Amazon Web Services

Jess Merritt

Is the S3 vunerability patched yet so that we do not have a repeat outage like we did at the end of February? Or are we still at the mercy of AWS?

J. Craig Williams

Jess,

 

The S3 outage was caused by a mistyped command during Amazon maintenance/debugging.

 

https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

 

Unless Smartsheet moves off of AWS or somehow mirrors servers or Amazon improves reliability (which they will, I'm sure), you will be at the mercy of AWS.

And your local power company.

And your local Internet provider.

And the cleaning people that may inadvertently turn off your internal servers.

Or other weird stuff (http://thedailywtf.com/articles/CSI-Server-Room)

 

Craig

 

 

Jess Merritt

Okay sounds good. At least this is the first time that's happened, so maybe it will be rare. Thanks Craig.

 

Jess

J. Craig Williams

Jess,

 

I do not speak for Smartsheet. Their take of this may be different.

 

I use Smartsheet in most of my daily work. As such, I monitor the status and keep track of my own impression of reliabilty. Same goes with other web-based services, Internet speed at hotels at which I stay, my laptop speed, whatever impacts my ability to deliver services to my customers and deliver projects.

If I delivered goods, I would pay attention to traffic and construction plans. 

You are encouraged to pay attention to risks in your work environment.

 

Craig

 

 

Jess Merritt

I hear ya. I was curious about it because my team lost a lost of unsaved work. I guess since it's rare, it's nothing to worry about.

J. Craig Williams

Jess,

 

That is like saying because a lightning strike is rare, it is nothing to worry about.

When dealing with risks (negative consequences) and opportunities (positive consequences), one must weigh the likelihood and the impact.

That's why people don't golf in thunderstorms.

Or shouldn't.

 

If you lost work, then you can likely quantify how much another event like this will cost your team.

 

Craig