I'm finding a lot of these articles about "surviving" the outage fairly frustrating. They generally boil down to a combination of the following:
1. "We use a multi-AZ strategy!" - This outage affected multiple AZ's concurrently. If you did not see downtime, this means you were fortunate to have at least one unaffected AZ. This is pure luck however, many sites with the same level of preparation had significant downtime. (Note: A multi-AZ strategy is sage and would have minimized your downtime, but does not warrant a survival claim in this case.)
2. "We aren't using EBS!" - Not a single article I've seen has claimed that they weren't using EBS because they feared a multi-day/multi-AZ outage. They weren't using it because it lacks predictable I/O performance in comparison to S3. You can't retroactively claim wisdom in the category of availability for this choice.
3. "We don't host component <X> on AWS!" - Taking this argument to it's logical end, any service that doesn't host on AWS could write one of these articles e.g. "We host on Rackspace so we didn't go down!"
In short, if you don't have a completely multi-region strategy (including your relational data-store) implemented purely on AWS, your blog post is decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio on this issue.
1. "We use a multi-AZ strategy!" - This outage affected multiple AZ's concurrently. If you did not see downtime, this means you were fortunate to have at least one unaffected AZ. This is pure luck however, many sites with the same level of preparation had significant downtime. (Note: A multi-AZ strategy is sage and would have minimized your downtime, but does not warrant a survival claim in this case.)
2. "We aren't using EBS!" - Not a single article I've seen has claimed that they weren't using EBS because they feared a multi-day/multi-AZ outage. They weren't using it because it lacks predictable I/O performance in comparison to S3. You can't retroactively claim wisdom in the category of availability for this choice.
3. "We don't host component <X> on AWS!" - Taking this argument to it's logical end, any service that doesn't host on AWS could write one of these articles e.g. "We host on Rackspace so we didn't go down!"
In short, if you don't have a completely multi-region strategy (including your relational data-store) implemented purely on AWS, your blog post is decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio on this issue.