Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#41

Post by coldtea » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:16 AM UTC

cjsuk wrote: post #8

This 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.

>This does worry me. If there is a shortage of resources suddenly or a DC fire that takes out a region, then what?

Then some businesses will be out for a few hours / days.

No big deal.

From WWII to 9/11 to Katrina (and whatever regional stuff we have), we have been through much worse than that in modern history.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#42

Post by cachvico » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:16 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #30

mediascreen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you have to blow up at least all the datacenters in a region to make an impact?

All you need to blow is a few cables.

Then all that's needed to repair is a few cables.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#43

Post by gaius » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:17 AM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #38

gaius wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

legitimate national security concern, and the government steps in to provide protection There are a LOT of far softer targets that go unprotected. A terrorist attack on a sewage plant for a major city would be far more devastating than knocking out a few websites.

I feel like the point of the article we're commenting on is that AWS is far from "a few websites"

You can live without Netflix much longer than you can without a flushing toilet, is the point I'm making. Yet we don't have armed guards patrolling the sewageworks... It's a matter of priority how finite security personnel are deployed.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#44

Post by nepotism2018 » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:20 AM UTC

blazespin wrote: post #24

The solution is pretty simple, AWS/Azure need to provide on premise versions of their cloud.. You'd probably get stuck with a particular version, but better than nothing.

Openstack is still going strong

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#45

Post by mediascreen » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:21 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #30

mediascreen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you have to blow up at least all the datacenters in a region to make an impact?

All you need to blow is a few cables.

Well, you need to disable redundant ISP or power cables to all datacenters in a region. and that would probably be pretty easy to recover from in a day or two.

I imagine Amazon has some on site security measures as well.

It would be interesting to see how important services would cope with their main region going down for more than a few days.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#46

Post by latch » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:23 AM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #33

wiz21c wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because pricing by, say Amazon, is published on their web site and therefore, the same for everyone ? Whereas before, when you were with one supplier, he could make specific price for you and leverage its position to make you pay more ? dunno...

I'd be very surprised if big users of AWS or Azure pay the rates advertised on the public web sites.

Like most large business, AWS has a sales department and sales engineers that behave like you expect.

Rates are absolutely negotiable.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#47

Post by arethuza » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:27 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #43

peteretep wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the point of the article we're commenting on is that AWS is far from "a few websites"

You can live without Netflix much longer than you can without a flushing toilet, is the point I'm making. Yet we don't have armed guards patrolling the sewageworks... It's a matter of priority how finite security personnel are deployed.

I used to work at a company that had a large cage in a local data center - one of the other cages in the same room was apparently for the local police force (we weren't supposed to know this!).

It wouldn't surprise me if those police systems have moved, or are moving, to Azure or AWS data centers.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#48

Post by icebraining » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:28 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #40

cm2187 wrote: post #29

What would be great is the equivalent of the ACME protocol for cloud service providers. That will take a while and shouldn't happen until the offering matures and stabilises. But in an ideal world you wouldn't tie your application to a specific cloud provider. You should be able to lift and shift to another provider. Which I think is a merit of using VMs as opposed to individual services.

But in an ideal world you wouldn't tie your application to a specific cloud provider. You can do that easily if you just treat clouds merely as hosted hypervisors and think entirely in terms of VMDKs. But this doesn't make commercial sense to do at least in the short term - you need to utilise the layered services you are paying for anyway or you might as well just run your own DC.

It still makes sense for its elastic properties (from which EC2 got its name). You can't rent half a DC for an hour, but you can spawn generic instances from VMDKs on different providers with a fairly small abstraction layer.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#49

Post by kalleboo » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:39 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #43

peteretep wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the point of the article we're commenting on is that AWS is far from "a few websites"

You can live without Netflix much longer than you can without a flushing toilet, is the point I'm making. Yet we don't have armed guards patrolling the sewageworks... It's a matter of priority how finite security personnel are deployed.

How about whatever is running on AWS GovCloud?

Water outages happen often enough - they distribute water manually with tanker trucks. When sewage is overwhelmed it overflows into a river and they tell people to not go for a swim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitary_sewer_overflow

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#50

Post by lithos » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:39 AM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #19

dalbasal wrote: post #2

This 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.

If you wanted to blow something up to make the west suffer, an AWS datacenter would probably be a pretty good target. I wonder at what point that becomes a legitimate national security concern, and the government steps in to provide protection.

Amazon's own data centers are tiny (compared to most) that taking one out would almost be a waste of time. Even one of their large colocations would probably be a waste.

If you wanted that type of destruction, and be noticed, you would need a city leveler type event in a data center heavy area.