ElephantDrive has been one of Amazon S3’s most prolific consumers since the AWS launched the service. While we make extensive use of S3, our systems are not completely reliant on their performance. We’ve architected a solution that keeps some storage on S3 and some on ElephantDrive’s own storage devices, so that in the event of an outage or problem by either we can continue to provide uninterrupted service.
This was put to the test again this weekend when the S3 service experienced a major outage. Details of the downtime were covered by a variety of sources, some of which detailed responses from end users. The good news is that our system worked flawlessly – our storage allocation engine recognizes the problem and routed requests to available nodes instead of the non-responsive S3 service points.
We’d like to thank our engineers for staying on top of things and the many users who wrote to us about the S3 issues. We appreciate your support and concern – happily our safeguards worked as planned and we avoided any problems.
No ElephantData was lost during this experience and no requests were denied as a result of the problems. We will continue to work with our friends at Amazon Web Services to help them improve their systems, as well as continue to review the other services available.
The Team at ElephantDrive
