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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

#161

Post by ufmace »

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.

No, it's 100% appropriate. Anyone can have opinions on anything, but frankly, most of them have little relevance to reality. Their use of the word "expert" is supposed to mean the person has knowledge or expertise that renders their opinion on a subject substantially more valid and relevant than any regular person. That clearly is not the case here. If I wanted to know what a random person on the street thought about a subject, I could go ask one myself. The purpose of news organizations was supposed to be to better-inform people by getting opinions from actual relevant experts in a subject.

These people don't seem to have much ability to discuss relevant subjects like what the actual reliability of lower-tier hosting providers is, the value-add to business and iteration speed of having a variety of extra services (SQS, DynamoDB, VPC, RDS, managed K8s, etc) available, etc.

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

#162

Post by Veserv »

dylan604 wrote: post #159
Veserv wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It absolutely matters how large your storage use is. Terabytes of storage is easily manageable on even basic consumer hardware. Terabytes of storage costs just hundreds of dollars if you are not paying the cloud tax.

If you got resiliency and uptime for a extra hundred dollars a year, that would be a no-brainer for any commercial operation. The byzantine kafkaesque horror of the cloud results in trivial problems and costs ballooning into nearly insurmountable and cost-ineffective obstacles.

These are not hard or costly problems or difficult scales. They have been made hard and costly and difficult.

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

#163

Post by hdgvhicv »

bamboozled wrote: post #108
BrenBarn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all of that is mostly irrelevant. You don't need to pay a huge cost to avoid the small benefit, you don't need every service to be resilient to this, or any of that. You just need multiple different providers so that not everyone gets screwed at once.

Yes but we live in a highly anti-competitive monopolized world now. With more to come under the new admin.

There’s two or three gartner approved ways of doing things for fortune 500 ctos, and f500 wannabes.

It’s not a monopoly but it’s close.

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

#164

Post by hdgvhicv »

franz_vlkshp wrote: post #127
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.

on the other hand, that's a small price to pay to having total control and physical access to your own infrastructure. if the sysadmin did his job properly, an incident like that shouldn't require anything else but to plug the server back in and hit the power switch. but then if he did his job properly, no one but IT should be tripping on power cables to begin with.

My home infrastructure is immune from the “unplug” problem by being hosted on two different 10 year old £30 raspberry pis in different rooms.

But apparently that’s too hard for the average.

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

#165

Post by starman55 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #15
neom wrote: post #5

Been 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?

All the cloud providers have cheap compute but ludicrously expensive network egress. Trying to multicloud will stick you with a massive traffic bill, which is probably not a coincidence.

It really depends on how you will built it. You can architect it for multi cloud from top down where the client/browser talk to one region, With DNS with health check, and replication happens at the DB layer. Your services don't talk cross region at service level, so avoiding a lot of cross region/cloud communication. Most use cases can be addressed this way.

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

#166

Post by starman55 »

arbll wrote: post #49
Aeolun wrote: post #32

It’s only a single region. If anything it shows how many people just double down on the default without any redundancy.

A single region that is a SPOF for global AWS services*

Is us-east-2 services impacted today? which ones?

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

#167

Post by BenjiWiebe »

dylan604 wrote: post #159
Veserv wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes they exaggerated, it takes several pinky nail sized cards to store several TB. Only 1TB per microSD.

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

#168

Post by dexterdog »

_pvzn wrote: post #87

The "experts" should lay out a good alternative in that case. Smaller providers also run into outages.

And they all get to claim that they have better uptime to potential customers because nobody other than their current customers remembers their outages.

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

#169

Post by Isamu »

mhb wrote: post #126
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…

[flagged]

What “experts” can you directly cite? Or is the reality that you recall opinion makers saying “experts” are making clearly unsupported claims?

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

#170

Post by dylan604 »

Veserv wrote: post #162
dylan604 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It absolutely matters how large your storage use is. Terabytes of storage is easily manageable on even basic consumer hardware. Terabytes of storage costs just hundreds of dollars if you are not paying the cloud tax. If you got resiliency and uptime for a extra hundred dollars a year, that would be a no-brainer for any commercial operation. The byzantine kafkaesque horror of the cloud results in trivial problems and…

Your pedantry is just boring. Yes, I used the word terabyte instead I guess something more palatable to you for being large. Fine s/exabyte/terabyte/.

I work with buckets where single files are >1 terabyte. There's more than one of these files, hence terabytes. I'm not going to do a human-readable summary listing of an entire bucket to get the full size. The point of the actual size is irrelevant. When people are spending 5-6 digits on cloud storage per month, they are not going to do it in multiple places. period. Maybe the new storage unit should just be monthly cloud spend, but then your pedantry will say nonsense like which cloud sever, which storage solution type, blah blah blah.

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