I learned something important today about Smugmug . . .

PeterPeter Registered Users Posts: 280 Major grins
edited July 21, 2008 in SmugMug Support
As much as I can appreciate that Smugmug is doing everything they can to restore service to the ablums, I never knew that Amazon was actually hosting my images.

I always thought it was Smugmug that stored the images on their own servers and ran independent of any other service. Knowing that my images were being looked after by one provider, and not channelled to another, give me secure knowledge that the people hosting my images also controlled access and maintenance of my images.

Having a third party actually holding my images does concern me somewhat. Is the agreement between myself and Smugmug regarding protecting my images and such, also held between Smugmug and Amazon?

Perhaps my concerns are unwarranted, but I really do like to know where exactly my images are stored. Maybe this was explained through the forum, but since I rarely have a chance to visit the forums, I missed out about Amazon's role in all this.

Peter

Comments

  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    Check our CEO & Chief Geek's posts about how things work: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/?s=s3

    Holler with questions after that thumb.gif
    Andy

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  • PeterPeter Registered Users Posts: 280 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    Andy wrote:
    Check our CEO & Chief Geek's posts about how things work: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/?s=s3

    Holler with questions after that thumb.gif
    Not sure what to look for but according to this entry of Feb 15th. http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/02/15/s3-outage-we-werent-affected/

    "UPDATE 1: I’m not sure why there’s all this confusion, but SmugMug *does* use Amazon as our primary data store. We maintain a small “hot cache” in our datacenters of frequently/recently viewed photos and videos, but there are massive numbers of them that are only at Amazon. This is a change from our initial usage of S3, and the change is based on how reliable they’ve been. Yes, we still consider them to be very reliable even after an outage like this. And yes, I suspect our “hot cache” did at least partially enable us to ride out this issue."

    "Bottom line: While the outage was certainly a big deal to those affected, I think the bigger deal here is how Amazon handled the outage. They need to communicate better about these mission critical services and their health."

    Answers my question . . . thanks.

    Peter
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    Peter wrote:

    Answers my question . . . thanks.

    Peter
    And, wherever we keep your photos, we're ultimately responsible for them.
    Andy

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  • PeterPeter Registered Users Posts: 280 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    Andy wrote:
    And, wherever we keep your photos, we're ultimately responsible for them.

    Andy . . .

    Not questioning you, nor your other team members in taking and accepting responsibility. Your posts and quick responses are evident of your commitment to your customers. The question is, does Amazon emulate the same dedication to service and understanding . . .

    Thanks again,

    Peter
  • TerenceKearns.comTerenceKearns.com Registered Users Posts: 13 Big grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    stability
    I think one has to look at amazon's stability as a company. This affects a lot of things all the way down to the underlying regimes (ie. ITIL implementations). The three pillars of governance - standards, policy, procedure.

    A weak or unstable leadership will affect these. IT outages in a large IT company are a sure sign of weak leadership.

    Any company making themselves dependent on another for service support needs to (re)consider these things carefully. Perhaps smugmug would revise their strategy based on Amazon's response. Either way, Amazon is gonna have confidence in it lost and that will hurt it's profit margins.

    A relatively small outfit like smugmug would do well to use a specialist for specialist functions (ie. pure storage), but what happens when that specialist cocks up?
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    Peter wrote:
    Andy . . .

    Not questioning you, nor your other team members in taking and accepting responsibility. Your posts and quick responses are evident of your commitment to your customers. The question is, does Amazon emulate the same dedication to service and understanding . . .

    Thanks again,

    Peter
    Without question thumb.gif
    I'll try and get Don to post more when the dust settles on this.
    Andy

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  • RBrogenRBrogen Registered Users Posts: 1,518 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    My concern is how a company of Amazon's size and customer base can allow their systems to be subject to what in essence is a full outage of service. This indicates poor contengency planning and system design. IMO there is absolutely no way that a service provider as large as Amazon should be suceptable to a full service outage for this length of time. Someone in Amazon's IT department seriously dropped the ball.
    Randy Brogen, CPP
    www.brogen.com

    Member: PPA , PPANE, PPAM & NAPP
  • jchinjchin Registered Users Posts: 713 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    Please keep us posted. Thanks.
    Johnny J. Chin ~ J. Chin Photography
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  • SewermanSewerman Registered Users Posts: 115 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    I think we should all be happy with smugmug and the way that they handled the Amazon failure. this only reinforces my satisfaction with the service !! Not one picture was lost !! thanks again!!clap.gif
    Don't sweat the petty things and Don't pet the sweaty things!

