And we lean into it by saying "Well, if everyone else is down, I get a free pass".
(which, is not true in reality if you have ordinary customers).
AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
21–30 of 223 posts
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#22This new post is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45646777 "October 17, 2025, was my last day at Amazon Web Services... CloudFront is a CDN, a content delivery network, or, simply put, a large distributed cache for your cat photos. And a very successful one. Something like 30% of all internet traffic goes through CloudFront in one way or another. Pretty cool, huh? In practice, this means that with an…
Ngl, that sounds like my dream job.
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#23I find it weird many people are just realizing this. I've had this conversation with regards to talking about what should happen if a couple of bad earth quakes, not even "the big one", were to occur. But on the other hand, maybe I hang around too many tech people to not empathically understand the other point of view.
We've seen big outages already but nothing that lasts too long. If an outage became prolonged enough, people would find solutions. We don't know what this massive outage would even look like, so whatever preparation you do, it might still break.
Also there are some outages that affect real life like airlines, but tech news overstates some like Facebook. It turns out that FB and IG can be totally broken for a whole day, the world will keep spinning, and they won't even lose users.
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#24Been a while since I worked in cloud but at least when I got out of it, the primitives where all shoring up to be generally very similar. Did multi cloud redundancy end up being too expensive? Tech didn't line up enough? No good business case? The elastic cloud story that never was? https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/pets-vs-cattle-the-elas... What happened?
Many companies idea of a disaster plan is to make it after the disaster.
You have to build it in. That takes time money and training. Do you do failovers? Do they work? What is your backup situation? What is your list of work items to do during the failover? How long does it take? Do you even HAVE a failover plan? Can your services handle being in 'split brain'? Do you have specialty services that can only run in one place?
The unfortunate reality is this planning happens many times too late.
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#25The whole industry walked straight into the cloud service lock-in trap. How would we begin to wind back? I also think Docker is as much to blame as the bigger cloud vendors.
Why is docker to blame?
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#26If only there was a system of computers on the Internet that was distributed across the world where we could host things instead of all in one location. We could call it the "cloud".
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#27This is what I call "fool's availability": reducing single points of failure (one cloud provider) without adding any actual redundancy. If you removed AWS/GCP/Azure/etc and just had 100 small providers scattered all over, the result would be hundreds of outages throughout the year, as opposed to one big outage every other year [in one region]. AWS is already way more reliable than any other provider. The real problem…
Its probably worse—a given stack using multiple of these small providers will probably have more “single points of failure” (providers used in series rather than parallel.)
(If most companies liked using cloud providers in parallel, they’d already be doing it today between AWS, Azure, and GCP.)
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#28[dead]
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#29We already have diversification. You can rent a VPS from hundreds of possible companies. And people are very happy with them, it seems every month or two there’s a post here about how some company slashed their cloud bill by switching to a VPS. What we have here is a lock-in and marketing problem.
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#30Wow, thanks experts! I never could have figured this out without you :)))