Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

news.ycombinator.com

261–270 of 497 posts

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#261

We are barbarians occupying a city built by an advanced civilization, marveling at the hot baths but know nothing about how their builders keep them running. One day, the baths will drain and anyone who remembers how to fill them up will have died.

So long as you live in a city you are probably forgetting most of the ways to survive. I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself. However, I can teach advanced maths to a largish group of students without much trouble.

> I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself.

Eat a small amount and see if you get sick? Science in the wild...

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#263
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago I stood at the window of my comfortable apartment, watching wind and cold rain rage outside. I thought about my cave men ancestors who during such a storm if they needed water would have to go out and get it, getting themselves soaked. If I wanted water, the tap in the kitchen would give it to me, in a nice controlled fashion. If I did feel like having water rain down upon me, my shower would do that,…

Not to mention that when the power goes out, the illusion fades fairly quickly. Learned that lesson myself in the Texas snowstorm early this year.

I lived in Miami during hurricane Wilma and spent like a week without electricity. You realize how quickly things go south without electricity flowing.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#264

They really need to stop requiring SVPs or higher to show non-green status on the status page, as other HNers have revealed in last week's AWS post. It's effectively not a status page, and they could probably be sued if it can be demonstrated that X service was down but the status page showed green (since the SLA is based on status page). Should be automated and based on sample deployments running in every region and…

They were much faster than usual about updating the AWS Status page.

I thought Status Pages or Health Pages is designed to automate the reporting and checking the status automatically. This was my impression when I came across those status pages. Apparently, it is not automated and only update it manually. What is the point of having a status pages if it cannot be automated? I'm sure FAANG and tech conglomerates don't want it to be automated because of SLA.

I'm surprised with FAANG hosted their stuff in their competitors cloud services without providing a fallback cloud service if the primary service is down. Sure it cost money but it would be effective this way than putting all eggs in one basket.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#265

We are barbarians occupying a city built by an advanced civilization, marveling at the hot baths but know nothing about how their builders keep them running. One day, the baths will drain and anyone who remembers how to fill them up will have died.

On-prem is much more rare, but its hardly non-existent. Plenty of people know how to do this sort of thing.

There's (still?) a lot of on-prem and managed hosting. It's probably the majority of hosted services. Otherwise VMWare wouldn't be doing as well as it is.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down. I doubt even a very skilled engineer would know how his own machine works all the way down. What I think happens mostly is the skilled dev can use his experience to know where to investigate and where to look for solutions. The question is organisational. Might it be that certain orgs have gotten so convoluted that they…

I do contracting dev work and my specialty is being able to drill down into any part of the engineering assets, ops, sec, dev. People think someone like me is slow and expensive until they have a problem that no one else wants to touch.

I also specialize in being great at everything.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#267
post #210

We are barbarians occupying a city built by an advanced civilization, marveling at the hot baths but know nothing about how their builders keep them running. One day, the baths will drain and anyone who remembers how to fill them up will have died.

Many years ago I stood at the window of my comfortable apartment, watching wind and cold rain rage outside. I thought about my cave men ancestors who during such a storm if they needed water would have to go out and get it, getting themselves soaked. If I wanted water, the tap in the kitchen would give it to me, in a nice controlled fashion. If I did feel like having water rain down upon me, my shower would do that,…

Great for you, I hope you enjoy your cave.

> Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work.

I'm sure if you just sat down with a pen and paper you could come up with a DIY solution.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down. I doubt even a very skilled engineer would know how his own machine works all the way down. What I think happens mostly is the skilled dev can use his experience to know where to investigate and where to look for solutions. The question is organisational. Might it be that certain orgs have gotten so convoluted that they…

I do contracting dev work and my specialty is being able to drill down into any part of the engineering assets, ops, sec, dev. People think someone like me is slow and expensive until they have a problem that no one else wants to touch.

Not at all diminishing what you do, but surely you have a limit past which you say "that's outside of my expertise, or what's reasonable for me to gain expertise given the scope of this issue"?

For instance, I manage a team that does "full stack" development, where full stack means I regularly interact with mechanical and manufacturing, operations, electrical engineers, battery and radio people, embedded developers, mobile, and most aspects of backend engineering. We had an issue where one of our chip suppliers changed their FW, didn't tell us, and we literally were taking apart units to get to the bottom of why units off the line weren't working properly. We go pretty deep. Still, at some point we throw our hands in the air and say "Hardware is hard, it's in the name."

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down. I doubt even a very skilled engineer would know how his own machine works all the way down. What I think happens mostly is the skilled dev can use his experience to know where to investigate and where to look for solutions. The question is organisational. Might it be that certain orgs have gotten so convoluted that they…

I do contracting dev work and my specialty is being able to drill down into any part of the engineering assets, ops, sec, dev. People think someone like me is slow and expensive until they have a problem that no one else wants to touch.

> Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down.

So you are disagreeing with this statement and saying that, in fact, you are the person who knows how the whole thing works?

I knew tech work produced some large egos, but sheesh.

Post reply on HN