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AWS down again?

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS down again?

#211

Post by gerbilly »

doublerabbit wrote: post #205
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…

Serverless is just buzzword for a container on a virtual machine on a server. The Cloud is just a buzzword for a company with a data centre selling virtual servers from other big servers. > You’re either so new to this stuff to have no experience to remember the days before cloud I do, and it was much more peaceful. Everything you can do on "in the cloud" you can do in colocation. Which in the long-run is cheaper, mo…

Preach it brother!

Also, you should consider renting out space on your cube.

You could even design APIs around the internet protocols so they can create their own DNS records, mailboxes. Wait...

Re: AWS down again?

#212

Post by stunt »

PedroBatista wrote: post #43

Only the most informed and rational companies will see how and why most of this "in the cloud" thing is a bad idea. Most will accept it as a fact of life and continue to pay for it both directly and indirectly, as long as there's cheap money going around the cloud business can't do wrong. But it's hilarious to see people indulging in byzantine "World scale" resilient systems that depend on a single vendor.

I don't use Cloud for their uptime, it's all about their managed services for me.

Re: AWS down again?

#213

Post by grey-area »

gregmac wrote: post #194
grey-area wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many approaches which don't depend on AWS, and not all of them mean hosting your own physical servers, and they certainly don't mean you don't have an off-site backup policy. There are well-understood answers to all your questions, they are not too difficult, they just cost money - some businesses choose not to spend that money, some weigh cost-benefit and go for AWS, some decide to go for in-house servers,…

> they just cost money - some businesses choose not to spend that money, some weight cost-benefit and go for AWS, some weigh cost benefit and decide to go for in house, some go for hosted Virtual Servers, some go for Serverless. I'd also say some choose not to spend the money, but fail to consider the cost of that choice. For example: Doing old-school manual deployments that require herculean efforts to update at off…

Your choice of straw man here is interesting.

Of the options I mentioned, you seem to have picked only self-purchased hardware with no redundancy and no backups (your addition) to compare with, and also throw in manual deployment (why?).

Most businesses are somewhere between a forgotten old dell server in the closet and fully hosted multi-region auto-scaling fully bought in to AWS, and that's OK!

Re: AWS down again?

#214

Post by Flankk »

mac-chaffee wrote: post #163
Flankk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that purchasing and maintaining your own servers is cheaper than using AWS? Let's hear the rationale, then.

Yes, on-prem is generally cheaper in the long-run. For example, my company recently purchased $400k worth of hardware that would cost $80k/month if it was all EC2. There's amortized costs of the supporting infra (cooling, power) and ongoing maintenance/depreciation, but paying for the hardware in 5 months can't be beat.

You forgot the salaries of the network technicians you wouldn't have otherwise. You now have to manage attacks on your infrastructure yourself. You left out bandwidth costs as well. Your servers will need to be replaced entirely every 5 years, and partially as hardware fails.

It sounds like you're at sufficient scale that it makes sense. For most people, it doesn't make sense.

Re: AWS down again?

#215

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

There is nothing wrong with pointing out the warts. I wonder if you've ever been at the mercy of google/aws and their lack of customer service if you aren't representing the business $$ of a fortune 500 company?

Re: AWS down again?

#216

Post by jeremyjh »

emptybottle wrote: post #110
jeremyjh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think people who manage their own data-centers never have outages?

Running your own data center is on the far other end of the spectrum. There are numerous options between solely using AWS and building a data center.

And people have outages in all of them.

Re: AWS down again?

#217

Post by colechristensen »

armchairhacker wrote: post #156
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?

maybe we actually have a case for decentralized “web3” networks. At least ones which really need reliability, but can’t can use whatever e.g. airplanes use (telehealth? online exams?) Of course you need to make sure the network is actually decentralized (see Solana). Or maybe you can just rely on Amazon and GCP and Azure, because surely they won’t all fail at the same time.

The whole of Amazon isn’t falling, just some services in one region, it is easy enough to build region redundant services but most people don’t because the few hours of downtime per year don’t seem worth it.

You usually just don’t need 100% uptime. “Sorry were closed, come back later” is fine.

Re: AWS down again?

#218

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

willcipriano wrote: post #111
papito wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on HN there are some former AWS employees who talk about how its all stitched together and flying on a wing a prayer. Apparently the on-call is just a traumatizing experience. It will take real damage to revenue for the management to pay that debt off.

Is there a case of an organization ever paying off "tech debt" (I refuse the term, I call it incomplete software)? I've only ever seen it snowball until the product falls into the sea and they start again fresh.

A well-maintained car can drive for a very long time, but for a poorly maintained car, restoring it to like-new condition rarely makes financial sense. It's usually cheaper to just buy a new car, and/or do the bare-minimum maintenance until it dies completely (then buy a new car).

I'm not sure tech debt can ever be fully paid down. You can pay off a bit, and you can stop the debt from accumulating further, but the only way to realistically unburden yourself of a really horrible, big pile of tech debt is to just rebuild the thing from scratch. Or don't, and just keep making money while you wait for the business to fail. (From an investor's perspective, this is the equivalent of riding the car into the ground.)

Re: AWS down again?

#219

Post by Edman274 »

iso1631 wrote: post #76
41209 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather have to fix your own data center, or wait 4 hours. AWS works 99% of the time,plus it's someone else's problem

In my industry, five nines is the starting level. You're proposing something 1,000 times worse.

Besides the fact that they used "99 percent" in a colloquial, informal way ... is that really how calculations like that work, or should work? I mean, if you have 99 percent availability, and 99.999 percent availability, maybe it's valid to say that the former is 1000 times worse than the other, but that could also be true by saying that 99.999 percent availability is 10,000 times worse than 99.9999999 percent availability (where a service only goes down for a third of a second in the span of a decade), and that 99.9999999 percent availability is infinity times worse than something that hasn't had an outage within whatever monitored period (since 100 percent availability is the same as ninety nine dot nine repeating availability)

Re: AWS down again?

#220

Post by stjohnswarts »

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?

I wonder if we're hearing the full story. Could they be being attacked by foreign hacker farms in Russia and China just to make the US infrastructure look bad?
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