- Lessons Learned, Survival-Stories etc. von Firmen mit Amazon-Infrastruktur Before 5 AM Eastern on April 21st, 2011, an outage started at EC2's northern Virginia datacenter that brought down hundreds of web 2.0 and social media websites including Foursquare, Springpad, Reddit, Quora, BigDoor and Hootsuite. Specifically, attempts to use Amazon's elastic-disk and database services hung, failed, or were slow. Service was restored to some parts of the datacenter (three of four "availability zones" in Amazon's terms) by late afternoon Eastern time that day
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) enables a single Amazon EC2 instance to attach to one or more highly available, highly reliable storage volumes of up to 1 TB of data each. Once attached, applications on a single Amazon EC2 instance can read or write from the Amazon EBS volume similar to a disk drive. With Amazon EBS, an Amazon EC2 instance can now be terminated without losing the data that resides on the Amazon EBS volume. One use case involves running a relational database within an Amazon EC2 instance, but maintaining the data within an Amazon EBS volume.