Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
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Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
1–10 of 164 posts
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#2This is (I was surprised) a pretty good article. Financial services are regulated and based on recent experience, they're concerned with systemic risk. Most industries do not have anyone responsible for worrying about this kind of thing.
It seems reasonable to start worrying about the fragility potentially introduced by these massive internet infrastructure companies.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#3Even at a smaller scale it is a little nerve-wracking to know be so reliant on one provider. If AWS tanks there's a fair amount of code that'd need to be changed just to switch over to Azure or GCE. Failover with, e.g., email providers is easy enough, but the entire cloud stack (for lack of better terms) is a completely different ballgame.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#4Even at a smaller scale it is a little nerve-wracking to know be so reliant on one provider. If AWS tanks there's a fair amount of code that'd need to be changed just to switch over to Azure or GCE. Failover with, e.g., email providers is easy enough, but the entire cloud stack (for lack of better terms) is a completely different ballgame.
AWS provides a lot of features that are exclusive to their platform and can't be drop-in replaced on other providers like Azure of GCE. ELB, EFS, S3, ASGs, etc. They'd need to be replaced at the application level for other platforms. That could be a huge commitment for a decent sized system.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#5Even at a smaller scale it is a little nerve-wracking to know be so reliant on one provider. If AWS tanks there's a fair amount of code that'd need to be changed just to switch over to Azure or GCE. Failover with, e.g., email providers is easy enough, but the entire cloud stack (for lack of better terms) is a completely different ballgame.
It is one of the issues with choosing the cloud providers and taking their stack. They are hoping the cost of swapping once bought into their way is too costly to a competitor who can offer similar service cheaper. Lockin used to be considered bad but something changed with cloud providers and ops/developers don't seem to care as much anymore.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#6Even at a smaller scale it is a little nerve-wracking to know be so reliant on one provider. If AWS tanks there's a fair amount of code that'd need to be changed just to switch over to Azure or GCE. Failover with, e.g., email providers is easy enough, but the entire cloud stack (for lack of better terms) is a completely different ballgame.
AWS provides a lot of features that are exclusive to their platform and can't be drop-in replaced on other providers like Azure of GCE. ELB, EFS, S3, ASGs, etc. They'd need to be replaced at the application level for other platforms. That could be a huge commitment for a decent sized system.
I don't know about ELB, EFS and ASG but:
- S3 has a public protocol and many 3rd party providers support it (OpenIO, Scality, Ceph, Minio, etc),
- EFS could be replaced with something like DRDB or GlusterFS, or DigitalOcean's block storage or Google Cloud's networked disks.
- ELB could be replaced easily with similar services from other providers [1] if you use Kubernetes (I don't know if all have a LoadBalancer type though)
I would be more concerned about firewall/vpc rules, because I have no idea how those could be migrated without risk of forgetting some. Lock-in seems not that high in the end though and even less so if you use an open source container orchestration stack because they abstract most of these things away.
[1] https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/...
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#7This is (I was surprised) a pretty good article. Financial services are regulated and based on recent experience, they're concerned with systemic risk. Most industries do not have anyone responsible for worrying about this kind of thing. It seems reasonable to start worrying about the fragility potentially introduced by these massive internet infrastructure companies.
> Financial services are regulated and based on recent experience, they're concerned with systemic risk. Most industries do not have anyone responsible for worrying about this kind of thing.
I'd say that most industries do not have anyone responsible for worrying about it high enough in the management chain.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#8This does worry me. If there is a shortage of resources suddenly or a DC fire that takes out a region, then what?
We have contingency against this via our own infrastructure but I worry about organisations who don't have any.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#9This does worry me. If there is a shortage of resources suddenly or a DC fire that takes out a region, then what? We have contingency against this via our own infrastructure but I worry about organisations who don't have any.
> Amazon EC2 is hosted in multiple locations world-wide. These locations are composed of regions and Availability Zones. Each region is a separate geographic area. Each region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. Amazon EC2 provides you the ability to place resources, such as instances, and data in multiple locations. Resources aren't replicated across regions unless you do so specifically.
Source: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-reg...
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#10Is it possible for AWS to have a multi-region outage - as in is there anything connecting them that could bring them all (or several) down at once?
(Apart from the result of a botched patching or update to the core software stack that was done worldwide at the same time and hopefully never happens).