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Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

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Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#361

Post by boopboopbadoop »

OneLeggedCat wrote: post #355
boopboopbadoop wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t even know what the problem is yet. Stop shouting solutions.

I kind of think everyone else here understands this very particular problem of a status page running on the same equipment that it's supposed to be monitoring if that equipment goes down, and for whatever reason, you don't.

I understand that. What I’m questioning is whether that is the problem here. Is it? Do you know? I heard it might be an internet provider issue, in which case the status page is not the problem here.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#362

Post by reaperducer »

itisit wrote: post #113
synergy20 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS should monitor itself from Azure or GCP, even DO or Linode makes more sense. Eat your own dog food shows confidence, but monitoring it is a different dimension, you need use anything but your own dog food there.

AWS wouldn't monitor itself from a competitor, of course, but they could just as well silo a team and isolate DCs to do independent self-auditing.

AWS wouldn't monitor itself from a competitor, of course

Why not? The big tech companies use each other all the time.

For example, set up a new firewall on macOS and you can see how many times Apple pulls data from Amazon or Azure or other competitors' APIs and services.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#363

Post by s_fischer »

nerdjon wrote: post #95
rexreed wrote: post #61

It's not just AWS - check the down reports: https://downdetector.com/ Cloudflare having some significant issues as well on certain domains.

The list of affected services is a bit all over the place, especially since I highly doubt Xbox Live or Halo is running on AWS.

For the core services? Definitely. But do we really know that some 3rd party API which doesn't fail gracefully isn't causing this?

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#364

Post by gitfan86 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #352
rch wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of person exists, and while rare, not as rare as some seem to assume.

There is nobody who exists who would be able to recreate a modern computer from scratch.

When you say 'modern' do you mean with photolithography?

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#365

Post by zaltekk »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #196
rexreed wrote: post #61

It's not just AWS - check the down reports: https://downdetector.com/ Cloudflare having some significant issues as well on certain domains.

DownDetector is showing everything down during that period, including Google. I suspect DownDetector itself suffered some outages during this period, which it shows as outages of every service it monitors.

That's not how DownDetector works. It just relies on reports from users. The real failure case is users not understanding why they can't access whatever end service. Maybe they blame that service, maybe they blame their ISP, maybe they blame something else.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#367

Post by dredmorbius »

prh21 wrote: post #308
the_af wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 used to have this joke(?) with my friends: remember Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King's Arthur Court"? The titular Yankee basically upends the (faux) medieval society he gets transported to, "inventing" all sorts of technological miracles. Well, I'm a software devel…

Inventing the printing press was more difficult than it seems at first. In addition to the idea of unsing movable type significant development of the correct alloys for the types was necessary. The alloy needs to be able to be cast easily and at the same time be durable to be reused for a large enough number of print runs. In addition the proper ink needs to be developed...

Cheap durable paper also helps.

Fun fact: printing rates increased from about 120 sheets/hour to over 1 million over the course of the 19th century. Those began with wooden screw presses that differed little from Gutenberg's to cast iron, rotary, steam and later electric powered, and web (continuous paper feed) presses, and from matrix plates (with individual type set in blocks) to offset Linotype (in which the entire print block was cast as a single sheet through multiple stages from the original matrix characters).

Thought just occurs: the falling characters of the iconic Matrix screen somewhat resemble the individual type elements flowing and falling through a Linotype machine. I don't know if that is a deliberate or incidental reference, but it's an interesting one.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#368

Post by reaperducer »

ec109685 wrote: post #285
api wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... because you need to contact a server 1000 miles away to issue badges in your building. This cloud-for-everything-even-local-devices thing is both hilarious and sad. I wonder if anyone had trouble doing their dishes or laundry today, because I'm sure someone thought dish washers and washing machines needed cloud.

I don't know if you can say an on-premise badge hosting service would be more reliable than the cloud.

Taking badges out of the cloud reduces points of failure by several orders of magnitude.

Cloud-based badges make sense if you have locations with small staffs and no HR people or managers. Like if you're controlling access to a microwave tower on the top of a mountain.

But badges-in-the-cloud for an office building full of people who are being supervised by supposedly trusted managers, and all of whom has been vetted for security and by HR, is just being cheap.

Like the 1980's AT&T commercials used to say: "You get what you pay for."

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#370

Post by mediaman »

mikestew wrote: post #344
pier25 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. My wife and I lived for a year in an off-the-grid cabin in some mountains in Mexico. We had solar panels and a generator we used only when absolutely necessary. We were never without power, but we lived with the constant anxiety of optimizing our energy consumption. Some stuff we could only do during the day and at night we only used devices with batteries. For a couple of weeks we didn't have running wat…

Absolutely. My wife and I lived for a year in an off-the-grid cabin in some mountains in Mexico. I think everyone ought to do a week in an RV with no connections to utilities. Not to take away from your story, but a similar scenario comes up when we "dry camp" (no water or electrical connections): resources are not unlimited. We have solar panels, big-ass inverter and big-ass battery to go with it. But if we want lig…

Very similar experience with sailboats.

There's nothing like being at sea, 100+ miles from civilization, reliant on the limited capacity systems on your vessel. You manage your food, you manage your water consumption, fuel, electrical usage, you're closely attuned to the weather, the sea state, the charts. There are no other visible people or people-made objects out to the horizon in all directions. If something breaks, you'd better know how it works and be able to fix it, or go without. It feels very freeing, but also provides a "back to basics" accountability.

Standing under a hot water shower with unlimited water in a spacious home shower afterward feels luxurious.

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