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S3 ‘n’ Me, or, My Lost Semi-Weekend

Yesterday I was busy playing around with my new web application, when all of a sudden it froze up.  I was a little worried but, hey, it’s sort of in a super-early preview so some bugs are expected.  I logged into the Noteflight Amazon EC2 instance to check out the production logs, and found a “Connection Reset By Peer” error.  The peer was Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), on which we completely rely at this point for all data persistence needs.  My web app couldn’t communicate with the S3 service to fetch or store data — kind of an essential function.

Next I fired up an S3 client on my machine to look at the data from another vantage point. It couldn’t connect successfully.  Uh oh.  With a little more digging I found my way to Amazon’s Services Health Dashboard, which showed that there was in fact some kind of service disruption.  “Elevated error rates,” it said.  A few minutes later, this turned into “Service Disrupted”.  All over the web, sites relying on Amazon S3 were either not showing vital data or crashing and burning.

In the end, the outage lasted almost 7 hours.  Every other discussion group has someone flaming about how they’re going to have to find some other solution, that S3 and “the cloud” won’t cut it after all, and so on.

Me?  I’m not so upset.  I think it’s not so surprising that there should be a major outage with something as new and complicated as this, and Amazon provided updates every 20 minutes or so for the duration of the downtime.  If anything, it’s good when we’re more aware of our dependencies, and act with full knowledge of what could happen.  I’m not at all happy about my site being unavailable because of Amazon’s problems (and I am anxious to see a real explanation posted, not just status updates), but I compare that with the bad situations I’ve had with some other hosting providers, and I feel I am still getting my money’s worth.  Is it perfect?  No. Does it enable businesses like mine to scale without huge up-front capital investments?  Yes… and that’s why I picked AWS, accepting the risk and the dependency that goes with that.  We’ll have to see where they take it from here.

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My Inflection Point

Let’s get nerdy for a second. Just one second. As Wikipedia would have it:

In differential calculus, an inflection point, or point of inflection (or inflexion) is a point on a curve at which the curvature changes sign. The curve changes from being concave upwards (positive curvature) to concave downwards (negative curvature), or vice versa. If one imagines driving a vehicle along the curve, it is a point at which the steering-wheel is momentarily “straight”, being turned from left to right or vice versa.

My steering wheel is turning, for darn sure. I have recently left the wonderful company for which I have been working, Allurent, to start my own business. It’s an exciting change and one that I didn’t quite see coming until it had almost occurred by itself. This was a decision that felt like it happened to me, not a decision that I consciously made. I have an idea that I am absolutely passionate about, and must work on, as disruptive as the consequences may be. It’s as simple as that.

I will be talking much more about my company — called Noteflight — quite soon. Noteflight is an online platform for creating, sharing, viewing and hearing music. It’s a serious application, aimed at people who perform, compose, study, teach or collect musical content. Expect some very substantial posts from me in the next month or two.

I am also working with the crack Boston development shop Infrared5. To say these are smart folks is a huge understatement; go take a look at their site, their team and their achievements. Besides being smart, they’re also really nice folks, and I’m very pumped about the work we’ll do together, and are already doing now. Plus… they have some great dogs hanging around the office. I mean, how can you beat that?

Lastly, one more bit o’ news: I’ll be speaking at the Flash on Tap conference in Boston this year. Hope you can come!

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TR Coffey speaking on skinning, styling at Boston FUG

This is just to give a quick heads up to my local readership: TR Coffey of Allurent will be speaking at this month’s Boston Flex User Group meeting on Tuesday July 8th at Adobe’s Newton office. TR is a really smart designer and information architect, one of the best people I ever worked with, and here’s why you should come hear TR talk about Flex styling and skinning:

• TR has invented some really creative and powerful ways of using CSS to control the look of Flex apps, going well beyond the textbook approaches that you can read about yourself.
• TR doesn’t just solve the problem in front of him, he’s someone who always looks at the larger context of other similar problems. So the stuff he came up with might help you in your job.
• TR is a really articulate and well-spoken person, and you’ll enjoy hearing him talk, no matter what he says.

Surely those are reasons enough to come! Hope to see you there.

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