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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

#181

Post by Veserv »

dylan604 wrote: post #170
Veserv wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spe…

Ah yes, let us just gloss over 6 orders of magnitude when we are discussing cost-effectiveness and feasibility. What is the difference between 100$ and 100,000,000$ of spend really? Basically the same thing.

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

#182

Post by inopinatus »

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]

The actual experts I was paying attention to said that wearing a K/N-94/95 type mask lowers the statistical rate of transmission, that is, infection of others by your deadly virus.

The subsequent findings are that cloth-type masks are less effective (but not wholly ineffective) compared to clinical/surgical masks at limiting the aerosolized viral shedding from those already infected. So if a cloth mask was all you had, the advice became "please wear it".

Turns out, many people assume advice is only relevant when given for their own direct & immediate personal benefit, so they hear what they want to hear, and even the idea of giving a shit about externalities is sheer anathema. That gets boiled down further for idiot-grade TV and bad-faith social media troll engagement and we wind up with reductive and snarky soundbites, like the remark above, that help nobody at all.

Back on topic, the choice of so-called "experts" in the Guardian's coverage of the AWS matter seems to be a classic matchup of journalistic expediency with self-promoting interests to pad an article that otherwise has little to say beyond paraphrasing Amazon's operational updates.

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

#183

Post by qmmmur »

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]

Unfortunately this site is full of Americans…

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

#184

Post by morshu9001 »

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?

HN does it too, but it's a simple site

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

#185

Post by SoftTalker »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #81
candiddevmike wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing applies to AWS...

I’m not really making a point here as much as an observation, but if my stack that I manage atop VMs in a data center goes down, my customers are pissed at me. If AWS goes down along with half the Internet, my customers are completely sympathetic.

But if your services are up when everyone on AWS is down you look like a wizard.

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

#186

Post by throwaway894345 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #185
throwaway894345 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not really making a point here as much as an observation, but if my stack that I manage atop VMs in a data center goes down, my customers are pissed at me. If AWS goes down along with half the Internet, my customers are completely sympathetic.

But if your services are up when everyone on AWS is down you look like a wizard.

Unfortunately, people rarely notice when something is working, and the few who do will probably just assume you weren’t on AWS in the first place and move on with their day.

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

#187

Post by Veserv »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #167
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.

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

They have them at 2 TB [1] now for just 300$. And SanDisk announced 4 TB last year, but I do not see them for sale just yet.

[1] https://shop.sandisk.com/products/memory-cards/microsd-cards...

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

#188

Post by TiredOfLife »

impure wrote: post #29

We already have diversification. You can rent a VPS from hundreds of possible companies. And people are very happy with them, it seems every month or two there’s a post here about how some company slashed their cloud bill by switching to a VPS. What we have here is a lock-in and marketing problem.

And every comment in those threads is how AWS is webscale and wont go down, while the vps will have uptime of 1 day a month

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

#189

Post by maccard »

cyberax wrote: post #57
maccard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies can architect their backends to be able to fail back to another region in case of outage, and either don't test it or don't bother to have it in place because they can just blame Amazon, and don't otherwise have an SLA for their service. My CI was down for 2 hours this morning, despite not even being on AWS. We have a set of credentials on that host that we call assumeRole with and push to an S3 bucket, w…

You likely used a us-east-1 IAM endpoint instead of a regionalized one ( https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-regional-aw... ). We've been using it, and we're not experiencing any issues whatsoever in us-east-2. One thing that AWS should do is provide an easier way to detect these hidden dependencies. You can do that with CloudTrail if you know how to do it (filter operations by region and check that none…

We did indeed.

The problem was we couldn’t log into cloud trail, or the console at all, to identify that, because IAM identity center is single region. This was a decision recommended by AWS, and blessed by our (army of) SRE teams.

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

#190

Post by benterix »

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…

> Knows how much time national newspapers spend actually talking about the importance of multi-region/multi-cloud redundancy

For the record, multi-region redundancy is moot, and I can't stress it enough. It is not the first time that on the surface it looks like a single region but in fact services in multiple regions are affected.

And multi-cloud hot standby can be terribly expensive, unless your infra is very simple. And it's not easy to get it right either until you planned for it from day one.

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