Reddit has now been down for 30+ hours

http://www.reddit.com/?down

by scorpion032 • 15 years ago

47 43 15 years ago

For the first time ever the admins have pushed a hand curated content (where did they get that one from?) to the top.

Seems to be like the community is well past the state of being angry when the site gets back up. They will be so glad that it is back at all. Need more donations Conde Nast?

llambda• 15 years ago

It's amazing that AWS has been affected this long, or rather that their customers have been; here focusing on one big customer, Reddit. But actually what seems more relevant to me, vis-à-vis sites like Reddit are services such as Heroku which were or still are affected. Although I can appreciate that Reddit is an extremely popular site, at the end of the day I'm more concerned with the development services that were impacted.

cygwin98• 15 years ago

Maybe it's just me. I feel HN has become very sluggish this morning. Does that mean lots of redditors come over here?

Edit: Wierd, got downvoted. I do think this is related to the topic, so the failure of Amazon can have a domino effect, say, AWS fails -> Reddit fails -> HN sluggish/struggling -> ... Some times I really question the resilience of the social networks, as most of them may not be designed to handle 2x or 10x more load.

benthumb• 15 years ago

Doing what we can to gum up the works, and don't mention it : - D

mlk• 15 years ago

> Does that mean lots of redditors come over here?

I know I did.

zck• 15 years ago

I was wondering why I was logged in, able to comment and vote.

They're letting back in members slowly, with Reddit Gold members having a larger chance of being allowed in: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/gv63r/nobody_can... . Be sure to read the comments by jedberg, one of the reddit staff.

Edit: Now the top of reddit says:

>UPDATE: We are slowly getting our capacity back and as such allowing a random subsets of redditors access to the site as we increase capacity. Please check back soon, as you may be able to log in if you are lucky. Thanks!

davidreiss666• 15 years ago

They are sort of limping back up now. Some users -- seems to be mostly gold users right now -- can get in.

scorpion0323• 15 years ago

It is reddit. Not experts-exchange. If it were "gold users can now login" that would be bad.

ceejayoz• 15 years ago

If they have to let users back in slowly (which they do), why shouldn't it be ones that contributed financially to the site?

random42• 15 years ago

Btw, has Amazon commented about potential irrecoverable/lost changes/damages, if any?

blhack• 15 years ago

I'm kindof curious how they're going to deal with the self-serve ads that were supposed to run yesterday.

Just a straight refund, or...?

/me patiently waiting for it to come back up so that I can buy some for next week... :(

groovylick2• 15 years ago

jedberg said yesterday he will add a day to the self-serve ads.

chuhnk3• 15 years ago

Being a sys admin and having to plan disaster recovery I can understand this scenario. I've played it out in my mind, its been done to death on paper and we've tested it. My question is, why aren't reddit doing anything about it? After numerous outages over the past few months it seems reddit's answer to everything is, "It's not our fault, it's Amazon". In all honesty without turning this into an attack that is ridiculous. If my company were to suffer outages on a weekly basis, my boss and I would both be under the gun and seriously before it even got to that point we would be restructuring systems and shifting hosting platforms. Before anyone says to me, "hold on, you cant just go moving infrastructure". BS. When your business is the website and you are providing a service, availability is damn well key. I've moved datacenters more than once, I've delt with disaster recovery, I know how to do these things transparently and before you start thinking I'm arrogant well actually I only have 4 years of experience in the system administration game so I'd expect people with more talent than me to be able to get the job done pretty damn effortlessly. If our company suffered an outage of more than 3-4 hours we'd be switching to our DR plan end of story. That means switching dns and pushing to warm standby servers.

Engineers of reddit, take some initiative. Move off aws. I dont care how hard it is, look at the outages you've suffered. Look at the problems you've had. Havent you figured it out yet? Get some physical hardware with rackspace and sort it out.

Please understand this comment is not meant to attack anyone but I am frustrated with people shifting blame and not taking responsibility. If your down 30 hours then you have failed.

wdewind• 15 years ago

Reddit has < 5 engineers working on it and in the last few months has been at 1 active engineer for a while. With 13mm unique visitors and > 1 billion page views monthly let's cut them some slack.

chuhnk3• 15 years ago

Let me ask you. How does a company get into that state? Say you had 5 engineers, 1 billion page views a month and ongoing issues. Wouldn't you dedicate some resources to that? When one engineer leaves, wouldn't you worry a little? And then another, and another? Would you sit and do nothing? These events did not occur in a day. They occurred over a lengthy period of time. I can sympathize with the lone engineer because I've been there. I still sleep with my laptop and phone next to my head. I know what the burn out feels like, so yes I feel for that engineer. But as a business letting it get to that point.

edit: JonnieCache mentioned Conde Naste will not let them hire more people. Obviously we know where the fault lies then.

jsavimbi• 15 years ago

Last I heard they had one full-time developer working on it, and if that is the case, I wouldn't be surprised if yesterday was their first day off in a awhile. Also, Quora was having the same difficulties and it mostly points to not doing what Twilio and a host of other architecture-aware teams did. Single points of failure will fail.

