Lessons (Hopefully!) Learned from AWS’s Latest Outage

On November 25, 2020, Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 Region experienced a multi-hour outage due to an addition of capacity to its Kinesis service, which exceeded the maximum number of allowed threads, affecting over 100 companies including Adobe, Flickr, Twilio, and Roku. The incident highlighted the vulnerabilities of relying on a single-region architecture, underscoring the importance of adopting multi-region disaster recovery (DR) strategies and potentially multi-cloud architectures to ensure business continuity. Best practices for preventing similar outages include using global DNS load balancers to distribute traffic across regions, implementing cross-region backups for critical data, and employing emerging techniques such as continuous simulation for proactive outage management. Tools like Lightlytics can help organizations map the impact of outages on business functionalities and validate multi-region strategies to ensure operational resilience in the face of regional disruptions.