DooKey
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2001
- Messages
- 13,560
Amazon's Prime Day got off to a rough start earlier this week, but they still managed to make a boat load of money. Their rough start began with the front page of their website showing a bunch of dog pictures with an error code. They got things straight after a few hours and then went on to make hundreds of millions of dollars. The behind the scene story according to internal documents is they just didn't have enough servers online to handle the load. Kind of surprising for a company that sells server time and space to others. As the glitches grew they killed international traffic and added servers manually since their auto-scaling feature appeared to fail. Just goes to show even the mighty fail once in a while. However, Amazon tends to learn from their mistakes so next year will probably be pretty smooth.
Caesar says the root cause of the problem may have to do with a failure in Amazon’s auto-scaling feature, which automatically detects traffic fluctuations and adjusts server capacity accordingly. The fact that Amazon cut off international traffic first, rather than increase the number of servers immediately, and added server power manually instead of automatically, is an indication of a breakdown in auto-scaling, a critical component when dealing with unexpected traffic spikes, he said.
Caesar says the root cause of the problem may have to do with a failure in Amazon’s auto-scaling feature, which automatically detects traffic fluctuations and adjusts server capacity accordingly. The fact that Amazon cut off international traffic first, rather than increase the number of servers immediately, and added server power manually instead of automatically, is an indication of a breakdown in auto-scaling, a critical component when dealing with unexpected traffic spikes, he said.