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Two days ago Instagramhelp tweeted they are having problems.
We're currently experiencing technical difficulties and we're working to correct the issues. Thanks for your patience
Loggly suffers extended outage after AWS reboot shuts down their service
MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2011 AT 9:29PMLoggly a cloud service that provides as one of its services System Monitoring and Alerting.
Systems Monitoring & Alerting
Alerting on log events has never been so easy. Alert Birds will help you eliminate problems before they start by allowing you to monitor for specific events and errors. Create a better user experience and improve customer satisfaction through proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. Alert Birds are available to squawk & chirp when things go awry.
But, Loggly has suffered an extended outage that was caused by AWS rebooting 100% of their servers, but that was only half the time down. The other half was due to not knowing the service was down.
See the below video to see Urs Hölzle annouce Google Compute Engine at Google IO 2012.
Sundar Pichai introduces Urs as one of the first 10 Google employees, the first VP of engineering, and the person more than any one else responsible for building all of Google's infrastructure (Data Centers, Servers, Network, and Infrastructure SW)
By the way I finally figured out how to embed a video and get it to start at a specific point of time, so this video will play at the 35m30s mark.
If you want to see the scale of Google data centers look at how small Urs is compared to the server racks. :-)
The video is the one I referenced with this post.
Open Compute has been making noise in the data center and IT world open sourcing server and and data center design.
Something that has taken off much bigger is Arduino.
Photo by the Arduino Team
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).
Here is TED video of one of founders explaining how surprising Arduino's growth has been and what it has been used for.
Instagram is one of the latest poster child's of Amazon Web Service. Netflix being a believer in Chaos Monkey and has recovered. Meanwhile Instagram is still down.
@InstagramHelp I can't see all the pictures I've posted? Same with all the other peoples...but thank you for fixing it!
@tinarinalemon@emma1312@queenofbirkdale@yorkshirelass57@instagramhelp Bit many and temperamental! Blooming thunderstorm! :0( xx
@InstagramHelp What happened to the pictures ? I can not see mine but it says how many i have
@emma1312@QueenofBirkdale@tinarinalemon@yorkshirelass57@instagramhelp Watch TV and talk to humans?? xx
AWS has gone down before, but a big service like Instagram has not been a result of down time. AWS is mostly up, but not all.
Jun 30, 11:42 AM PDT We are continuing to work on processing our provisioning backlog for ELB load balancers. We are also continuing to work on restoring IO for the remaining small number of stuck EBS volumes. Customer action is required for EBS volumes that do not have IO currently enabled-- if you have not already chosen to Enable Volume IO, outlined in the instructions above, please follow those steps to re-enable IO on your EBS volumes.
It will be interesting what the post mortem looks like from AWS and Instagram on what the issues are.
I am probably wrong on this calculation, but willing to take a stab at what could be.
Google announced its Compute Engine offering this morning.
A Genome calculation with 10,000 cores was used as a demo. If you use an 8 core Intel Xeon with dual processors this is 625 servers.
Urs Hoelzle was presenting that there are 771,886 cores ready to run a Google Compute Engine job.
Here is a the calculation executed with 600K cores with refreshes in seconds vs. 10 minutes for the 10,000 core system.
So how many servers would 600K cores be? If you assume 8 core processors (I was going to assume 10 core processors, but backed off to 8). The following is pricing info.
How many servers could this be? 600,000 Cores/16 cores/server = 37,500 servers. (assume a virtual core does map to a physical core, note this is not always true) Assume 350 Watts per server ( 2 processors, 64 GB more of RAM, 2 HD) is 13.125MW of IT power with a PUE of 1.12 you get to 15MW overall data center power consumption
600K cores may seem big. But, thinking about 37,500 servers and 15MW of power is really impressive at least to the data center geeks. Oh yeh, there 771,886 cores available which is 48,242 servers, 16.9 MW of IT and 18.9 MW of data center power.
It is impressive to think one whole 20MW of data center capacity is available on demand for a Google Compute Engine job. Keep in mind this what is available, not the total capacity and being consumed.
Corey Winter 
Brian McAndrew 
Lynne 
Lise Jayy