When Amazon’s cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), suffered an outage on December 7, 2021, the magnitude of the event was felt globally. What happened, and how can your business learn from this significant outage?

Why was there an AWS outage?

Reported issues within the AWS infrastructure began around 12:00 ET/17:00 GMT on Dec. 7, according to data from real-time outage monitoring service DownDetector.

Amazon reported that the “US-East-1” region went down in North Virginia on Tuesday, which disrupted Amazon’s own applications and multiple third-party services that also rely on AWS. The issue was an “impairment of several network devices” that resulted in several API errors and ultimately, impacted many critical AWS services.

What were the effects of the AWS outage?

The effects of the AWS outage were massive because any problem affecting Amazon impacts hundreds of millions of end-users. AWS constitutes 41% of the global cloud-computing business, and many of the largest companies in the world are dependent on AWS’s cloud computing services. These businesses rent computing, storage, and network capabilities from AWS, which means the outage prevented end-users ‘ access to a variety of sites and apps across the Internet.

The major websites and apps that suffered from the outage are ones we turn to on a daily basis: Xfinity, Venmo, Google, and Disney+, just to name a few.

On Tuesday morning, users were reporting that they couldn’t log on to a variety of vital accounts. Most of us were going through our normal daily routine of checking the news, our financial accounts, or our Amazon orders, only to frustratingly realize that we couldn’t do so.

With so many large organizations relying on AWS, when the outage occurred, it felt like the entire Internet went down.

Benefits of a High Availability Multi-Region Cloud Application Architecture

Even though the outage was a major headache, it serves as an important lesson for those who are relying on a cloud-based infrastructure. As they say, you should learn from mistakes.

So how can your business mitigate, or even avoid, the effects of a major failure within your cloud provider?

At 2nd Watch, we are in favor of a high availability multi-region cloud approach. We advise our clients to build out multi-region application architecture not only because it will support your mission-critical services during an outage, but also because it will make your applications more resilient and improve your end-user experiences by keeping latencies low for a distributed

user base. Below is how we think about a multi-region cloud approach and why we believe it is a strong strategy

1. Increase your Fault Tolerance

Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to endure some kind of failure and continue to operate properly.

Unfortunately, things happen that are beyond our control (i.e. natural disasters) or things slip through the cracks (i.e. human error), which can impact a data center, an availability zone, or an entire region. However, just because a failure happens doesn’t mean an outage has to happen.

By architecting a multi-region application structure, if there is a regional failure similar to AWS’s east region failure, your company can avoid a complete outage. Having a multi-region architecture grants your business the redundancy required to increase availability and resiliency, ensure business continuity, and support disaster recovery plans.

2. Lower latency requirements for your worldwide customer base

The benefits of a multi-region approach go beyond disaster recovery and business continuity. By adopting a multi-region application architecture, your company can deliver low latency by keeping data closer to all of your users, even those who are across the globe.

In an increasingly impatient world, keeping latency low is vital for a good user experience, and the only way to maintain low latency is to keep your users close to the data.

3. Comply with Data Privacy Laws & Regulations

“Are you GDPR compliant?” is a question you probably hear frequently. Hopefully, your business is, and you want to remain that way. With a multi-region architecture, you can ensure that you are storing data within the legal boundaries. Also, with signs that there will be more regulations each year, you will stay a step ahead with data compliance if you utilize a multi-region approach.

How Can I Implement a Multi-Region Infrastructure Deployment Solution?

A multi-region cloud approach is a proactive way to alleviate potential headaches and grow your business, but without guidance, it can seem daunting in terms of adoption strategy, platform selection, and cost modeling.

2nd Watch helps you mitigate the risks of potential public cloud outages and deploy a multi-region cloud infrastructure. Through our Cloud Advisory Services, we serve as your trusted advisor for answering key questions, defining strategy, managing change, and providing impartial advice for a wide range of organizational, process, and technical issues critical to successful cloud modernization.

When making a cloud migration, a common term that gets tossed around is “cloud optimization”. If your organization is new to the cloud, optimizing your environment is essential to ensuring your migration pays off quickly and continues to do so in the long term.

If your organization is already established in the cloud, you may observe higher costs than expected due to cloud sprawl, under-utilized resources, and improper allocation of resources. Cloud optimization helps your organization reduce these costs and improve overall efficiency in the cloud

What is cloud optimization?

The definition of cloud optimization may vary from one cloud service provider to another, but generally, cloud optimization is the process of analyzing, configuring, provisioning, and right-sizing cloud resources to maximize performance and minimize waste for cost efficiency. The reality is that many organizations’ cloud environments are configured in an inefficient manner that creates unnecessary cloud spend. With proper cloud optimization tools and practices, these unnecessary costs can be eliminated.

