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Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

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Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#91

Post by flotwig »

ethbr0 wrote: post #48
caffed wrote: post #28

I thought this story was about this house x-) "Neighbors in Tennessee city worry as Amazon packages pile up outside home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVQjEB2sxBw

I don't even understand what's going on with this one. Transcribing the blurb from the clip, from interviewing the residents of the house: "[The people who live in the house] have a friend who has a contract with an Amazon warehouse in China. They say whenever that friend's contract expires, she will send the packages to their house for the family to sort and then send back to Amazon for the company to sell."

Yeah, I noticed that too, someone's getting scammed.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#92

Post by smsm42 »

Something I'm not getting there. OK, one zone went down in AWS. But there supposed to be multiple ones? And if somebody knows how to use AWS so that one zone going down wouldn't knock over the whole thing, it should be Amazon? I thought the whole point of this multi-zone cloud setup would be so that even if one zone goes down, it could survive and perform as usual - maybe a little slower for a bit while backups kick in and such, but after initial short period everything should be fine? Here we're talking about the whole system going down hard. Was the problem much wider than reported - i.e. affecting all (US) zones at least, or is it that Amazon doesn't know or doesn't care to use its own infrastructure to build a robust system?

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#93

Post by reasonabl_human »

faridelnasire wrote: post #51

As bad as this article makes AWS sound, it's actually the reason you should go with AWS over say Azure or GCP; when AWS goes down, its owners actually feel the pain with you, Microsoft and Google run their own stuff elsewhere...

This is simply not true. Microsoft dog foods tons of its own software and all internal cloud services I know of run on azure. Also, having consumed both cloud service offerings, customer support within Azure was far more responsive.

Source: used to work as a SWE on a flagship Azure service

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#94

Post by johncena33 »

faridelnasire wrote: post #51

As bad as this article makes AWS sound, it's actually the reason you should go with AWS over say Azure or GCP; when AWS goes down, its owners actually feel the pain with you, Microsoft and Google run their own stuff elsewhere...

HN is a very pro-Amazon place. Regardless of what Amazon does, at least one of the top 3 comments is always justifying Amazon's actions.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#95

Post by notfromhere »

karmicthreat wrote: post #90

Whenever us-east-1 goes down you just get a really good feel for how many other companies also have pretty fragile setups. They apps I work on can deal with a few hours of downtime, so as long as I'm sure I can recover from getting totally leveled its ok. And I think it's that was for the majority of companies. Most don't want the extra effort and cost of failover.

Us-East-1 took out commuter rail travel in Chicago for like a good 30 minutes, so not just companies

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#96

Post by throwawayboise »

hattmall wrote: post #75
toomuchtodo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t remote start the car with the fob? Viper/Directed has a paid cloud/app service for convenience, but the primary/default method to activate the remote start is RF.

Couldn't you also just go outside and turn on the car, like people did before remote starts.

We apparently don't teach advanced problem-solving like this in school anymore.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#97

Post by gpm »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #66
Consultant32452 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend lives in very cold Alaska. She has an app on her car that lets her remotely warm her car, which is a requirement before driving because it's so cold. The AWS outage meant her phone couldn't talk to her car. She was 20 mins late to work because of that. This is the future. AWS has an outage and your car won't work.

Couldn’t remote start the car with the fob? Viper/Directed has a paid cloud/app service for convenience, but the primary/default method to activate the remote start is RF.

It's unclear to me that the app being discussed started the car?

In sufficiently cold conditions, you need to warm the engine up before starting the car, with an electric heating element. If this was controlling one of those heating elements, the problem was presumably that the car wasn't able to start at all, not that the car couldn't be started remotely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#98

Post by shadowgovt »

nodesocket wrote: post #84
shadowgovt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Google's stuff runs on Borg, which predates GCP (and is the fabric GCP runs on top of).

Borg is the predecessor to Kubernetes (sort of) right? They could have switched to Kubernetes and run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

I'm a bit out of the loop, but the vibe for years was "It isn't broke, so we're not going to rewrite it to run on something else."

Actually, it's a bit more than that. Some half-decade ago, Google Cloud got stung by a coordinated attack over the holidays where attackers used stolen credit cards to build a net of GCE instances and do an attack on Tor via endpoint control. Cited by SRE in the postmortem was the relative immaturity of the cloud monitoring, logging, and "break glass" tools that SREs were accustom to in Borg... Essentially, Cloud didn't have the maturity of framework that Borg did and they felt the extra layer of abstraction complicated understanding and stopping the abuse of the service.

This report had a chilling effect internally. Whereas management had previously been encouraging people to migrate to Cloud as quickly as possible, after this incident software engineering teams and the SREs that supported them were able to push back with "Can we trust it to be as maintainable as what we already have?" and put cloud on the defensive to prove that hypothesis.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#99

Post by bombcar »

justusethefob wrote: post #76
Consultant32452 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend lives in very cold Alaska. She has an app on her car that lets her remotely warm her car, which is a requirement before driving because it's so cold. The AWS outage meant her phone couldn't talk to her car. She was 20 mins late to work because of that. This is the future. AWS has an outage and your car won't work.

Did AWS hide her keys, too? This story makes no sense even in block heater Alaska.

Apparently based on another comment the app fails silently. Which is wonderful design.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#100

Post by Syonyk »

throwawayboise wrote: post #78
Consultant32452 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend lives in very cold Alaska. She has an app on her car that lets her remotely warm her car, which is a requirement before driving because it's so cold. The AWS outage meant her phone couldn't talk to her car. She was 20 mins late to work because of that. This is the future. AWS has an outage and your car won't work.

There was a time when we didn't have remote start cars. We managed to get to work on time. This is why I buy older cars with minimal electronics, BTW.

Yeah... go out and start it, for whatever value of "start" you need. I frequently walk out to our Volt and start it to let it warm up the cabin on shore power, though I can also do it through a window with the key fob. Or I'll even go start a motorcycle to let it run for five minutes before I head out in the winter.

I'm really not sure what I'm going to do with cars in the future. The Volt is the last wave of not-always-connected-software-OTA-big-data-analysis cars, and even it had Onstar, it just tries to talk to towers that no longer exist. But there's a difference between that sort of system and what newer cars have. I suppose you can always disable the cell modem and let them have occasional wifi access to update, but... ugh.

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