JonnieCache2• 15 years ago

Reddit have real problems with staffing. They have said they are planning to do stuff like this, but their parent company Conde Nast won't let them hire anyone, for some corporate reason. They only have like one sysadmin IIRC.

Duff• 15 years ago

IIRC from previous posts on HN, you should correct that to read "Engineer of Reddit".

They're an organization in flux, and when you're in that state, the priority is survival.

lukeschlather• 15 years ago

>If our company suffered an outage of more than 3-4 hours we'd be switching to our DR plan end of story.

I don't really see how you can have a functional DR plan for a site the size of Reddit with fewer than 10 people.

Of course, I've never been involved with keeping a site the size of Reddit operational, and I suspect the number of people required to do the kind of migration you're suggesting is an obvious choice would require Reddit to at least quadruple their staff.

I guess they could do it now, but odds are they would end up having to put Reddit in read-only mode for a week to do a proper migration with as tiny a staff as they have. And it's not clear that just throwing dedicated hardware at the problem would solve it.

dmuino2• 15 years ago

>I don't really see how you can have a functional DR plan for a site the size of Reddit with fewer than 10 people.

You can definitely have a good plan, and be able to execute on that plan, with fewer people. I was lucky enough to work in a team that was running the search backend for a big internet company. Tens of thousands of machines, constant code, config and data pushes, configuration management, os images, kernel, etc. The team was responsible for developing and running the tools needed to keep the site up even when a whole datacenter lost power and you had to shift load from one coast to the other. The size of that team was much lower than 10 people.

Obviously Reddit will have to invest in both infrastructure and human resources to get there, but it can be done.

chuhnk3• 15 years ago

A functional DR and usually the most optimal are the ones that require the least amount of work when disaster strikes. If our the datacenter in which our servers are hosted is destroyed I do not want to be figuring what hardware to restore databases on, where to deploy applications, what to use as load balancers, or what IPs to point my dns records to, what ad hoc config changes I had on a server somewhere. It should all have been preplanned, 80% of that should already have been done. We've got a 100mbit line running into the office. We've got staging servers, database servers and just crap loads of hardware thats used internally which would instantly become our server farm. Databases are being replicated as we speak, those that cannot are being incrementally backed up and restored. I've got a DR dns zone file ready to go, the ttl on dns records is 1800. If you had to do this stuff from scratch yes it would take time. But any credible business that runs online should have these things in place. If you're idea of a backup is your mirrored RAID I feel bad for you.

Does the size of their site matter? Perhaps. Does it require 10 engineers to get a DR strategy going and be able to implement it? No. If you clearly plan this ahead of time, if all the pieces are in place then no it will not take that many. If I was to take into account multiple pieces of infrastructure it could still be done. DR is not about getting the exact same infrastructure up. Its about keeping the business running, its about staying alive and in those situations usually you try the minimal that will get you there. Do I really need my back end reporting and emailing systems when shit hits the fan? No. Messages will queue up and when those systems come online later they'll take care of it.

Am I simplifying it? Perhaps so lets take an example.

In your current infrastructure you've got 100 servers, you got a couple load balancers, 40 webservers, 30-40 app servers and 20 database servers. Load balancers a dummy HA thing where something like haproxy, nginx, keepalived, lvs or something else runs, the second one is just the backup that takes over when the first dies. Those are static configs that dont take much to get up and running somewhere else. 40 webservers. So in my place of work each webserver is identical and any one of those can go down without affecting the other. Usually thats varnish, nginx, apache or something of the like in the front end maybe proxying off to rails apps, php or python. Each server has no dependency except on the database. Got some mid caching layer like memcached? Ok well you'd have one per webserver in a cluster and those things drop in and out with ease. App servers follow suit if you know how to build systems that are not tightly coupled and deal with asynchronous requests. Alot of it comes down to queues and message passing. Obviously there are some inter dependencies which you cant help and if you can solve some of it with intermediary haproxy balancing then great. So far I feel like all of these things can easily be setup on servers anywhere else and code can be frequently updated.

