If Amazon's cloud service would disappear today, it would be a chaos for a week or two but most people should recover (as long as they have backups).
Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
131–140 of 164 posts
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#132If Amazon's cloud service would disappear today, it would be a chaos for a week or two but most people should recover (as long as they have backups).
I'd wager most peoples' database backups live in AWS as well.
Plus, some people have huge, huge datasets. It could easily take weeks to migrate to, say, GCE, or to your own hosted servers. In the latter case, it would also necessitate a pretty large up-front investment.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, it seems like the software approach as well. You wouldn't want a class or a piece of code to be "too big" to fail, you'd refactor it into smaller pieces which can be overviewed more easily.
It's really a basic engineering principle. Smaller and more distributed systems are more reliable.
This sounds like the microkernel / monolith debate. Except monoliths kind of won.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#134Cloud services are concentrated by nature built with the same cloned DNA.
Of course that is a systematic risk with so much it concentrated to fewer physical locations running on the same code.
Think Cloned bananas vs fingers disease but computers. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35131751
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really a basic engineering principle. Smaller and more distributed systems are more reliable.
This sounds like the microkernel / monolith debate. Except monoliths kind of won.
It depends on what you want to optimize for. micro is good for some things, mono is good for other things. Neither is inherently "better", it just depends on your goal
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, this goes to show that there are ~zero terrorists in the US. The US has an almost infinite supply of soft targets, but since 9/11 there have been no attacks of any consequence. There have been a few minor attacks like Boston bombers, but those have all been laughably amateurish. The US has no terrorism problem. In 1979, the Irish killed the Queen's uncle in law, and in 1984, they blew up a hotel where Thatcher w…
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Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hate the "too big to fail" meme and I strongly agree with Bernie in that if you are too big to fail you are too big to exist. That should be the priority.
I don't know what Bernie's specific plans were/are but it's not unusual. At least, at first blush, this is a lot of people's reactions. Too-big-to-fail = danger = make it smaller. Realisitically, this has not been the solution implmented (in the EU & US, at least). In the EU, it is even more crucial as the "solutions" to this problem are applied to state finances as well as financial institutions. In terms of policie…
Paul Volcker's solution was that any time a bank is so big that we need to bail it out to avoid systemic problems, then the bank should be broken up. We can't always see all the problems in advance, but we can break them up in the aftermath.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#138If your architecture means your system goes down if AWS is down, then the question becomes can you replace AWS with something better that you can build, have means to build, have time to build, can keep running, can get enough momentum in term of sheer size of customer base to fund the upkeep of the platform? If you can't build/run a better AWS replacement then it's a mute point, isn't it? Then the question turns int…
I think most people probably don't need an entire AWS replacement, though. If you're running an e-commerce platform, you could run it on a VPS. It would be harder -
you'd have to do your own server management, figure out your own deploy strategy, run your own load balancers, do your own security, backups, etc. - but that's not "rebuild AWS from scratch" harder.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#139If your architecture means your system goes down if AWS is down, then the question becomes can you replace AWS with something better that you can build, have means to build, have time to build, can keep running, can get enough momentum in term of sheer size of customer base to fund the upkeep of the platform? If you can't build/run a better AWS replacement then it's a mute point, isn't it? Then the question turns int…
irrelevant points are "moot", not "mute"
Moot points aren't really irrelevant, on the contrary, they're perhaps the most relevant as non moot points are already settled.
Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?
#140Nothing is too big to fail. Society needs to be able to adapt and maintain a level of patience during transition times i.e., be patient when Amazon's cloud fails to a new tool.