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Ask HN: Is S3 down?

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Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would definitely seriously consider switching to GCS more if your cloud functions were as powerful as AWS Lambda (trigger from an S3 event) and supported Python 3.6 with serious control over the environment.

On a curious note, how do you guys use lambda?

It's a little outdated now, but this post details our pipeline: https://hearthsim.info/blog/how-we-process-replays/

Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#822
post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two different vendors if you can afford it. It's a bit of a hassle though.

I like to stick to one, but I have seen some success stories with an AWS/GCE mix :-) HashiCorp's Terraform makes it a lot easier to go multi Cloud, and abstracting away configuration of the OS and applications/state with Ansible makes the whole process a lot easier too.

Here is one success story:

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/guest-post-mult...

Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor's office that's unable to process patients due to the outage: https://mobile.twitter.com/drjincali/status/8366578638879989...

I mean, that's not really AWS's problem, is it? Outages happen. If you have a mission-critical service like health care, you really shouldn't write systems with single points of failure like this, especially not systems that depend on something consumer-grade like S3. This appears to be a normal doctor's office where there are routine appointments. Emergencies would be referred to the ER anyway. And while I obviously…

I work in the healthcare industry and there's a big push from AWS into offering HIPAA compliant services for things like patient records. It's becoming much more common to tie in third party services into electronic healthcare software. Obviously no mission critical system should have a single point of failure and doctor's offices should have fallback plans for handling service outages, but most care providers don't have staff onsite with the technical expertise to understand the extent of the coupling. I'm just closely watching this space and found that tweet interesting in relation to the parent comment's remark about realizing the scope of this S3 outage. There's no blame unique to AWS here, but it is becoming an increasingly important piece of plumbing in the industry.

Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#824
post #735

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Apologies if you find this to be in poor taste, but GCS directly supports the S3 XML API (including v4): https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability and has easy to use multi-regional support at a fraction of the cost of what it would take on AWS. I directly point my NAS box at home to GCS instead of S3 (sadly having to modify the little PHP client code to point it to st…

I have a component in my business that writes about 9 million objects a month to Amazon S3. But, to leverage efficiencies in dropping storage costs for those objects I created an identical archiving architecture on Google Cloud.

It took me about 15 minutes to spin up the instances on Google Cloud that archive these objects and upload them to Google Storage. While we didn't have access to any of our existing uploaded objects on S3 during the outage, I was able to mitigate not having the ability to store any future ongoing objects. (our workload is much more geared towards being very very write heavy for these objects)

It it turns out this cost leveraging architecture works quite well as a disaster recovery architecture.

Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#826
post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would definitely seriously consider switching to GCS more if your cloud functions were as powerful as AWS Lambda (trigger from an S3 event) and supported Python 3.6 with serious control over the environment.

Is there something about the GCS trigger that doesn't work for you? I hear you on Python 3, but I'm also curious about "serious control over the environment". Can you be more specific?

Here are our main issues with Lambda, from highest-to-lowest priority:

- It supports Python 2.7 only. We need Python 3.4+ support.

- We can't increase CPU allocation without increasing RAM allocation, making them far more expensive than we need.

- Using psycopg2 on it is a PITA due to their handling of system dependencies.

- The system is entirely proprietary, making it impossible to run it locally for testing.

- Cloudwatch sucks for finding errors in the functions and is atrociously expensive.

- API gateway is an extremely crufty system, and used not to let you pass around binary data (this has changed)

- We can't disable/change the retry-on-error policy.

We have a pretty hard tie-in to S3 and Redshift, but when GCF can do better on a majority of these points, we'll begin moving to it. But yes, Python 3 at a minimum would be a requirement.

Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. soundcloud uses aws s3. it is still down. this is false information.

Soundcloud recovering from this failure and S3 being operational are two separate issues. We use S3 and it will take us nominally an hour to recover after S3 went up, for example. S3 has started working as of about 20 minutes ago, and things are running smoothly.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#828
post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised more people don't know about it. I get questions like https://github.com/kahing/goofys/issues/158 every now and then and to be fair I don't think they market it well: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/migrating Disclosure: I don't work for google but have an upcoming interview there.

"Disclosure: I don't work for google but have an upcoming interview there." Disclosure: I took a tour there one time and have used google. EDIT: I realized that I was being mean, but why was that disclaimer relevant?

I think it's a fair disclosure of potential bias.

Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#829
post #735

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Apologies if you find this to be in poor taste, but GCS directly supports the S3 XML API (including v4): https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability and has easy to use multi-regional support at a fraction of the cost of what it would take on AWS. I directly point my NAS box at home to GCS instead of S3 (sadly having to modify the little PHP client code to point it to st…

I keep telling people that in my view, Google Cloud is far superior to AWS from a technical standpoint. Most people don't believe me... Yet. I guess it will change soon.

Google Cloud is the Betamax of cloud... while it might be technically superior it's not the only factor to consider. :)

Re: Ask HN: Is S3 down?

#830
post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised more people don't know about it. I get questions like https://github.com/kahing/goofys/issues/158 every now and then and to be fair I don't think they market it well: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/migrating Disclosure: I don't work for google but have an upcoming interview there.

"Disclosure: I don't work for google but have an upcoming interview there." Disclosure: I took a tour there one time and have used google. EDIT: I realized that I was being mean, but why was that disclaimer relevant?

> I realized that I was being mean, but why was that disclaimer relevant?

Because:

- transparency is always good

- adding a small disclosure to the bottom of a post is very low impact

- someone who is interviewing for a job at a company is likely to have a set of biases that influence what they say even if they think that they're being honest and objective.

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