Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#411

Post by jethro_tell » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #301

itisit wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rightly so. My point is a company can self-audit without having to pay a competitor.

I think that is inherently riskier because you never know on what axis you will have a failure and it is difficult to exclude all shared axes.

But we're talking about a status page which should be basically static. In it's simplest form you need a rack in 2+ random colos and a few people to manage the page update framework. Then you make teams submit the tests that are used to validate SLA. Run the tests from a few DCs and rebuild the status page every minute or two.

Maybe add a CDN. This shit isn't rocket science and being able to accurately monitor your own systems from off infrastructure is the one time you should really be separate.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#412

Post by jethro_tell » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #362

itisit wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple is not a competitor to AWS or Azure in any way. They offer not infrastructure/platform as a service that I am aware of.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#413

Post by throwaway81523 » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

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.

They have a bazillion alexa and kindle devices out there that they could monitor from, heh heh. At least let that phone-home behaviour do something useful, like notice AWS is down.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#414

Post by philistine » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

hatware wrote: post #330

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

As stated earlier, AWS has financial incentive to not update the status page. Nobody is willing to call them on the conflict of interest in a meaningful, market-changing way.

Perhaps someone could produce an alternate, Patreon-supported status page that accurately reports on the status of AWS services.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#415

Post by boopboopbadoop » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:50 PM UTC

yunwal wrote: post #246

boopboopbadoop wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The problem is that AWS can't update their status page to reflect that there's a problem. This happens during every AWS incident without fail.

My point is that you’re not even sure that it’s AWS’s problem. I heard that other providers might be affected, perhaps meaning it’s a network issue.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#416

Post by boopboopbadoop » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

slig wrote: post #251

boopboopbadoop wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The problem is very clear: the status page is not working as it should.

What if the problem is not an AWS problem? My point is that you don’t know what the problem is, you’re assuming.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#417

Post by wly_cdgr » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

clavicat wrote: post #145

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.

It's ok, we can just rebuild everything from scratch if we need to. We know we can cos we already do it every five years anyway without needing to

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#418

Post by llbeansandrice » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

s_dev wrote: post #380

moralestapia wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP has a point with, >Or will smaller players go from single-AZ to more expensive multi-AZ?

No -- if they needed to they already would have migrated to a multi-region. If they don't need it -- they won't have. The reason is simple -- it's expensive as you say. I'm not a fanboi or evangelist of AWS either -- I do have pet theories they named their products with shit names in order to make more money by making AWS skills less transferable to Google Cloud etc. S3 should be Amazon FTP, RDS should be Amazon SQL…

S3 is nothing like FTP? RDS stands for Relational Database Service. You have a valid point but picked the worst examples.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#419

Post by BenjiWiebe » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

zikduruqe wrote: post #346

derekp7 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are close. You first rub the berry on your skin (or leaf, or whatever). Wait 24 hours to see if a rash develops. Then you taste it, wait another 24 hours. Then you eat one, and see if you get sick after another 24 hours. Now you can eat several, and build up from there. Yes, that is a lot of time to go hungry and testing just one item. And then you still don't know what actually gives you nutrition vs just not ki…

That is the Universal Edibility Test and gets repeated ad nauseam in all the survival circles. You would miss out on some fine choice foods if you did that. Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) is one of them. Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) too. Source - used to teach these skills before it was cool to be a "survivalist" on TV and social media.

Yes I don't know how someone figured out that if you cook pokeweed and change the water multiple times then you can finally eat it without it killing you.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#420

Post by cle » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

someguydave wrote: post #338

cle wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, this is one of the goals, to free up engineers to work on higher level things. Whether it meets that goal in some cases is debatable, and it’s certainly not ideal for us engineers who like to get to the bottom of things.

“working on higher level things” currently implies that depending on many layers of opaque and unreliable lower level hardware and software abstractions is a good idea. I think it is a mistake.

The best conclusion I can come to is "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't". Depends on the context. I've seen cases where it works great and other times where it's a huge hassle.