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AWS down again?

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Re: AWS down again?

#171

Post by SamuelAdams »

ceejayoz wrote: post #120
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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_bias Twitter used to go down so frequently the "fail whale" was a whole cultural thing. Big AWS outages are rare, but hardly new. https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/amazo...

Yep I remember the same issues with Reddit. They’re fairly stable now, but up until about 2015 they had outages maybe once a month or so.

Re: AWS down again?

#172

Post by tres »

julianlam wrote: post #132
gerbilly wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at least you said please, however: I have built and run my own infrastructure from the ground up, and I've been made to transition to the cloud. The experience hasn't been great. It may simply be sour 'grapes' because, after all the expertise a whole generation has built up learning UNIX, and all the internet protocols (DNS, ARP, Email, reading RFCs, networking, routing) we get told that all that old stuff is ju…

That's an interesting position to take, because I imagine if a team of developers decided to invent the internet in a vacuum today, it'd be a hell of a lot more secure than the "let's hope nobody uses this protocol maliciously" attitude prevalent in the early days of the internet. Not that that is a bad thing, but just something to think about.

It wasn't an attitude of naive hope that there wouldn't be nefarious actors leveraging the protocol; there was a different kind of people using the Internet.

There's no need to design security in the system when you literally know everyone who is using it. And everyone who was using it had the same goals in mind.

So, I don't disagree with the sentiment -- people today would probably do it a little bit differently; however, I do disagree with the expression -- people designing these protocols weren't naive. They were trustful because they had to be.

In the early days of building something new, nothing works without trust; not the Internet... not Bitcoin... not a nascent venture... nothing.

Re: AWS down again?

#173

Post by Waterluvian »

themodelplumber wrote: post #106
Waterluvian wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I kind of get that sentiment. Fundamentally I think it's beautiful and I'm delighted by such variety in human languages. But I spent 10 years learning French and it drove me nuts how many different ways you conjugate verbs.

Re: AWS down again?

#174

Post by robomartin »

Ah, the debate between managing your own infrastructure or renting it from someone else. Always a fun debate, often centering around uptime far more so than cost.

I'll go ahead and make what will seem like a weird comparison. I sometimes think about this as I do about Microsoft Office.

What?

Over the years the MS Office suite has reached an asymptotic limit with regards to functionality users would actually be willing to pay for. I'll say that somewhere between 2013 and 2016 the suite had everything most users would need to do the usual stuff one does with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. In other words, it became good enough and maybe even better than good enough.

This is the parallel I see with Linux servers and the Internet infrastructure needed to run a reliable site or service. Not just the OS, but the system as a whole has, over time, approached an asymptotic limit on functionality, reliability, uptime, ease of use, capacity, bandwidth, management, etc. Not sure we are at that limit yet. It sure feels like we must be close. As many have echoed, today one can deploy a range of servers in multiple configurations and achieve extremely good uptimes with as much functionality as needed without necessarily having to go to cloud service providers.

Is it the same? Not sure. I haven't operated at the highest scales in building web services, so I don't know. My gut feeling is that short of things like seriously large DDoS attacks, a self-owned infrastructure could do just as well as something hosted by a cloud provider. With knowledgeable engineers running the show there should not be any issues in setting-up, managing, maintaining and supporting such a structure.

Note that I am not hating on cloud services. No. What I am saying is that because technology tends to get better over time, it is only natural that the alternative approach has gotten better and better to the point that it would be perfectly sensible for a business to consider rolling their own rather than automatically resorting to cloud providers.

Re: AWS down again?

#175

Post by strken »

gerbilly wrote: post #117
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…

Well at least you said please, however: I have built and run my own infrastructure from the ground up, and I've been made to transition to the cloud. The experience hasn't been great. It may simply be sour 'grapes' because, after all the expertise a whole generation has built up learning UNIX, and all the internet protocols (DNS, ARP, Email, reading RFCs, networking, routing) we get told that all that old stuff is ju…

This conflates two very different things: cut-throat KPI-driven development practices at companies like Amazon, and the entire current generation of software developers. You're taking problems caused by the environment and attributing them to a moral deficiency in the people, which is neither fair nor helpful.

Re: AWS down again?

#176

Post by [deleted] »

oxfordmale wrote: post #116
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wha? We host everything on our hardware (which is nothing special) and haven't had any downtime in this year (yet). And we're just another run of the mill dev shop, very far from "superstars" who work on these (supposedly extremely stable) platforms.

Two questions I have regarding your in-house hardware: 1. How easy can I access your physical servers ? 2. What happens if there is a catastrophic failure, for example local power outage or a major flooding 3. How secure is your server? Are you regularly patching your operation systems 4. If I want to run a project that requires double the capacity of your current hardware for a specific project, how long is it going…

[deleted]

Re: AWS down again?

#177

Post by emptybottle »

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…

It's not "weasels" scampering out of the wood work.

This is a community of highly technical users expressing legitimate frustration and concern that the biggest player in cloud hosting is

  a) having a service impacting event, and
  b) the status page says everything is up
That's why people talk about the beneits of alternate hosting arrangements. If the status page said what was happening, there would be no need to ask "is AWS down?" the status would be clear.

Re: AWS down again?

#178

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

I know it is not recommended, but for small (-to-medium) websites you can use DNS failover. I run non-critical services but still I like to have above-average uptime, so I have them configured in two separate physical locations by two different providers. From the point of view of visitors, they had zero downtime in the last 7 years, in spite of several hardware failures (disks, motherboard, power supply - all resolved within an hour). I know it because I tested it multiple times from various location checking what happens if one of them dies.

Of course if you have millions of visitors a day, you'll do better with a more robust setup, but mine costs me €80/month.

Re: AWS down again?

#179

Post by jrochkind1 »

gerbilly wrote: post #117
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…

Well at least you said please, however: I have built and run my own infrastructure from the ground up, and I've been made to transition to the cloud. The experience hasn't been great. It may simply be sour 'grapes' because, after all the expertise a whole generation has built up learning UNIX, and all the internet protocols (DNS, ARP, Email, reading RFCs, networking, routing) we get told that all that old stuff is ju…

Hm, my understanding/memory of the history of internet technologies has a lot more "let's try this and see if it works" than your comment about the role of specing it out and up-front design in the internet would suggest. I think there was actually quite a bit of people in labs just doing things, coordinating informally with people they knew personally in other labs.

Yes, there was also, at various points and times, specs and big-picture thinking, sure.

Re: AWS down again?

#180

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

You're correct that the knee jerk reactions are a bit over the top, but what is so interesting is how little the benefits of cloud are discussed here on HN. People who haven't used cloud native services think it's just EC2 and someone else's computer. But the idea of compute and data all being controlled through a single set of APIs, controlled by the same security syntaxes, is pretty incredible. Of course I'm a fan of the idea of on-prem alternatives, but the unified architecture is nice.
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