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    J D Plummer

  • PBolchoverPBolchover Registered Users Posts: 909 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    Andy wrote:
    Without question thumb.gif
    I'll try and get Don to post more when the dust settles on this.

    One of the questions I'd like Don to answer is whether smugmug maintain backup copies of our photos, in addition to the "live" versions at amazon. I appreciate that it might not be possible to plug these backup copies directly to the website (e.g. smugmug might only backup the originals, and not the display sizes), but it'd give some peace of mind to know that there are some non-amazon copies of my photos...
  • OffTopicOffTopic Registered Users Posts: 521 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    PBolchover wrote:
    One of the questions I'd like Don to answer is whether smugmug maintain backup copies of our photos, in addition to the "live" versions at amazon. I appreciate that it might not be possible to plug these backup copies directly to the website (e.g. smugmug might only backup the originals, and not the display sizes), but it'd give some peace of mind to know that there are some non-amazon copies of my photos...

    Do you not keep your own backups? I have three copies of each version of all of my photos, not including the copy uploaded to Smugmug.
    Lori
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  • pabsterpabster Registered Users Posts: 17 Big grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    OffTopic wrote:
    Do you not keep your own backups? I have three copies of each version of all of my photos, not including the copy uploaded to Smugmug.

    Good question. This whole thing is a bit mysterious and disheartening at the same time. Where's the backup and redundancy? S3 is clearly a leaking ship.
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    pabster wrote:
    S3 is clearly a leaking ship.
    It is? Do you know stuff we don't? If so, please share, it's that important to us to know everything - thanks!
    Andy

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  • pabsterpabster Registered Users Posts: 17 Big grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    Andy wrote:
    It is? Do you know stuff we don't? If so, please share, it's that important to us to know everything - thanks!

    I'm not sure if you're being facetious? :D

    I don't have any "inside" information but any moron could take a cursory look at various sites and services which depend upon S3 and see their blogs and forums are full of problems and issues related directly to, or stemming directly from, S3 problems - many during the last 60 days alone. IMO, S3 has never been all that rock solid (how it got such a reputation I'll never know) and it has really taken a nosedive recently. I wouldn't pay a penny to store any of my data there much less rely upon it for mission-critical applications and data. Of course, that's just my opinion.
  • NathanLakeNathanLake Registered Users Posts: 2 Beginner grinner
    edited July 20, 2008
    Pro vs Amateur
    pabster wrote:
    Good question. This whole thing is a bit mysterious and disheartening at the same time. Where's the backup and redundancy? S3 is clearly a leaking ship.


    If I were an amateur, I would be bothered by the outage. As a professional, I am a bit beyond bothered. I have only just logged onto this forum since I have not needed it in the past, but the outage today really concerns me. From what I can tell it has gone on all day and as of right now (8:40PM Pacific/7/20/08) it still appears to be out.

    If not up by tomorrow AM, when my customers start wanting to look, I may have to come up with some other solution.
  • pabsterpabster Registered Users Posts: 17 Big grins
    edited July 20, 2008
    NathanLake wrote:
    If I were an amateur, I would be bothered by the outage. As a professional, I am a bit beyond bothered. I have only just logged onto this forum since I have not needed it in the past, but the outage today really concerns me. From what I can tell it has gone on all day and as of right now (8:40PM Pacific/7/20/08) it still appears to be out.

    If not up by tomorrow AM, when my customers start wanting to look, I may have to come up with some other solution.

    I certainly understand. Fortunately, I'm not a professional photographer (furthest from it) and my livelihood doesn't depend in the slightest on SmugMug. I'm just a fan who is also disheartened and disappointed.
  • PBolchoverPBolchover Registered Users Posts: 909 Major grins
    edited July 21, 2008
    OffTopic wrote:
    Do you not keep your own backups? I have three copies of each version of all of my photos, not including the copy uploaded to Smugmug.

    I have at least 3 copies of all of my photos at home, plus online backups via both smugmug and jungledisk. I know that jungledisk is 100% dependent on amazon for storage, but I'm pretty sure that smugmug has its own copies as well.

    I'm just asking for such a post for the sake of having a clear picture of where the dependencies lie...
  • mbradymbrady Registered Users Posts: 321 Major grins
    edited July 21, 2008
    Just for the record, I'm a casual user of SmugMug who's had an account for quite some time (over 3 years), and from my experience the speed and system stability went up noticeably after the transition to S3 for storage.
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