An AWS post-mortem: When Amazon broke the internet
+ what we can learn from it.
Hi there,
This week I wanted to do something a little different.
In light of the big AWS crash last week, we decided to make this week’s “post mortem” edition of our Educative Newsletter free for everyone. The Educative Newsletter is a perk for Educative Unlimited subscribers — who received insights on the crash the very next morning.
You can see a preview below, or use this link to read the whole thing. Enjoy!
When (and why) Amazon $hat the bed
At the start of last week, the internet was literally falling apart.
Netflix lost its chill.
DoorDashers went hungry.
Redditors around the world thought they were shadow banned from their favorite online communities.
And spookiest of all? You couldn’t even send a Slack.
(Hey, maybe that last part wasn’t so bad).
You likely experienced the AWS us-east-1 outage that broke the internet in your own way. But do you have a complete understanding of what actually caused the outage, and how it all went down?
When systems break, we learn
The internet is only as strong as the systems we design to hold it together.
If this kind of postmortem fascinates you, or if you’re thinking about how to make your own architecture more resilient, our courses dig deep into the principles that separate fragile systems from fault-tolerant ones.
Now’s the perfect time to learn something that won’t vanish when us-east-1 does again.
And you’ll also get topical post-mortems like today’s feature in your inbox as a subscriber.
🎃 And remember — don’t forget to grab 50% off your Educative Unlimited subscription before the Halloween sale ends on October 31st.
Happy learning!
- Fahim