Yes, networking issue which brought down even multi-az deployments.
I don't want to setup highly available fault tolerant systems, I just want a good level of reliability of a service provider. Probably, we will migrate to the dedicated servers out of Amazon soon. It will be harder to maintain, but cheaper and, as practice shows, more reliable.
"Brought down" and "Brought down and lost data" are very different severities. Many businesses can handle occasional downtime as long as data's not disappearing into the ether.
> Yes, networking issue which brought down even multi-az deployments.
You might want to learn more about this before making business decisions on it. RDS was completely unaffected, as were all of my EC2 servers. They didn't receive any traffic from the internet but the systems were running fine throughout the brief outage interval.
A quick Google search will reveal that this is not uncommon for any hosting setup - data centers have lost network connections, routers can fail or be misconfigured, etc. - which is why anyone with serious uptime requirements has multiple widely separated data centers. Using AWS doesn't magically remove the need to avoid single points of failure in your system design.
> Probably, we will migrate to the dedicated servers out of Amazon soon. It will be harder to maintain, but cheaper and, as practice shows, more reliable.
I hope you have a good ops team and extra engineering resources; otherwise you'll learn very quickly that dedicated servers have the same failure modes. So far we're at ~18 minutes of AWS downtime this year - that's not going to be easy to beat.
I don't want to setup highly available fault tolerant systems, I just want a good level of reliability of a service provider. Probably, we will migrate to the dedicated servers out of Amazon soon. It will be harder to maintain, but cheaper and, as practice shows, more reliable.