What on earth can I cover for AWS this week? I mean, we're firmly in the AWS news drought season, and there's just not much going on. How on earth am I going to fill this episode? Mattias lucked out with that outage. Why couldn't I have gotten a week with an outage? There there, Scott. It is I, the ghost of reinvent past and feel your pain. Once reinvent is over everyone forgets about me and it's like a news desert out there.

Wow. Reinvent past. I can't believe it's really you. I've heard tales that all those graviton processors had created sentient beings within the AWS network. But those were just rumors, right? Nope. We are a real thing. Who else do you think calculates those ridiculously complex billing invoices. I tell you what, you've been a good AWS community member this year.

I'll grant you your wish of an outage. Just this one time. Thanks Reinvent Past, but stay away from us east two. I just moved all my stuff there. Oh, Right, right. Stay away from us east two. No worries. Your wish is my command.

Say reinvent past. Is there any strings you might be able to pull to get me into one of those AWS hero designations? No, not with bits like these. So, uh, sorry about that. I guess I better be careful what I wish for all kidding aside. You might have heard that AWS had some well publicized issues in the past couple weeks. First as Mattias expertly covered last week,

an outage on December 7th took down some important services in us east one resulting in significant impact for many customers. Then on December 15th, another outage struck the us west regions albeit much less dramatic. At 7:14 AM Pacific time on December 15th some AWS customers began to notice internet connectivity issues in us west one and us west two. Within about 45 minutes, AWS engineers had identified the root cause and began to implement remediation steps. And by around 8:15 Pacific time, they reported that things had returned to normal. So what happened? Well,

the official status update says that the issue was caused by network congestion, between parts of the AWS backbone and a subset of internet service providers. And what caused this network congestion? Well, again, according to the official status update, it was triggered by AWS traffic engineering executed in response to congestion outside the AWS network. And this moved more traffic onto the AWS network than expected and subsequently affected connectivity between the AWS backbone network and a subset of internet destinations. So AWS was really trying to be proactive and do the right thing for customers. And unfortunately, in this case, it backfired. In fact,

AWS engineers are always doing proactive stuff behind the scenes to keep the services running efficiently. And we just don't even notice because things just work. This outage is much different in nature to the December 7th outage. And I bet that not for that earlier event, this event would've gone relatively unnoticed. So what are we to do run for other clouds, bring our data centers out of retirements. Look, everything fails all the time.

It doesn't matter if it's in the cloud across multiple clouds or in our own data centers. According to AWS's reports, it appears that customers might have been impacted for as much as 45 minutes. 45 minutes in the context of a year's worth of 24 or by seven service is still north of 99.99% uptime. Of course, I can still hear the refrain, but that's downtime and we can't afford downtime. Sure.

Then you should create an active-active multi-region failover architecture and pay twice of what you're paying right now. What's that you don't trust AWS? Well, then create that same active-active multi-region architecture, spanning multiple cloud providers with multiple vendor relationships, with multiple support contracts and multiple support teams responsible for a solution that is now magnitudes more complex. Now how much are those 45 minutes really worth? Aside from all the outage chaos, there was one announcement that was more interesting than the existing slew of instance type X now available in region Y. AWS recently opened a new data center in the Asia Pacific region based in Jakarta Indonesia. The new data center is named AP Southeast three and is the 10th AWS region in the Asia Pacific and mainland China. Part of the globe.

In addition to this data center, AWS is also committed to growing their business in Indonesia and creating more than 24,000 jobs over the next 15 years. And this is a great example of where AWS just doesn't drop a data center somewhere, but truly invests in the local community, changing lives and improving economic and social futures. Well, this will be the final AWS this week episode for 2021. And what a year it has been! Fear not though, as we're back in 2022 with all the news commentary and ridiculousness that you've come to expect. So from all of us at acg and Pluralsight, to all of our friends and family out there, we appreciate each and every one of you, even those who multi-cloud - just beware.

There are many training options and we're honored to be who you choose, keep learning, keep it fun and above all, keep being awesome cloud gurus.