Category: Networking & Content Delivery

Many organizations begin their cloud journey with a lift-and-shift of applications from on-premise to AWS. This approach involves migrating software deployments with little, or no, modification. A lift-and-shift avoids a potentially expensive application rewrite but can result in a less optimal workload than a cloud native solution. For many organizations, a lift-and-shift is a transitional […]

I often encounter people experiencing frustration as they attempt to scale their e-commerce or WordPress site—particularly around the cost and complexity related to scaling. When I talk to customers about their scaling plans, they often mention phrases such as horizontal scaling and microservices, but usually people aren’t sure about how to dive in and effectively scale […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]