How I got back online after AWS East went down

Ok, on 2023-06-13 there was an AWS outage and everyone that used AWS East was affected. I use Vercel for hosting and they use AWS for their edge rendering lambdas (in AWSEast) so I was affected.

I have some analytics I bring in from Fathom Analytics (which was also suffering from the outage) and what alerted me to the issue in the first place.

This also brought to my attention that I needed to add in better error handling for my analytics endpoints for if this happens again in the future.

Recovering From the AWS Outage

Nothing was building, I took the outage advice and switched the function region from iad1 to cle1 but that didn’t work for me, the builds finished but the site returned a 500 error.

Switching Off Edge Rendering

What I did was switch off edge rendering. It’s a nice to have for me and not a deal breaker and it was what was causing the builds to either fail or not finish.

In my endpoints I commented out the edge runtime config:

// export const config: ServerlessConfig = {
//   runtime: 'nodejs18.x',
// }

Then in my svelte.config.js file I commented out the edge runtime config:

kit: {
  // adapter: adapter({ runtime: 'edge' }),
  adapter: adapter(),
},

Using SvelteKit Auto Adapter

So, after that I thought it best not to use the Vercel SvelteKit adapter either. I installed and switched to the SvelteKit auto adapter:

pnpm i -D @sveltejs/adapter-auto

Then I switched out the adapter out at the top of my svelte.config.js file imports:

-import adapter from '@sveltejs/adapter-vercel'
+import adapter from '@sveltejs/adapter-auto'

This change allowed my website to function properly until the AWS outage was resolved. After the resolution, I switched back to the edge runtime.

Sort of begs the question, do I really need edge rendering? I’m not sure, I’ll see how it goes for now and I know how to switch it off if I need to.

Anyway, leaving this here for future reference.

References

Some useful bits I found:

• Vercel status page: https://www.vercel-status.com/
• To change your Vercel function region: https://vercel.com/<vercel_user>/<project_name>/settings/functions
• Configuring SvelteKit fo use with Vercel edge functions: https://vercel.com/docs/frameworks/sveltekit#configure-your-sveltekit-deployment
• How to specify vercel builds location (depreciated): https://github.com/orgs/vercel/discussions/1470

Conclusion

Finding your way out of an AWS outage can (excuse the pun) put you on edge, but with the right steps, I managed to minimize downtime and keep my website running.

If you have any questions or need further clarification, feel free to get in touch.