Episode Details

Links

• Follow Last Week In AWS on Twitter
• AWS Outage Message
• "Kinesis Outage" by Ryan Frantz

Transcript
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Pete: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the AWS Morning Brief. It's Pete Cheslock again—

Jesse: And Jesse DeRose.

Pete: We are back to talk about ‘The Kinesis Outage.’

Jesse: [singing] bom bom bum.

Pete: So, at this point, as you're listening to this, it's been a couple of weeks since the Kinesis outage has happened, and I'm sure there are many, many armchair sysadmins out there speculating at all the reasons why Amazon should not have had this outage. And guess what? You have two more system administrators here to armchair quarterback this as well.

Jesse: We are happy to discuss what happened, why it happened. I will try to put on my best announcer voice, but I think I normally fall more into the golf announcer voice than the football announcer voice, so I'm not really sure if that's going to play as well into our story here.

Pete: It's going, it's going, it's gone.

Jesse: It’s—and it's just down. It's down—

Pete: It's just—

Jesse: —and it's gone.

Pete: No, but seriously, we're not critiquing it. That is not the purpose of this talk today. We're not critiquing the outage because you should never critique other people's outages; never throw shade at another person's outage. That's not only crazy to do because you have no context into their world. It's just, it's not nice either, so just try to be nice out there.

Jesse: Yeah, nobody wants to get critiqued when their company has an outage and when they're under pressure to fix something. So, we're not here to do that. We don't want to point any fingers. We're not blaming anyone. We just want to talk about what happened because honestly, it's a fascinating, complex conversation.

Pete: It is so fascinating and honestly, loved the detail, a far cry from the early years of Amazon outages that were just, “We had a small percentage of instances have some issues.” This was very detailed. This gave out a lot of information. And the other thing too is that, when it comes to critiquing outages, you have to imagine that there are unlikely to be more than a handful of people even inside Amazon Web Services that fully understand the scope of the size and the interactions of all these different services. There may not even be a single person who truly understands how these dozens of services interact with each other. 

I mean, it takes teams and teams of people working together to build these things and to have these understandings. So, that being said, let's dive in. So, the Wednesday before Tha