The real complexity is in data stores. I assume in companies with more than 20 machines they may have chosen multiple datastores for different purposes so it doesnt all live in one place. Yes that adds to the difficulty of things but you have to break things down and work on each one at a time. If you're smart you'll have used something that can be replicated, has multi master or is clustered in most cases you dont even have to worry about it because almost every popular datastore these days have those capabilities. Lets look at mysql. Most of the time people go with basic master slave replication and move to master with multiple slaves so you can offload reads. If you're replicating within the one place then theres no reason you cant replicate offsite to your warm standby. If you do maintain that offsite slave then you've got an upto the minute copy of your database in the event of catastrophic failure. Now thats one database down, what if your using redis, well that also has replication so I'm not seeing a problem there either. Mongodb, cassandra, oracle, it really doesnt matter what it is because you can maintain a copy.

At the end of the day its about planning, its about taking the time to already have 80% of the work done and getting the major pieces up and running. Theres no excuse. There really isnt. You think facebook's in one datacenter? Yea at one point they were but back then you really think they didnt have a backup plan? Ok they are big with lots of people but honestly I dont care if you've got 10 different datastores (dont do that) and each is half a terabyte on disk. I dont care what the complexity is, if you think its too complex to have a running backup thats your fault. Imagine google said, "eh yea the application is a bit complicated and we really cant have a backup somewhere else". What?!

Migrations, if you have no plan and are doing it from scratch yes that takes time. It took me a month from start to finish and thats only because I spent the first two trying to figure out how to get chef to automate most of it. But that was a migration and I had the luxury of time. If it was a DR scenario I'd have at max 8-10 hours before the MD would be yelling at me. Put all your databases on servers somewhere else, get the code up and running and have a strategy for switching.

kunjaan• 15 years ago

Apparently all of Reddit's problem is either Amazon or Conde Nast.

masklinn• 15 years ago

Reddit's current technical staff is composed of a single engineer and 2 ops (maybe 3, but I believe it's 2).

They simply don't have the manpower to do that.

omouse• 15 years ago

They moved from their own infrastructure to AWS because they thought it would be more reliable and because they don't have much manpower.

dmuino2• 15 years ago

You can do high availability deployments using AWS. AWS offers different availability zones within a region, and multiple regions if you're extra paranoid. Unfortunately the way reddit is using the available services is not ideal. IIRC they are using cassandra backed by EBS which is not a best practice. It's much better to run cassandra on local storage and have a backup system that's uploading incremental and full snapshots of your data to S3.

I agree with your overall point that having a business continuity plan is required. They should be able to answer questions like how do we minimize impact when we lose one cassandra node or two, ebs gets corrupted, a whole avail-zone disappears, etc. I'm just saying that AWS provides the building blocks for you to do that.

goalieca• 15 years ago

Sadly, my productivity has not improved one bit :(

cabalamat• 15 years ago

I recently set up a website, and did consider AWS to host it. I decided not to, based on the problems Reddit had been having with AWS. I eventually got a VPS; looks like I made the right decision.

enjo• 15 years ago

Counterpoint: We've been happily using AWS for several years now. We haven't had one second of downtime. We host across multiple availability zones, and have been pretty insulated. We are hosted in the eastern region (which was the one having issues yesterday), but managed to get through everything ok. We did lose some instances in one AZ, but failed back to our other instances without any incident.

ANY provider is going to have issues, the AWS actually gives you a bunch of nice options to easily handle those. I'm not saying that everyone should use Amazon, but don't take Reddits issues (I'm not familiar enough with their architecture to know where the fault really lies) to be the only data point for AWS reliability.

bdonlan• 15 years ago

If you do use AWS, however, it is vitally important to understand the tools they provide for redundancy, and their limitations. There are multiple availability zones for a reason, and although there was some multi-AZ downtime at the start, that recovered relatively quickly.

ck2• 15 years ago

Is there any proof that Conde Nast is trying to starve-off Reddit so they can maybe write it off on their taxes? They just don't seem to have a single ounce of pride in owning it.

It's amazing how much has been done with it's development given how little they have to work with.

lisper• 15 years ago

If anyone from reddit is reading this, I tried to sign up for Gold so I could log in, but I can't because signing up requires you to log in. I suspect I'm not the only person who would have happily bribed you to get to the head of the line. I think you guys left a lot of money on the table.

RoadRunner_23• 15 years ago

I wonder what the users of Reddit are doing? going for a walk outside and enjoying the nature?

simeshev• 15 years ago

Maybe this is Amazon's way to tell Reddit addicts to stop and smell the flowers? :-)

mannicken• 15 years ago

Let's hope it never gets to that point :o

jlampart• 15 years ago

If I understand correctly, sites using AWS, and reddit.com for sure, are geared towards automatically starting and stopping EC2 instances as needed. If that is the case, why can't they just move everything to a different region, which hasn't been affected by this disaster?

Reddit has now been down for 30+ hours

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