AWS Architecture Blog
Category: Amazon Route 53
Running Multiple HTTP Endpoints as a Highly Available Health Proxy
Route 53 Health Checks provide the ability to verify that endpoints are reachable and that HTTP and HTTPS endpoints successfully respond. However, there are many situations where DNS failover would be useful, but TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS health checks alone can’t sufficiently determine the health of the endpoint. In these cases, it’s possible for an […]
Doing Constant Work to Avoid Failures
Amazon Route 53’s DNS Failover feature allows fast, automatic rerouting at the DNS layer based on the health of some endpoints. Endpoints are actively monitored from multiple locations and both application or connectivity issues can trigger failover. Trust No One One of the goals in designing the DNS Failover feature was making it resilient to […]
A Case Study in Global Fault Isolation
In a previous blog post, we talked about using shuffle sharding to get magical fault isolation. Today, we’ll examine a specific use case that Route 53 employs and one of the interesting tradeoffs we decided to make as part of our sharding. Then, we’ll discuss how you can employ some of these concepts in your […]
Organizing Software Deployments to Match Failure Conditions
Deploying new software into production will always carry some amount of risk, and failed deployments (e.g., software bugs, misconfigurations, etc.) will occasionally occur. As a service owner, the goal is to try and reduce the number of these incidents and to limit customer impact when they do occur. One method to reduce potential impact is […]
Shuffle Sharding: Massive and Magical Fault Isolation
A standard deck of cards has 52 different playing cards and 2 jokers. If we shuffle a deck thoroughly and deal out a four card hand, there are over 300,000 different hands. Another way to say the same thing is that if we put the cards back, shuffle and deal again, the odds are worse […]
AWS and Compartmentalization
Practically every experienced driver has suffered a flat tire. It’s a real nuisance, you pull over, empty the trunk to get out your spare wheel, jack up the car and replace the puncture before driving yourself to a nearby repair shop. For a car that’s ok, we can tolerate the occasional nuisance, and as drivers […]