Cloud Computing: AWS glitch strikes Netflix and Tinder, offering a wake-up call for others

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Katherine Noyes.

Netflix, Tinder and other major websites were affected for a time Sunday by glitches in Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia facility, offering a cautionary lesson to other companies that rely on the cloud service for mission-critical capabilities. The problem manifested itself primarily in the form of higher-than-normal error rates. Sites affected reportedly also included IMDb and Amazon’s Instant Video and Books websites.

At the heart of the snafu were issues with AWS’s DynamoDB database, but it spread to include other services such as EC2, the mobile-focused Cognito service and the CloudWatch monitoring service, according to the AWS Service Health Dashboard. "The root cause began with a portion of our metadata service within DynamoDB," AWS explained in a dashboard update posted at 4:52 a.m. PDT on Sunday…

"This is an internal sub-service which manages table and partition information. Our recovery efforts are now focused on restoring metadata operations. We will be throttling APIs as we work on recovery."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/article/2985216/aws-glitch-strikes-netflix-and-tinder-offering-a-wake-up-call-for-others.html