Month: May 2015

June 30, 2015 23:59:60

AWS Official Blog covers the upcoming leap second shenanigans in “Look Before You Leap – The Coming Leap Second and AWS“:

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) recently announced that an extra second will be injected into civil time at the end of June 30th, 2015. This means that the last minute of June 30th, 2015 will have 61 seconds. If a clock is synchronized to the standard civil time, it will show an extra second 23:59:60 on that day between 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. This extra second is called a leap second. There have been 25 such leap seconds since 1972. The last one took place on June 30th, 2012.

Not all applications and systems are properly coded to handle this “:60” notation.

The Cost Of Loss

SingleHop – a cloud-based hosting company – created this infographic on the cost of loss for when your backups aren’t up to the par.  This should work well as a reminder, especially if printed out and hung on the wall in front of a sysadmin (but also somewhere, where the management can occasionally see it too).

SingleHop BaaS Infographic