alex.moskalyuk

That Amazon promotion on XBox 360 for $100 did not go too well this morning. I logged in at roughly 10:45, checked My Account, just to make sure the cookie that’s saved into Amazon system is fresh and new, so I am not presented with the login screen somewhere in the process. At about 11:00 am the site was completely inaccessible with Firefox tab icons spinning away for minutes at a time.

Greg Linden provides some insight as a former Amazonian:

When I was at Amazon, every year we in engineering would try to avoid spikes in traffic, especially around peak holiday loads, and every year marketing folks would want to run some promotion specifically designed to create a mad frenzy on the site. Usually, we convinced them to change the promotion, but apparently engineering lost (or was asleep at the switch) this year.

People who didn’t get the console got kinda upset with the site performance.

In related news, did you know you could build MySQL clusters on Amazon’s E2 service, while utilizing S3 for storage? Due to sudden availability of free time I did some reading on MySQL Cluster this morning.