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Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

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Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#21

Post by mediascreen »

peteretep wrote: post #19
dalbasal wrote: post #2

This is (I was surprised) a pretty good article. Financial services are regulated and based on recent experience, they're concerned with systemic risk. Most industries do not have anyone responsible for worrying about this kind of thing. It seems reasonable to start worrying about the fragility potentially introduced by these massive internet infrastructure companies.

If you wanted to blow something up to make the west suffer, an AWS datacenter would probably be a pretty good target. I wonder at what point that becomes a legitimate national security concern, and the government steps in to provide protection.

Wouldn't you have to blow up at least all the datacenters in a region to make an impact?

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#22

Post by [deleted] »

pferde wrote: post #7
dalbasal wrote: post #2

This is (I was surprised) a pretty good article. Financial services are regulated and based on recent experience, they're concerned with systemic risk. Most industries do not have anyone responsible for worrying about this kind of thing. It seems reasonable to start worrying about the fragility potentially introduced by these massive internet infrastructure companies.

> Financial services are regulated and based on recent experience, they're concerned with systemic risk. Most industries do not have anyone responsible for worrying about this kind of thing. I'd say that most industries do not have anyone responsible for worrying about it high enough in the management chain .

[deleted]

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#23

Post by dijit »

smegel wrote: post #10

Is it possible for AWS to have a multi-region outage - as in is there anything connecting them that could bring them all (or several) down at once? (Apart from the result of a botched patching or update to the core software stack that was done worldwide at the same time and hopefully never happens).

Unless you work at amazon, you can't know that.

It looks very separated on the outside, but I've worked in so many companies that have appeared incredibly competent externally but have "snowflake" servers which keep things ticking over- Given Bezos treatment of workers I have absolutely no confidence that everything is as cleanly engineered as they claim.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#25

Post by blazespin »

smegel wrote: post #10

Is it possible for AWS to have a multi-region outage - as in is there anything connecting them that could bring them all (or several) down at once? (Apart from the result of a botched patching or update to the core software stack that was done worldwide at the same time and hopefully never happens).

Yes, there are ways to bring down all of their arch at once, but you'd have to get through a lot of barriers to do it.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#26

Post by arethuza »

blazespin wrote: post #24

The solution is pretty simple, AWS/Azure need to provide on premise versions of their cloud.. You'd probably get stuck with a particular version, but better than nothing.

That's pretty much what Azure Stack is:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/

There might well be a commercial niche for providing Azure Stack hosting in non-Microsoft data centers.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#27

Post by mrep »

smegel wrote: post #10

Is it possible for AWS to have a multi-region outage - as in is there anything connecting them that could bring them all (or several) down at once? (Apart from the result of a botched patching or update to the core software stack that was done worldwide at the same time and hopefully never happens).

That would go against a core principle at aws which is to have every region completely isolated.

Also, deployments are designed to be exponential and no region should ever have a cross region dependency.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#28

Post by bonesss »

arethuza wrote: post #26
blazespin wrote: post #24

The solution is pretty simple, AWS/Azure need to provide on premise versions of their cloud.. You'd probably get stuck with a particular version, but better than nothing.

That's pretty much what Azure Stack is: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/ There might well be a commercial niche for providing Azure Stack hosting in non-Microsoft data centers.

I think there is a massive market for 100% cloud-compatible local deployments. In my personal experience every .Net shop I've seen would love to be incorporating more Azure goodness locally, but can't as they're cloud specific techs which bump into the realities of deployment and maintenance.

Personally, I think MS crapped the bed a little by taking Azure Stack off of commodity hardware and onto a combined hardware/software solution. Being able to deploy Azure-compatible solutions piece-meal locally would be a massive boon to governments, healthcare operations, and anyone working on a more thorough migration to the cloud.

Most of the EU, for example, has privacy regulation that makes cloud hosting impossible in some situations. Having a 'local Azure' would make it highly reasonable have all apps architected around Azures components and technology. Without the local deployment though you're kinda stuck with each foot in a different canoe... Hybrid infrastructures are highly favorable to DevOps and multi-party development scenarios.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#29

Post by cm2187 »

What would be great is the equivalent of the ACME protocol for cloud service providers. That will take a while and shouldn't happen until the offering matures and stabilises. But in an ideal world you wouldn't tie your application to a specific cloud provider. You should be able to lift and shift to another provider.

Which I think is a merit of using VMs as opposed to individual services.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#30

Post by cm2187 »

mediascreen wrote: post #21
peteretep wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanted to blow something up to make the west suffer, an AWS datacenter would probably be a pretty good target. I wonder at what point that becomes a legitimate national security concern, and the government steps in to provide protection.

Wouldn't you have to blow up at least all the datacenters in a region to make an impact?

All you need to blow is a few cables.
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