AWS us-east-1 outage: How Ably’s multi-region architecture held up

During a recent AWS us-east-1 outage, Ably successfully maintained uninterrupted service due to its robust multi-region architecture, which ensured no customer impact and negligible latency increases. This architecture allows Ably's globally-distributed system to operate independently across multiple AWS regions, with traffic rerouted from the affected region to us-east-2 during the incident. Pre-existing connections in us-east-1 remained stable, and the latency impact was minimal, averaging a 3ms difference that was imperceptible to users. The incident demonstrated the effectiveness of Ably's architecture, which includes a multi-layered defense strategy enabling automatic client-side failover to maintain connectivity even in case of complete regional failure. The experience reinforced the importance of having a genuinely distributed system capable of isolating failures and highlighted the necessity of planning and practicing responses to such events to ensure real resilience.

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