Amazon AWS had a power failure, their backup generators failed
This seems to be getting slightly overblown in that thread. To be clear, this impacted one datacenter out of ten that make up one availability zone out of six in AWS’s us-east-1 region. So we are talking 2-3% at most of that region’s capacity was impacted.<p>I haven’t seen a report yet on exactly why their generator failed, but from what I’ve heard, the power failed, and the backup generator kicked in and ran fine for over an hour, but then it failed. This sort of thing sucks to deal with but it’s also inevitable. Of their hundreds of datacenters, a mechanical failure is going to happen occasionally no matter how good their maintenance plans are.<p>So the key when using cloud services like AWS is to plan for the possibility of failure. EBS expects an annual failure rate of 0.1%. So one out of a thousand EBS volumes will fail in a given year. If you operate at the scale of thousands of servers in AWS, you see this sort of thing all the time. Luckily, EBS also makes it trivial to take volume snapshots which are stored in S3, which has much much higher reliability and durability. So if you have data in EBS that needs to be kept safe, take regular snapshots. Here’s a doc that explains how you can set up scheduled, auto-rotated snapshots: <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/snapshot-lifecycle.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/snapshot...</a>