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AWS down again?

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Re: AWS down again?

#241

Post by greedo »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #223
iso1631 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then AWS isn't really targeting you as a customer though. Most of the web really isn't that critical and can survive a few hours outage occasionally.

But for those who bought into AWS as a way of improving their performance and stability, "a few hours outage occasionally" can be very expensive. If my company experienced a multi-hour outage "occasionally,", it would be $100K/hour in lost revenue. Your remark reminds me of people who say "Well, Tesla really doesn't mean `autopilot` in the way you think."

Re: AWS down again?

#242

Post by SahAssar »

ksec wrote: post #240
SahAssar wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he can absolve both himself and his team of responsibility. Everything up until this sentence makes sense in a twisted sort of way, but that's the part I don't get. When did we absolve companies from their choice of vendors? If I buy a service and that service does not work then the company selling that service does not get to blame their vendors, that they chose, just like they don't get to blame individual devs t…

>When did we absolve companies from their choice of vendors? >just like they don't get to blame individual devs that they hired. When the vendors become a symbol, a public utility status or practically the only choice. And this isn't a Tech company thing. It can be applied to all other industry. You can fire and hire another Dev. If you are looking at cloud vendor, you only have AWS, Azure and GCP to choose. For lots…

> a symbol, a public utility status or practically the only choice

The first, I can agree with, but the latter two are definitely not the case. If they were a public utility they would be regulated as one and if they were they only choice there would not be companies online during these outages. The site you are writing this on is an example, an online service with a pretty large (although not massive) following that is online enough to be the place where all the people who work at companies that depend on cloud services come to discuss their outages.

Re: AWS down again?

#243

Post by greedo »

SahAssar wrote: post #238
greedo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be "No one got fired for buying IBM." Now it's AWS. Many CTOs are very risk averse, and having someone to blame is incredibly valuable to them. My company has a large multi-region set of datacenters, but we're using AWS for a lot of new projects, despite being able to deliver similar services with better performance and cost, on-prem. Some of the reasons are no one wants to be seen using old tech; stuck be…

> he can absolve both himself and his team of responsibility. Everything up until this sentence makes sense in a twisted sort of way, but that's the part I don't get. When did we absolve companies from their choice of vendors? If I buy a service and that service does not work then the company selling that service does not get to blame their vendors, that they chose, just like they don't get to blame individual devs t…

The company trusts the CTO; the CTO trusts AWS, and if AWS goes down, he can deflect responsibility onto AWS. The other C-Suite officers are largely ignorant about tech (that's why they have a CTO), and nod their heads.

Re: AWS down again?

#244

Post by grey-area »

oxfordmale wrote: post #225
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,…

i am not saying everyone needs to go for AWS and there are many good reasons for self hosting However, if the only reason for self hosting is a higher uptime than AWS or GCP, it is general false economy, and you are likely taking short cuts that you are not aware of.

This is a false dichotomy (I listed many options, not just self hosting, not many businesses fully self-host these days), and uptime is provably significantly better away from the big hosted services which are constantly churning features, config and hardware resulting in outages for everyone hosted on them.

Re: AWS down again?

#245

Post by cosmotic »

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…

I don't think anyone is saying they could do better than AWS at making their own infrastructure. I think the complaint is that it's a single point of failure for a huge swath of the internet.

Re: AWS down again?

#246

Post by technobabbler »

SahAssar wrote: post #228
ksec wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>making downtime somebody else's problem. It is even more, making downtime's responsibility somebody else's problem. You can now simply point to AWS is down, AWS is slow, AWS is causing error, and there is nothing we can do about it :). And as long as management knows everyone is having the same problem they are perfectly fine with it.

Do people not take responsibility for their choice of vendors? If boeing crashed a bunch of planes and said "Not our fault, our subcontractor made shitty software" would we accept it? If a startup leaked all their customers data would we accept "Blame this other company, we just gave them all our data for analysis" as an excuse? If you accept that then it means that we need to investigate and scrutinize the whole sup…

Life-critical industries like airlines, cars, healthcare, etc. are probably the exception?

If a restaurant ran out of some menu item for a few days because a supplier didn't have a good harvest, eh, it happens. If a bookstore doesn't stock a certain book, no big deal. Grocery store self-checkout broken yet again? Oh well. Band got too drunk and can't perform? Reschedule it. No snow at the slopes? Climate change.

In the real world, shit happens, and most of it isn't critical.

If you offer a 99.999% guarantee and your customers pay for it, well, you better deliver -- subcontractors or not. But many businesses don't need to do that and a few hours of downtime a year is just a minor inconvenience. To go from "a few days of downtime" to "a few hours" is really easy; just about any provider can offer that. To go from "a few hours of downtime" to "a few seconds" is a huge investment and not worth it to many folks.

Re: AWS down again?

#247

Post by dudeinjapan »

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…

Disagree on two counts.

1) Like any utility, the cloud is predicated on the assumption that it never goes down. If AWS itself goes down, it causes knock-on effects more most mid-sized (i.e. 1 region, multi-AZ) services on their platform, so we can't have it.

2) If we're going to have to accept downtime (1) then yes, it IS time we rethink the cloud--either how we can achieve no downtime, or how we achieve fault-tolerance in some other way.

Re: AWS down again?

#248

Post by Rudisimo »

Every time I see a situation like this one, I tell myself: "What a wonderful opportunity to go outside and smell the roses".

P.S. A comment from an exhausted engineer to another.

P.S.S. Seriously, I need to get out of the house more.

Re: AWS down again?

#249

Post by ksec »

SahAssar wrote: post #242
ksec wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When did we absolve companies from their choice of vendors? >just like they don't get to blame individual devs that they hired. When the vendors become a symbol, a public utility status or practically the only choice. And this isn't a Tech company thing. It can be applied to all other industry. You can fire and hire another Dev. If you are looking at cloud vendor, you only have AWS, Azure and GCP to choose. For lots…

> a symbol, a public utility status or practically the only choice The first, I can agree with, but the latter two are definitely not the case. If they were a public utility they would be regulated as one and if they were they only choice there would not be companies online during these outages. The site you are writing this on is an example, an online service with a pretty large (although not massive) following that…

>Public Utility

It is not whether they are one as in business or one as in politics that has to be regulated. They are utility like as people treated it as one and it behaves as one. Many things goes down with it with AWS just like many things goes down with the grid.

HN is comparatively tiny and simple. Doesn't requires any of the features on AWS. And has no reliability requirements like SaaS. HN doesn't even use CDN. Even though I am not a cloud advocate for 99% of cases it makes zero sense to build a SaaS with your own Server.

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