The following is an analysis of the Amazon Web Services incident on 12/07/2021. Millions of users were affected by an Amazon Web Services outage that took down major online services such as Amazon, Amazon Prime, Amazon Alexa, Venmo, Disney+, Instacart, Roku, Kindle, and multiple online gaming sites. The outage, which originated in the US-EAST-1 region on Dec. 7, 2021, is still ongoing at the time of blog publication.
It’s a digital world—we just work and play in it...Unless, of course, you work in the IT group responsible for digital experience. Then you also have nightmares in it. Here’s why.
Outages on the Internet always catch you by surprise, whether you are the end user or the Head of SRE or DevOps trying to keep a clear mind while you execute your incident playbook. As people in charge of ensuring reliable services for our customers, our normal experience of outages involves surfing a deluge of fire alarms and video calls as we work to solve the problem as quickly as we can. We often forget, therefore, what an outage means to the end user.
Last month, we partnered with AWS to put together a webinar on the importance of implementing a comprehensive redundant networking and multi-CDN monitoring strategy. You can replay the event in full here. In this article, we’ll recap the key takeaways covered by the panel of experts who included Leo Vasiliou, Director of Product Marketing at Catchpoint, and Steve Campbell, our Chief Strategy Officer.
The rolling Comcast outage on Monday, November 8th and Tuesday, November 9th affected customers across the U.S., knocking users offline around the country. The first wave took place Monday evening in the San Francisco Bay area. The second, which had a wider geographic impact, occurred Tuesday morning, primarily affecting broad swathes of the Midwest, Southeast, and East Coast.
Seasonal spikes in consumer activity are expected, if not depended on, by online retailers throughout the calendar year. However, as shoppers rush to compete over door-buster deals and order holiday must-haves, web traffic escalates to levels standard resource allocation cannot easily sustain. This spike in traffic can lead to unresponsive checkouts, lost or abandoned carts, and slow-loading pages, ultimately resulting in thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
From its inception, Catchpoint has been a pioneer in terms of observability and its ability to deep scan infrastructures and protocols that bind the Internet. Our industry-leading observers gather in-depth data, providing the broadest coverage across wireless, cloud, backbone, and last mile networks. That data arms people across the enterprise with the information they need to provide a superior digital experience.
Last month, Catchpoint celebrated its 13th birthday, a milestone which has us feeling more than a little nostalgic. As we embark on our teenage years as a company, we have also been looking back and reflecting on all the changes the world of technology has seen since Catchpoint was “born” back in 2008. The world looks very different today than it did at our founding and, for that matter, so do we!
During this year's VMworld, we announced that our solution Catchpoint Digital Experience Monitoring is now also available for purchase on VMware Marketplace. It is easier than ever for our customers to access, deploy, and start using Catchpoint solutions to realize and achieve their business goals.
Catchpoint is proud to present the top SRE tools as voted on by SREs. In our fourth annual SRE Survey, compiled in partnership with VMware Tanzu Observability and DevOps Institute, we simply asked, “What are a few tools that every SRE should have available in their toolbelt?” Today, we are excited to share the findings with you. While some of the answers were not strictly tools, the analysis gives us valuable insight into the mindset of an SRE.
