LabVIEW Web UI Builder Outage April 21 2011 Postmortem

Question

Here is the postmortem from the WLV server outage we suffered last week. We did post
ongoing updates on the NI Hosted Services status page located at http://status.niwsc.com
- if you think there's something wrong with the NI cloud that's your
first place to check, if there's a known problem we update it as soon as
we can.
What Happened And Why
From 10:53 AM to 4:05 PM CDT on Thursday, April 21, The LabVIEW Web UI Builder cloud systems were offline. This prevented downloads of the editor, loading or saving to the cloud, and build/deploy. If you were installed locally and using local project storage, you may not have been affected. We apologize for this unplanned outage, we
got caught up in the massive Amazon AWS Eastern region downtime, which
is where we host the service.
Detailed Timeline
2:51am
– LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud Beta (FCC) and LabVIEW Web UI Builder
(WLV) experience problems with the load balanced web servers on the
front end, LV Cloud Ops team is notified by monitoring. We have 24x5
operations staff on shift so there was no oncall delay.
3:30am – LV Cloud Ops team is able to stabilize WLV, but FCC is offline (both redundant front end servers are down).
4:00am – Ticket opened with Amazon support.
4:00am – Attempted to create new servers to fail over to. Not able to create new servers in Amazon US East Region.
7:17am – Posted on status.niwsc.com that FCC was no longer functioning.
10:16am
– One of the two WLV web servers crashes, AWS still not able to spin up
new instances in US East. It becomes clear from Twitter that the
problem is widespread and affecting many Amazon customers hosted in US
East.
10:20am – We alert customers that we might be losing WLV on status.niwsc.com.
10:30am
– We begin planning moving web servers to US West, but also hoping
second webserver stays up. Our tests show AWS is generally jacked up.
10:53am – Second web server for WLV goes down, WLV offline.
11:00am – Team works on moving assets to the US West Amazon region and continue to try and get new instances in US East.
12:35 pm – Amazon provides their first explanation:
A
networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of
re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a
shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which
impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could
re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes.Additionally, one of our
internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it's
difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. Weare
working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one
AvailabilityZone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore
the control plane issue. We're starting to see progress on these
efforts, but are not there yet.We will continue to provide updates when
we have them.
1:00pm – Reset DNS for uibuilder.niwsc.com to point to “Page not found” on our core services.
2:30pm – Able to provision new instances for the first time.  We grab 4 real quick.
2:40pm – Deploy software, apps, and config on all 4 new servers.
3:30pm – Encounter errors with the Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs)
3:50pm – Swap in new ELBs and move DNS
4:05pm – Services restored to customers, give it burn in time before communication on status page and forums
4:55pm – Communicate issue resolution
What We Can Do Better
We
were not already spread across multiple Amazon geolocations, instead
relying on multiple availability zones for uptime. Furthermore,
processes to migrate systems over to new regions require the old region
to be working.  We plan to set up a process to move assets over to
US-West on a regular basis so that we can bring up systems there as
needed. We have had consistently good uptime with Amazon up to this
point and do not plan on moving providers, but of course if the issue
recurs we would address it at our supplier level. We do intend to
address the lack of/slow communication to us and other customers
surrounding the issue.
It took us a while to get the downtime
notification page updated. We will do better; it is hard to prioritize
communication when people are frantically working issues but we train to
expect that as a top priority. We have an automation solution nearly
done that will update the notification page when our monitoring goes
bad, though of course explanations would still have to be entered by
operations staff.
We were not able to quickly email affected
customers, as operations staff does not have a direct channel to send
email to customers.  We are looking at other communication options such
as Twitter and opt-in email from the notification page.
We'd Like To Hear From You
Were you affected by the outage? What could we have done better in your eyes?
How
would you like to be notified of outages? We are reluctant to email all
hosted services customers about outages in case you'd consider that
annoying or spammy. Should we always push outage info to you or should
that be via an opt in mechanism?  Do you like email, twitter, forum
posts, all of the above?
Again, we apologize for the
service disruption and will continue to work to make the NI Cloud up and
rock solid 100% of the time.

Answer 1

LabVIEW Web UI Builder is back up and now available again. Please allow me to apologize on behalf of NI if you were inconvenienced by the outage.
Regards,
Mike Neal
LabVIEW Product Manager