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AWS down again?

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Re: AWS down again?

#92
post #75
post #21

I think this adds some momentum to the pendulum swinging back the other way. Maybe cloud teams can patch your services better than your in-house team can (See 2 critical issues in Azure the last 3 months, _caused_ by MS itself). Maybe the cloud has a higher uptime than your on-premise infrastructure (see the AWS, Azure outages). Make sure to compare the actual outage time v.s. the stats doctored by various political…

Also, not all uptime is equal or worth of the price. What would be more valuable to you: 1. 99.5% uptime where unscheduled downtime is max 10 minutes vs. 2. 99.5% uptime where unscheduled downtime comes in 2-5 hour chunks.

Another key point of this: Selecting your downtime. If you own your own stuff, your major changes and maintenance are done at times favorable for your business. AWS or Azure configuration fat-fingers happen when best for their business, not yours.

Re: AWS down again?

#93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you can manage more uptime on your own than through the cloud (which I doubt), being on the cloud means downtime is correlated with downtime of other services. That's usually a good thing. Your customers will be more understanding if your outage is part if a wider outage that makes national news. Any services you integrate with are likely down too. If two services with 99% uncorrelated uptime together drops t…

> Even if you can manage more uptime on your own than through the cloud (which I doubt) Getting higher uptime is super easy for smallish inhouse deployments. You just don't install any updates and let the server run, trusting your VPN to shield you from possible security issues. The maintenance burden is the reason why people often prefer the cloud services, not the uptime. Because maintaining the instance with updat…

This is particularly true with modern fully solid state hardware. Uptimes of decades are likely possible if you don't mess with anything.

We run some bare metal servers. They just never go down. Solid continuous pings for years as monitored from elsewhere on the Internet. That's because they're just boxes on a rack somewhere running an OS and some steady-state services (ZeroTier roots). Simplicity is more robust than complexity.

SaaS is definitely about the pain of managing and upgrading software, but it's also about OPEX vs CAPEX. Many companies will pay more for things to put them in the OPEX column for various entirely synthetic accounting, investor relations, and tax reasons.

I do wonder if the pendulum there will swing back though since if you price out cloud vs. physical hardware the market has become extremely distorted. Many companies spend enough on AWS to buy an entire rack of hardware at a different data center every month and pay 2-3 employees to manage it. That hardware would be up to 100X as fast and powerful as what they rent at AWS and bandwidth would be almost free. That's a really distorted market. The amortized costs should not be this different.

Re: AWS down again?

#94

Only the most informed and rational companies will see how and why most of this "in the cloud" thing is a bad idea. Most will accept it as a fact of life and continue to pay for it both directly and indirectly, as long as there's cheap money going around the cloud business can't do wrong. But it's hilarious to see people indulging in byzantine "World scale" resilient systems that depend on a single vendor.

>But it's hilarious to see people indulging in byzantine "World scale" resilient systems that depend on a single vendor.

As far as I can tell, there really hasn't been an AWS outage where you couldn't have avoided issues with multi-region and some careful selection of which products you're using. Which isn't much different from what you would have to do with your own infrastructure.

Re: AWS down again?

#95
post #21

I think this adds some momentum to the pendulum swinging back the other way. Maybe cloud teams can patch your services better than your in-house team can (See 2 critical issues in Azure the last 3 months, _caused_ by MS itself). Maybe the cloud has a higher uptime than your on-premise infrastructure (see the AWS, Azure outages). Make sure to compare the actual outage time v.s. the stats doctored by various political…

Even if you can manage more uptime on your own than through the cloud (which I doubt), being on the cloud means downtime is correlated with downtime of other services. That's usually a good thing. Your customers will be more understanding if your outage is part if a wider outage that makes national news. Any services you integrate with are likely down too. If two services with 99% uncorrelated uptime together drops t…

Wha? We host everything on our hardware (which is nothing special) and haven't had any downtime in this year (yet). And we're just another run of the mill dev shop, very far from "superstars" who work on these (supposedly extremely stable) platforms.

Re: AWS down again?

#96
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. It seems like an almost exact translation to all the other languages for this error page.

Japanese has multiple politeness levels, in this particular case the message is using keigo which is the most polite. At a guess I'd say that the machine translation is identical all the way down.

Thanks. I know nothing of Japanese so this was confusing to me.

I'm thinking about it, and I guess there's "politeness levels" in English, but probably not as much so, and usually in a form of passive aggresisveness.

That's fascinating. So the "style" of language they use has a huge impact on the message, possibly more so than the actual words? Very McLuhanesque :)

Re: AWS down again?

#97
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about having uptime while your competitors have downtime?

Which, given that downtime is inevitable, leads to you having downtime while all your competitors have uptime. Have fun with that…

If your non-cloud uptime is even 50% more then the uptime cloud offers, then you’re throughout the year, up longer then others.

Re: AWS down again?

#98
post #59
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, downtime is inevitable and I think I'd rather have downtime when all my competitors do too.

How about having uptime while your competitors have downtime?

If your system integrates with any external systems or APIs, it's likely they have downtime when one of the cloud giants are down, so sometimes being up is not so relevant. If your system is up but everything you depend on is down, how useful is that?

For (almost) entirely self-contained systems it can still be useful, of course. But everything wants to be interconnected to everything these days...

Re: AWS down again?

#99
post #21

I think this adds some momentum to the pendulum swinging back the other way. Maybe cloud teams can patch your services better than your in-house team can (See 2 critical issues in Azure the last 3 months, _caused_ by MS itself). Maybe the cloud has a higher uptime than your on-premise infrastructure (see the AWS, Azure outages). Make sure to compare the actual outage time v.s. the stats doctored by various political…

Even if you can manage more uptime on your own than through the cloud (which I doubt), being on the cloud means downtime is correlated with downtime of other services. That's usually a good thing. Your customers will be more understanding if your outage is part if a wider outage that makes national news. Any services you integrate with are likely down too. If two services with 99% uncorrelated uptime together drops t…

> That's usually a good thing.

For any individual company able to offload the blame, that's great. It's not so great if half the countries' doorbells, robot cleaners, various home streaming service setups, the baby camera, the fridge, the smart TV and your phone stop working... All at the same time.

In my opinion, the 'downtime' really should be measured in $NUM_SERVICES_STOPPED X $TIME, instead of just $TIME. And in this case I think any long time Amazon outage is orders of magnitudes worse than your regular old slow IT company outage.

Re: AWS down again?

#100
post #21

I think this adds some momentum to the pendulum swinging back the other way. Maybe cloud teams can patch your services better than your in-house team can (See 2 critical issues in Azure the last 3 months, _caused_ by MS itself). Maybe the cloud has a higher uptime than your on-premise infrastructure (see the AWS, Azure outages). Make sure to compare the actual outage time v.s. the stats doctored by various political…

Even if you can manage more uptime on your own than through the cloud (which I doubt), being on the cloud means downtime is correlated with downtime of other services. That's usually a good thing. Your customers will be more understanding if your outage is part if a wider outage that makes national news. Any services you integrate with are likely down too. If two services with 99% uncorrelated uptime together drops t…

An our on premise linux server recently reached an uptime of 1000 days. Yes, days.
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