Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS down again?

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 257 posts

Re: AWS down again?

#101

Post by rstupek »

y4mi wrote: post #89
tinalumfoil wrote: post #56

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…

That is true. But hope a drive by ddos doesn't pick you that day!

Re: AWS down again?

#102

Post by emptybottle »

41209 wrote: post #67
PedroBatista wrote: post #43

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.

Would you rather have to fix your own data center, or wait 4 hours. AWS works 99% of the time,plus it's someone else's problem

You don’t need to build your own data center to host outside AWS.

You can fully manage your hardware and software fleet while still paying a host to provide data center service, and networking too.

Re: AWS down again?

#103

Post by Flankk »

PedroBatista wrote: post #43

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.

Are you arguing that purchasing and maintaining your own servers is cheaper than using AWS? Let's hear the rationale, then.

Re: AWS down again?

#104

Post by technobabbler »

koprulusector wrote: post #84

I expect better of the community here. All it takes is a chance to take a cheap shot at one of the “big boys” and then all of a sudden the weasels come scampering out of the wood work. Seriously, those commenting “oh boy! Time to rethink this whole cloud thing!” You’re either so new to this stuff to have no experience to remember the days before cloud, you’re trolling because you’re high on nostalgia remembering the…

Y'know, debates about cloud vs in-house uptime aside, there's one thing I'm really grateful to the cloud vendors for: making downtime somebody else's problem.

Rather than a late-night panicked run to the smoking server, now we can just shrug and wait a few hours and it fixes itself. Most websites aren't that critical, and it's nice not having to lose sleep over devops issues.

Re: AWS down again?

#105

Post by csw-001 »

gtirloni wrote: post #88
SCHiM wrote: 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…

I don't see any momentum in that direction at all. If anything, it's quite the opposite. These outages have almost zero impact on anyone deciding to use a cloud provider.

Agreed. In fact, I've heard government decision makers actually swayed to go to the cloud due to outages with logic along the lines of, "If Amazon can't keep AWS running, what chance does our 30 person, chronically underfunded, team have?" There is also safety in having the outage be somebody else's fault, and having that outage effect a huge swath of the economy - "Sorry customer, but it's not just us." Reminds me a bit of the "nobody gets fired for picking IBM" mentality.

Re: AWS down again?

#106

Post by themodelplumber »

Waterluvian wrote: post #96
tjpnz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

You even conjugate the verbs differently for your customers.

Richard Feynman talked about this point really frustrating him and turning him off Japanese entirely. He just wanted to use words to get things done...granted for informational purposes it's nice to not have to conjugate the verb for download based on who downloaded it.

Re: AWS down again?

#107

Post by leghifla »

scrollaway wrote: post #71
cnity wrote: 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 you are 3 competitors on your market and you might lose x orders while your are down, but gain 2*x orders when the other 2 are down, you are ahead (with the same probability of going down as the others).

Real world is not so easy though...

Re: AWS down again?

#108

Post by trollied »

christophilus wrote: post #44

I wonder if it's the log4j thing... AWS is built on Java, and I'd be very surprised if log4j isn't used heavily there.

I think it is them frantically patching it. There are some Amazon staffers posting in the RCE reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/rcxehp/rce_0da...

> Our slack group for this issue is at 3,400 people, haha. It'd be funny if I wasn't one of them. > Where do y'all work that has 5000 employees on a single issue?? > One that has an arrow under it's name.

Re: AWS down again?

#109

Post by gonzo41 »

kaidon wrote: post #70
clavicat wrote: post #35

Anyone feel like Big Tech outages are happening more frequently recently? In recent months, we’ve seen Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter go down. Are we at the point where the people who maintain the infrastructure are now completely different than the ones who built it, and are struggling to keep it running because they don’t understand it as well?

I was thinking something similar. The FAANG interview has been optimized to punish candidates with actual experience in these problems in favor of those that can solve leetcode problems and regurgitate design architectures from youtube. This filters out a lot of engineers with grit that can actually work through tough real world (IT) problems.

Those people, the gritty ones who can't make it through the interview hoops are busy integrating companies into the cloud providers. Now they're taking it easy whilst the new kids are getting a first class lesson in what grit is.

Re: AWS down again?

#110

Post by emptybottle »

jeremyjh wrote: post #54
PedroBatista wrote: post #43

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.

Do you think people who manage their own data-centers never have outages?

Running your own data center is on the far other end of the spectrum. There are numerous options between solely using AWS and building a data center.
Post reply on HN