Netflix Proactive Maneuver Avoids Cloud Meltdown
By Karla Robinson
November 5, 2012
November 5, 2012
- When an availability zone in Amazon’s U.S. East data center complex went down, Netflix was able to circumvent cloud outages. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Netflix’s maneuver could serve as a model for other companies dealing with potential outages.
- Netflix had experience with outages in the past and has run evacuation drills to prepare for such an event. The company noticed issues with Amazon Web Services U.S. East on the Monday before superstorm Sandy. “Amazon was also able to confirm that the degradation was limited to a single Availability Zone,” two employees wrote in a blog. “Once we learned the impact was isolated to one AZ, we began evacuating the affected zone.”
- “Netflix’s Asgard technology helped in this effort,” GigaOM writes. “Asgard, which Netflix open sourced last summer, is a web interface (once known as Netflix Application Console) that engineers use to deploy code changes and manage resources on Amazon. According to Netflix, the technology lets engineers track multiple AWS components — Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), EC2 instances, etc. — used by their applications and manage them more efficiently than Amazon’s own console allows.”
- Using Asgard, Netflix was able to evacuate the troubled zone in 20 minutes and restore service to all users.
- “So far, AWS U.S. East has not exhibited problems associated with the massive superstorm [Sandy],” GigaOM reports. “But given past issues — and the fact that other east coast data centers have crashed – companies that rely on Amazon’s cloud are (or should be) scrambling to find ways to mitigate outages and performance problems.”
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