While cloud optimization is mostly discussed in terms of cloud spend, cost optimization is simply a faucet of cloud optimization and can extend to overall performance and organizational efficiency. Some examples of cloud optimization practices that your organization can adopt right now include:

Right-sizing: Matching your cloud computing instance types (i.e. containers and VMs) and sizes with enough resources to sufficiently meet your workload performance and capacity needs to ensure the lowest cost possible.
Family Refresh: Replace outdated systems with updated ones to maximize performance.
Autoscaling: Scale your resources according to your application demand so you are only paying for what you use.
Applying Discounts: Reserved instances (RIs) allow companies to commit to cloud resources for a long period of time. The longer the discount and the more a company is prepared to pre-pay at the beginning of a period, the greater the discount will be. Discounted pricing models like RIs and spot instances will drive down your cloud costs when used according to your workload.
Identity use of RIs: Identifying the use of RIs can be an effective way to save money in the cloud if used for suitable loads.
Eliminate Waste: Regulating unused resources is a core component of cloud optimization. If you haven’t already considered cloud optimization practices, you are most likely using more resources than necessary or not certain resources to their full capacity.

Why is cloud optimization important?

Overspending in the cloud is a common issue many organizations face by allocating more resources to a workload than necessary. Integrating cloud optimization practices can reap many benefits for your cloud infrastructure and your organization, including the following:

Cloud Efficiency: When workload performance, compliance, and cost are continually balanced against the best-fit infrastructure in real-time, efficiency is achieved. Implementing cloud optimization practices will eliminate as much cloud resource waste as possible, increasing the performance of your cloud environment.
Cost Savings: Although cloud optimization comes in a variety of forms, cost optimization is the most important component for many organizations. By reducing waste in the cloud, costs are reduced as a byproduct.
Greater Visibility: Cloud optimization practices utilize analytics to provide visibility into your cloud environment to make data-driven decisions. Implementing optimization tools also provides cost visibility, so your organization has a better perspective on cloud spend.
Increased Productivity: Once a cloud optimization strategy is implemented, IT teams will spend less time trying to solve problems because an optimized environment prevents problems before they occur.
Organizational Innovation & Efficiency: Implementing cloud optimization often is accompanied by a cultural shift within organizations such as improved decision-making and collaboration across teams.

What are cloud optimization services?

Public cloud services providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have over 500,000 distinct prices and technical combinations that can overwhelm the most experienced IT organizations and business units. Luckily, there are already services that can help your organization achieve the cloud optimization it needs to drive business outcomes. Cloud optimization services help your organization identify areas of improvement in your cloud for cost savings and efficiency, create an optimization strategy for your organization, and can manage your cloud infrastructure for continuous optimization.

At 2nd Watch, we take a holistic approach to cloud optimization. We have developed various optimization pillars based on real-time data to ensure your cloud environments are running as efficiently as possible. Behind our solutions for cloud optimization is a team of experienced data scientists and architects that help you maximize the performance and returns of your cloud assets. Our services offerings for cloud optimization at 2nd Watch include:

Strategy & Planning: Define your optimization strategy with our proven methodology, tailored to meet your desired business outcomes and maximize your results.
Cost Optimization Assessment: Gain the visibility necessary to make data-driven decisions. Identify opportunities across our Pillars of Optimization to maximize cost savings and cloud environment efficiency.
Spot Instance & Container Optimization: Save up to 90% compared to traditional cloud infrastructure by running both Instances/VMs and Containers on spot resources for relevant workloads.
Multi-Cloud Optimization: Cloud optimization on a single public cloud is one challenge but optimizing a hybrid cloud is a whole other challenge. Apply learning from your assessment to optimize your cloud environment for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware on AWS.
Forecasting, Modeling, & Analytics: Understand your past usage, and model and forecast your future needs with the analytical data needed for visibility across your organization.

Our cloud optimization process starts with data, and you have a lot of it. But data alone can lead you astray yielding wasted resources and overspend. There are many other factors to evaluate, such as EDP/EA agreements and Savings Plans/RI Purchases, to ensure you choose the most cost-effective option for your business. Strategically, our data scientists and architects map connections between data and workloads. We then make correlations between how workloads interact with each resource and the optimal financial mechanism to reach your cloud optimization goals.

Cloud Optimization with 2nd Watch

Working with a managed cloud service provider like 2nd Watch will give your organization the expertise needed for cloud optimization. If you want to learn more about cost savings or are interested in fully optimizing your cloud infrastructure, contact us to take your next steps.