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AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

theguardian.com

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Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#131

Post by imgabe »

kopecs wrote: post #125
imgabe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "experts" in this case are > Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation Article 19 Dr. Cath-Speth has a PhD in cultural anthropology > Cori Crider, the executive director of the Future of Technology Institute A lawyer > Madeline Carr, professor of global politics and cybersecurity at University College London A professor. Her bio doesn't say what her degree is in, but she mostly seems…

Do you not think it a bit too hyperbolic to throw scare quotes around experts and imply the only people who can have opinions on systemic risk are software engineers? I don't think it is unreasonable for people who haven't run or worked for a hosting service to have opinions on the policy aspect or economic impact of hyperscalers.

Anyone can have an opinion, I never said or implied otherwise. Having an opinion does not make one an expert, hence the scare quotes.

The headline is misleading because when there is news about experts saying something about technology, one would naturally think that they are at least somewhat technical experts. Instead the "expert" is the director of the "Big Tech is Bad Institute" who says that "Big Tech is Bad". And their qualification of being an expert is solely that they are director of the "Big Tech is Bad Institute".

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#132

Post by 999900000999 »

xp84 wrote: post #124

In 2011 there was some kind of big outage at some major AWS US-east pop. I started a job at a company (very boring B2C startup) which had taken the lesson from that, that "cloud anything is dangerous." They went and bought a bunch of literal servers and installed them in a datacenter, 90 miles away from our offices, and this is where all our applications ran for the remainder of that company's existence (about 6 more…

I largely agree with you. When AWS goes down, for most situations I can just go outside and smoke a cigarette and not worry about it.

It's someone else's problem.

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#133

Post by jimbokun »

kopecs wrote: post #125
imgabe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "experts" in this case are > Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation Article 19 Dr. Cath-Speth has a PhD in cultural anthropology > Cori Crider, the executive director of the Future of Technology Institute A lawyer > Madeline Carr, professor of global politics and cybersecurity at University College London A professor. Her bio doesn't say what her degree is in, but she mostly seems…

Do you not think it a bit too hyperbolic to throw scare quotes around experts and imply the only people who can have opinions on systemic risk are software engineers? I don't think it is unreasonable for people who haven't run or worked for a hosting service to have opinions on the policy aspect or economic impact of hyperscalers.

I don’t think it’s useful at all.

What are they going to say that’s useful for making concrete technical decisions?

They can advise on how to write contracts for dealing with these situations after the fact, I suppose.

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#134

Post by hippo77 »

sunrunner wrote: post #80

The 'experts' also made similar criticisms with the Fastly outage in 2021 and did anything obvious change as a result? In a week's time no national newspapers will be talking about this. Meanwhile, everyone that spends actual time in these areas: - Knows that running an operation at AWS scale is difficult and any armchair critism from 'experts' is exactly that. Actions speak louder than words. - Understands that the…

These are Guardian 'experts' so can be safely ignored.

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#135

Post by sunrunner »

kopecs wrote: post #125
imgabe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "experts" in this case are > Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation Article 19 Dr. Cath-Speth has a PhD in cultural anthropology > Cori Crider, the executive director of the Future of Technology Institute A lawyer > Madeline Carr, professor of global politics and cybersecurity at University College London A professor. Her bio doesn't say what her degree is in, but she mostly seems…

Do you not think it a bit too hyperbolic to throw scare quotes around experts and imply the only people who can have opinions on systemic risk are software engineers? I don't think it is unreasonable for people who haven't run or worked for a hosting service to have opinions on the policy aspect or economic impact of hyperscalers.

> I don't think it is unreasonable for people who haven't run or worked for a hosting service to have opinions on the policy aspect or economic impact of hyperscalers.

Yeah, that's completely fair. My angle was more that firstly this doesn't come across as an opinion that needs the expert in question, and secondly this is yet another case of 'Talk is cheap, show me the code', particularly when quotes in the article include "We urgently need diversification in cloud computing."

I feel like the 'We' is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting and there's no mention of the costs of taking on such a task.

Additionally, and awkwardly, it's possible to be both a monopoly in the space but also technically a more stable solution, making the cost for competitors or people willing to use competitors doubly high.

Edit: Realised afer the fact I'm GP to your post, assumed it was mine, keeping the words anyway.

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#136

Post by SkyPuncher »

KronisLV wrote: post #115

So, how many people will actually switch their setups to multi-cloud as a consequence of this? How many will move over to self-hosting? Or will they just do a post-incident report, wave hands around and do nothing? Because I think it's very much the same way as it is with Cloudflare - while the large vendors aren't always openly hostile, we can just smile and hope that they don't get too keen on reminding us that the…

For most companies, I suspect this will actually re-affirm _not_ switching to multi-cloud.

Lots of businesses who will be completely forgotten as having an outage today because all of their customers were dealing with their own outages and outages in dozens of other providers.

Obviously, that doesn't fly for everyone.

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#137

Post by jimbokun »

KronisLV wrote: post #115

So, how many people will actually switch their setups to multi-cloud as a consequence of this? How many will move over to self-hosting? Or will they just do a post-incident report, wave hands around and do nothing? Because I think it's very much the same way as it is with Cloudflare - while the large vendors aren't always openly hostile, we can just smile and hope that they don't get too keen on reminding us that the…

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM…

…no, Microsoft…

…no, AWS.

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#138

Post by jacobsenscott »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #84
labrador wrote: post #68

Kieran Healy @kjhealy@mastodon.social Always worth taking sentences that use “the Cloud” or “the Internet” and try replacing those phrases with “A shed in Virginia” to see how they hold up. “Our service is fully based in a shed in Virginia”; “All my files are in a shed in Virginia”; “A shed in Virginia was designed to survive a nuclear war”, etc. https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115407725852594322

Sounds like a pretty good shed! Like a lot of pithy commentary on the cloud, this ignores the fact the practical alternative to a shed in Virginia for most businesses is a shelf in the supply closet. "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience.

Largely mitigated by twist lock sockets.

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#139

Post by hippo77 »

patrickmcnamara wrote: post #47
binary132 wrote: post #30

Wow, thanks experts! I never could have figured this out without you :)))

This article isn't written for you. It's written for my mom, etc.

Surprised to see an article like that even getting shared here. The Guardian seems to be wrong on almost every tech issue.

Re: AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say

#140

Post by jimbokun »

dylan604 wrote: post #45
morshu9001 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if you can't even do cross region, cross cloud won't happen

Cross region isn't simple when you have terabytes of storage in buckets in a region. Building services in other regions without that data doesn't really do any good. Maintaining instances in various regions is easy, but it's that data that complicates everything. If you need to use the instances in a different region because your main region is down, you still can't do anything because those cross region instances ca…

Data has a lot of gravity.
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