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

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

#141

Post by dwyerm » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:16 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #36

peteretep wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

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 get what you're saying.

However, we actually have evidence that a sewage plant for a major western city can suffer a sudden catastrophic failure[1] and it won't even make it above the fold.

[1] https://projects.seattletimes.com/2017/west-point/

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

#142

Post by forkLding » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:47 PM UTC

Personally as a dev, I find AWS's service in the middle of Paypal (shit, not sure why they're popular) to Stripe (Damn that was fast and easy) seeing as I used them both.

Their support is alright although you often have to pay for it but AWS docs are atrocious and remind me of university textbooks written by professors who like creating pseudo-scientific-sounding jargon which mixed with their huge array of features is quite un-comforting to use for even people with intermediate AWS experience (built some apps with AWS before kind of people).

I can see that there could be more specialized services like Firebase (which is built on Google Cloud) that should be built on AWS for the users. Firebase is a breeze to use and very responsive and I've used it to build real-time chat apps in a couple days.

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

#143

Post by erentz » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 9:56 PM 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.

A great soft target is electricity grid. The timelines for manufacturing large transformers for example can be many months and they usually don't have as much redundancy as you would expect. A semi coordinated attack against the grid, using dynamite to take out a number of pylons along main HV lines, easily accessible because they're out in rural areas. Combine with a number of sticks thrown over fences at transformers. And you could massively impact the US economy for months.

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

#144

Post by darkr » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:00 PM UTC

savoytruffle wrote: post #100

AmIFirstToThink wrote: post #81

If 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"

I think you mean "moo".

It's like a cow's opinion, you know, it just doesn't matter. It's "moo".

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

#145

Post by darkr » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

YawningAngel wrote: post #92

sharemywin wrote: post #80

Hasn't anyone heard of disaster recover plans? I used to work at a medium sized insurance company and every year we had a project to update our disaster recovery plans. Including our main inhouse datacenter going down. If it was a critical system you'd better have a plan to get it back up in like 4 hours. and those were business critical we didn't have any life critical systems.

What's the disaster plan for "DynamoDB doesn't exist any more"? There is literally nothing else like it in the world. I don't know of an idiot proof queue system that can handle the scales SQS can take either.

Cassandra?

Rabbit?

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

#146

Post by falsedan » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

c22 wrote: post #139

savoytruffle wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/25/mute-point/

Woah, Prof Brians updated his layout

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

#147

Post by taheca » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:44 PM UTC

mediascreen wrote: post #21

peteretep wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

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

fight club update anyone?

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

#148

Post by falsedan » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:46 PM UTC

patta54 wrote: post #93

barsonme wrote: post #3

Even 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.

I warn other developers at my company about this. When new projects spin up they're often very excited about using new Amazon services and will make any excuse to choose an AWS product over a stable open source solution. If I were a manager, I'd be very worried over the vendor lock-in. I don't understand the preference for AWS over open source in many cases. Their services are "reliable", but they often have minute r…

> "But RabbitMQ might crash! We don't have to worry about that with AWS!"

I can confirm that not only can RabbitMQ get into an unusable state, it will do so extremely rapidly and with little warning unless you sit an engineer or two on it to monitor and manage the incoming/dead letter rates.

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

#149

Post by jrimbault » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:47 PM UTC

Rjevski wrote: post #68

jrimbault wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there's a global world admin web console ?

Well as a customer how do you interact with it? Do you have one admin interface per region with its own URL or do you just go on an AWS homepage, login and control everything from there?

I meant like truly admin, amazon intranet admin.

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

#150

Post by bdcravens » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 11:02 PM UTC

mediascreen wrote: post #21

peteretep wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

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

I think the number of applications running on AWS in a non-HA manner is very high, so a single datacenter going offline would have some impact.