> If you loose a server, we can deploy a new server in a matter of minutes and it will rebuild the RAID array from the last backup so we have a warm spare.
Unless you can't actually get a new server provisioned because the now-fragile API (like last night) is under such load from people trying to mitigate their downtime... We use rightscale, and rightscale won't solve this issue. If AWS is being clobbered by people trying to get new boxes up, using a third-party api abstraction service doesn't help.
Also, rightscale themselves were affected last night, throwing invalid alerts about servers being inaccessible when they were actually still operating normally.
That's also the beauty of Rightscale. If you do everything correctly you should be able to provision a new server in another region if need be or even another cloud (ie Rackspace).
Most outages of AWS don't last more than a few hours. The real goal is to make sure your infrastructure can hobble on one leg for those few hours until help arrives and you can cleanup the mess once the outage is over.
When the API goes down it sure isn't fun. Just try to project yourself the best you can. I had no problems with Rightscale last night other than anything trying to reach EC2.
Unless you can't actually get a new server provisioned because the now-fragile API (like last night) is under such load from people trying to mitigate their downtime... We use rightscale, and rightscale won't solve this issue. If AWS is being clobbered by people trying to get new boxes up, using a third-party api abstraction service doesn't help.
Also, rightscale themselves were affected last night, throwing invalid alerts about servers being inaccessible when they were actually still operating normally.