Read the original article at AirBNB didn’t have to fail

Today part of Amazon Web Services failed, taking down with it a slew of startups that all run on Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure. AirBNB was one of the biggest, but also Heroku, Reddit, Minecraft, Flipboard & Coursera down with it. Its not the first time. What the heck happened, and why should we care?

1. Root Cause

The AWS service allows companies like AirBNB to build web applications, and host them on servers owned and managed by Amazon. The so-called raw iron of this army of compute power sits in datacenters. Each datacenter is …

Read the original article at Road War Story – Hacking Inflight Solutions

The 2am phone call

Last summer I got my call from the president at 2am.  Actually it was my former boss at Hollywood Reporter.  I had worked there three months previous, and they had since hired an outsourced DBA solution.  Big outsource, big chops.  And big fail.

12 hours to liftoff

I was scrambling to pack my luggage to go on summer vacation.  I was bound for SF at the moment and my flight was leaving in the morning.  I was trying to wrap up loose ends and my former boss was entreating me – “Can you help us?  …