can't wait for the postmortem on this
AWS us-east-1 outage
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#782I'm absolutely terrified by our reliance on cloud providers (and modern technology, networks, satellites, electric grids, etc. in general), but the cloud hasn't been around that long. It is advancing extremely fast, and every problem makes it more resilient.
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#783I think now is a good time to reiterate the danger of companies just throwing all of their operational resilience and sustainability over the wall and trusting someone else with their entire existence. It's wild to me that so many high performing businesses simply don't have a plan for when the cloud goes down. Some of my contacts are telling me that these outages have teams of thousands of people completely prevente…
This seems like an insane stance to have, it's like saying businesses should ship their own stock, using their own drivers, and their in-house made cars and planes and in-house trained pilots. Heck, why stop at having servers on-site? Cast your own silicon waffers, after all you don't want spectrum exploits. Because you are worst at it. If a specialist is this bad, and the market is fully open, then it's because the…
Quick follow up. I once used a IASS provider (hyperstreet) that was terrible. Long story short provider ended closing shop and the owner of the company now sells real estate in California.
Was a nightmare recovering data. Even when the service was operational was sub par.
Just saying perhaps the “shittiest” providers may not be more reliable.
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#784I think now is a good time to reiterate the danger of companies just throwing all of their operational resilience and sustainability over the wall and trusting someone else with their entire existence. It's wild to me that so many high performing businesses simply don't have a plan for when the cloud goes down. Some of my contacts are telling me that these outages have teams of thousands of people completely prevente…
This seems like an insane stance to have, it's like saying businesses should ship their own stock, using their own drivers, and their in-house made cars and planes and in-house trained pilots. Heck, why stop at having servers on-site? Cast your own silicon waffers, after all you don't want spectrum exploits. Because you are worst at it. If a specialist is this bad, and the market is fully open, then it's because the…
I think you're missing the point of the comment. It's not "don't use cloud". It's "be prepared for when cloud goes down". Because it will, despite many companies either thinking it won't, or not planning for it.
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#785I think now is a good time to reiterate the danger of companies just throwing all of their operational resilience and sustainability over the wall and trusting someone else with their entire existence. It's wild to me that so many high performing businesses simply don't have a plan for when the cloud goes down. Some of my contacts are telling me that these outages have teams of thousands of people completely prevente…
Do you think they'd manage their own infra better? Are you suggesting they pay for a fully redundant second implementation on another provider? How much extra cost would that be vs eating an outage very infrequently?
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#786I worked at a company that hired an ex-Amazon engineer to work on some cloud projects. Whenever his projects went down, he fought tooth and nail against any suggestion to update the status page. When forced to update the status page, he'd follow up with an extremely long "post-mortem" document that was really just a long winded explanation about why the outage was someone else's fault. He later explained that in his…
It's popular to upvote this during outages, because it fits a narrative. The truth (as always) is more complex: * No, this isn't the broad culture. It's not even a blip. These are EXCEPTIONAL circumstances by extremely bad teams that - if and when found out - would be intervened dramatically. * The broad culture is blameless post-mortems. Not whose fault is it. But what was the problem and how to fix it. And one of t…
Oh, yes. Let me go look at the PERSONAL health dashboard and... oh, I need to sign into the console to view it... hmm
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#787I think now is a good time to reiterate the danger of companies just throwing all of their operational resilience and sustainability over the wall and trusting someone else with their entire existence. It's wild to me that so many high performing businesses simply don't have a plan for when the cloud goes down. Some of my contacts are telling me that these outages have teams of thousands of people completely prevente…
This seems like an insane stance to have, it's like saying businesses should ship their own stock, using their own drivers, and their in-house made cars and planes and in-house trained pilots. Heck, why stop at having servers on-site? Cast your own silicon waffers, after all you don't want spectrum exploits. Because you are worst at it. If a specialist is this bad, and the market is fully open, then it's because the…
> AWS has fewer outages in one zone alone than the best self-hosted institutions, your facebooks and petagons. In-house servers would lead to an insane amount of outage.
