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

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 223 posts

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

#151

Post by ghaff »

imgabe wrote: post #131
kopecs wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". A…

And one would hope that the stats being quoted about desktop share were from someone who has been at that research firm in the last 20 years or so. I'm not sure how active he is at all at this point. I have a feeling someone looking for some stats found something old that may or may not have actually had a date on it.

(If I'm wrong mea culpa but I'm pretty sure.)

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

#152

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

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…

Um.. you don't need to be an expert in security, comp.science or economics to know that putting all eggs in one basket may not be a great idea as introduces one giant systemic target. If anything, regular people here are uniquely qualified to say something along the lines of:

Oi, this is ridiculous. Maybe more things should be ran locally..

FWIW, it was instructive to me as to which companies were not able to function today.

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

#155

Post by Spivak »

gspencley wrote: post #107
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "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. You're not entirely wrong, but you're being hyperbolic too. I'm actually curious how old you are / how long you've worked in tech, because I started out pre-cloud and things weren't nearly as bad or as limited as you suggest. First, on-prem servers are not the only alternative…

But is the distinction meaningful? The alternative to a shed in Virginia is a different shed in Montana? I mean sure there are a lot of different sheds out there but they're all still sheds. They're all shared responsibility models where the line is drawn in different areas, some outages will be because of your fuckup, some will be theirs.

Not saying as an industry we shouldn't diversify a little but it doesn't fundamentally change the relationship each company has to their hosting provider.

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

#156

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

gspencley wrote: post #107
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "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. You're not entirely wrong, but you're being hyperbolic too. I'm actually curious how old you are / how long you've worked in tech, because I started out pre-cloud and things weren't nearly as bad or as limited as you suggest. First, on-prem servers are not the only alternative…

I've never managed IT professionally myself (pre-cloud or otherwise), so a lot of my information comes from family members who do, but my impression is that bare metal rental and colo centers weren't realistic options for any but the most technically sophisticated organizations. I know schools, stores, even research centers who went straight from on-prem to managed cloud with no real consideration for anything in between.

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

#157

Post by mhb »

Waterluvian wrote: post #150
mhb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Right?! Same with seatbelts. I don’t wear mine because there’s obviously still automobile deaths. Experts said seatbelts would protect us from deadly accidents. What else are they wrong about?!

That counterargument might make sense if seat belts were not generally protective in accidents or if experts were telling you to wear crepe paper seat belts instead of nylon ones because the nylon ones were needed elsewhere.

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

#158

Post by dylan604 »

neom wrote: post #100
dylan604 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is precisely why it's not done

I seems to recall it was fairly common to have a read only versions of sites when there was a major outage - we did that a lot with deviantart in the early 2000s, did that fall out of favour or too complex with modern stacks or?

If only everything was a simple website. You're totally ignoring other types of workflows that would be impossible to use a read-only fall back. Not just impossible, but pointless.

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

#159

Post by dylan604 »

Veserv wrote: post #144
dylan604 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Entire terabytes?! My god, I can only barely fit that onto a single SD card the size of my pinky nail. It is quite bizarre that such paltry amounts of data and problems with such tiny scale seem to pose challenging problems when done in the cloud.

Such a sophomoric response. It does not matter how large your storage use is exactly. The point is that nobody is going to pay to replicate that data in multiple clouds or within multiple regions of the same cloud provider.

Btw, I'd love to have a link to where I could buy an SD card the size of a pinky nail that holds terabytes of data.

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

#160

Post by binary132 »

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.

Does your mother frequent hackernews?
Post reply on HN