DDoS gives trouble to site hosted on Amazon EC2

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack targeted at a site hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) solution have brought a number of possible weaknesses out in the open. Jesper Nøhr, who runs the affected Bitbucket service, received an unwitting glimpse of the innards of Amazon's Cloud as he struggled to resolve a site outage that dragged on for more than 16 hours.

In a nutshell, Amazon and Nøhr eventually narrowed down the source of the problem to a massive on Bitbucket DDoS. One of the reasons the diagnosis took so long was the fact that even the premium support reps have no way of viewing the network traffic, causing them to look in all the wrong places.

Regardless of the cause, aren't Cloud platforms supposed to be able to weather massive DDoS attacks? A reading of the story indicates that Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS)--think of it as storage traffic--shares the same network channel as incoming traffic from the Internet.

Nøhr told The Register: "[Amazon] said they were supposed to prioritize EBS traffic over other traffic so we wouldn't be bogged down by external traffic. But they admitted it wasn't working the way they wanted it to."

With the network channel completely saturated, it is no wonder that EBS registered problems, as well. Naysayers will point to this as an example that a Cloud platform is not omnipotent after all, a contention I would agree with. However, Cloud Computing is still maturing, and it would be far too early to dismiss it as a robust and enterprise ready platform at this point.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at The Register

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