AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
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Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#2This 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 any change, you have a chance of crashing 30% of the internet."
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#3The 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.
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#4Can someone educate me on the solution to this?
I assume most organizations, both small and large, just host on whatever provider they know or that costs them the least. If you have budget maybe you deploy to multiple providers for redundancy? But that increases cost and complexity.
Who’s going to bother with colo given the cost / complexity? Who’s going to run a server from their office given ISP restrictions and downtime fears?
What is the realistic antidote here?
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#5Been 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?
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#6We don’t use AWS at work but we still experienced disruption because lots of our customers do, and use it to transfer data to us. That means we then saw an uplift in data transfers as their systems came back online.
There is no panacea. The reason many people use these is because it’s easy and hard to find people that know other clouds and their quirks.
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#7Can someone educate me on the solution to this? I assume most organizations, both small and large, just host on whatever provider they know or that costs them the least. If you have budget maybe you deploy to multiple providers for redundancy? But that increases cost and complexity. Who’s going to bother with colo given the cost / complexity? Who’s going to run a server from their office given ISP restrictions and do…
What cost?
Complexity - yes, to some extent.
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#8The expert opinions are more about geopolitics, like maybe don't have all your country's systems realtime depend on a foreign company.
If you are just one company whose goal is to maximize uptime without bringing in the complexity of multi-cloud, relying on AWS is reasonable. You probably won't get better uptime using something else, you'll only be down at different times than most others, which in most cases is actually worse.
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#9Been 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?
The (cognitive) overhead of managing and deploying to multiple clouds usually isn't worth it for most teams. Hiring experts and maintaining knowledge about the ins and outs of two (or more) clouds is less feasible for small, fast moving teams.
Simplicity is linked to uptime and having a single cloud solution is a simpeler solution.
For large companies, its mostly cost savings. Easier to negotiate a good discount at N million versus N/2 million.
Besides that no-one ever got fired for picking AWS ;)
Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
#10Been 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?
Networking leaving the cloud provider (or even just to another zone on the same cloud) is $0.02 GB. That adds up real fast.