It’s had two in 13 months
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#788I think now is a good time to reiterate the danger of companies just throwing all of their operational resilience and sustainability over the wall and trusting someone else with their entire existence. It's wild to me that so many high performing businesses simply don't have a plan for when the cloud goes down. Some of my contacts are telling me that these outages have teams of thousands of people completely prevente…
This seems like an insane stance to have, it's like saying businesses should ship their own stock, using their own drivers, and their in-house made cars and planes and in-house trained pilots. Heck, why stop at having servers on-site? Cast your own silicon waffers, after all you don't want spectrum exploits. Because you are worst at it. If a specialist is this bad, and the market is fully open, then it's because the…
> This seems like an insane stance to have, it's like saying businesses should ship their own stock, using their own drivers, and their in-house made cars and planes and in-house trained pilots.
> Heck, why stop at having servers on-site? Cast your own silicon waffers, after all you don't want spectrum exploits.
That's an overblown argument. Nobody is saying that, but it's clear that businesses that maintain their own infrastructure would've avoided today's AWS' outage. So just avoiding a single level of abstraction would've kept your company running today.
> Because you are worst at it. If a specialist is this bad, and the market is fully open, then it's because the problem is hard.
The problem is hard mostly because of scale. If you're a small business running a few websites with a few million hits per month, it might be cheaper and easier to colocate a few servers and hire a few DevOps or old-school sysadmins to administer the infrastructure. The tooling is there, and is not much more difficult to manage than a hundred different AWS products. I'm actually more worried about the DevOps trend where engineers are trained purely on cloud infrastructure and don't understand low-level tooling these systems are built on.
> AWS has fewer outages in one zone alone than the best self-hosted institutions, your facebooks and petagons. In-house servers would lead to an insane amount of outage.
That's anecdotal and would depend on the capability of your DevOps team and your in-house / colocation facility.
> And guess what? AWS (and all other IAAS providers) will beg you to use multiple region because of this. The team/person that has millions of dollars a day staked on a single AWS region is an idiot and could not be entrusted to order a gaming PC from newegg, let alone run an in-house datacenter.
Oh great, so the solution is to put even more of our eggs in a single provider's basket? The real solution would be having failover to a different cloud provider, and the infrastructure changes needed for that are _far_ from trivial. Even with that, there's only 3 major cloud providers you can pick from. Again, colocation in a trusted datacenter would've avoided all of this.
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This issue is affecting the global console landing page, which is also hosted in US-EAST-1 Even this little tidbit is a bit of a wtf for me. Why do they consider it ok to have anything hosted in a single region? At a different (unnamed) FAANG, we considered it unacceptable to have anything depend on a single region. Even the dinky little volunteer-run thing which ran https://internal.site.example/~someEngineer was…
Every damn Well-Architected Framework includes multi-AZ if not multi-region redundancy, and yet the single access point for their millions of customers is single-region. Facepalm in the form of $100Ms in service credits.
> Facepalm in the form of $100Ms in service credits.
It was also greatly affecting Amazon.com itself. I kept getting sporadic 404 pages and one was during a purchase. Purchase history wasn't showing the product as purchased and I didn't receive an email, so I repurchased. Still no email, but the purchase didn't end in a 404, but the product still didn't show up in my purchase history. I have no idea if I purchased anything, or not. I have never had an issue purchasing. Normally get a confirmation email within 2 or so minutes and the sale is immediately reflected in purchase history. I was unaware of the greater problem at that moment or I would have steered clear at the first 404.
Re: AWS us-east-1 outage
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't asked AWS employees specifically about blameless postmortems, but several of them have personally corroborated that the culture tends towards being adversarial and "performance focused." That's a tough environment for blameless debugging and postmoretems. Like if I heard that someone has a rain forest tree-frog living happily in their outdoor Arizona cactus garden, I have doubts.
When I was at Google I didn't have a lot of exposure to the public infra side. However I do remember back in 2008 when a colleague was working on routing side of YouTube, he made a change that cost millions of dollars in mere hours before noticing and reverting it. He mentioned this to the larger team which gave applause during a tech talk. I cannot possibly generalize the culture differences between Amazon and Googl…
While I support that, how are the people involved evaluated?