421–430 of 646 posts
AWS didn’t “go down”. They had an outage in one AZ, which is why there are multiple AZs in each region. If your app went down then you should be blaming your developers on this one, not AWS. Those having issues are discovering gaps in their HA designs. Obviously it’s not good for an AZ to go down but it does happen and why any production workload should be architected to have seamless failover and recover to other AZ…
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In most startups? You're mostly correct. But you still have some risks here, yes, with a super low probability, but a company-killing impact. In some industries - banking, finance, anything regulated, or really (I'd argue) anywhere where losing all of your data is company killing - you will need a disaster recovery strategy in place. The risks requiring non-AWS backups are things like: - A failed payment goes unnotic…
Yes threat models is obvious qualifier, if you have a business that requires backup on the moon if there asteroid collision then by all means got for it.[1] For most companies what AWS.or Azure offers is more than adequate. An internal bad actor with that level of privileged access can delete your local backups or external one can all things you he can do to AWS he can likely do easier to your company storage DC too.…
The extra expense outlay for the 2 additional backups is approximately $50/month, so it's not going to break the bank.
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I once had to argue that we still do need backup even though S3 has redundancy. They laughed when I mentioned a possible lock-up from AWS (even due to a mistake or whatever). I asked what if we delete data from app by mistake? They told me we need to be careful not to do that. I guess I am getting more and more tired of arrogant 25 years old programmers with 1-2 years in industry and no experience.
S3 and (others) have version history that can be enabled. If you have to take care of availablity and redundancy and delete protection and backups then why pay the premium S3 is charging ? Either you don't trust the cloud and you can run NAS or equivalent (with s3 APIs easily today) much cheaper or trust them to keep your data safe and available. No point in investing in S3 and then doing it again yourself.
In some orgs, recreating lost data, code, deployment and more is literally hundreds of thousands of hours of work.
In a smaller org, the devastation can be just as stark. Loosing hundreds of hours of work can be a death knell.
Anyone advocating placing an entire orgs's future on one provider is literally, completely incompetent.
It's the equiv of a home user thinking all their baby pics will be safe on google or facebook. It is just plain dumb.
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> Can you make your on prem infrastructure go down less than Amazon's? Obviously depends on what you need, but for a small to medium web app that needs a load-balancer, a few app servers, a database and a cache, yes absolutely - all of these have been solved problems for over a decade and aren't rocket science to install & maintain. > Is it worth it? I'd argue that the "worth" would be less about immunity to occasion…
I have run high availability (HA) systems in prem and your statement vastly understates the difficulty and expense. You need multiple physical links in running to different ISPs because builders working on properties further down the street could accidentally cut through your fibre. Or the ISP themselves could suffer an outage. You need a back up generator and to be a short distance away from a petrol station so you…
Santa is bringing me a Synology in three days.
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That's true for on-prem infrastructure, but is all already handled for you if you rent servers from hosting providers such as OVH/Hetzner or even rent colocation space in an existing DC, and is still cheaper than the cloud equivalent (and as we saw recently, actually more reliable as well).
But then you’re still reliant on those hosting providers not fscking up; just like with cloud providers. Literally the same complaint the GP was making about AWS applies for OVH et al too. In fact I used to run some hobby projects in OVH (as an aside, I really liked their services) so I’m aware that they have their own failures too.
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>And that won't happen HA! I had received new 16-bay chasis and all of the drives needed plus cold spares for each chasis. Set them up and started the RAID-5 init on a Friday. Left them running in the rack over the weekend. Returned on Monday to find multiple drives in each chasis had failed. Even with dedicated one of the 16 drives as a hot swap, the volumes would all have failed in an unrecoverable manner. All driv…
Guess I was lucky, we ran a lot of these over the decades when things were far more unreliable than now and never experienced anything like that. Manufacturing issues, sure, but we always had everything we bought run on stress for 48 hours and see if that killed it, if it didn't, it didn't usually break anymore (I have many of the machines from mid to end 2000s still and they don't have diskfailures now while they ra…
Now that everyone and their dog is on AWS, it is not just 'a website stops working', half the world, from telephones to security doors and Iot equipment, stops working? I am not sure if the movement the cloud has reduced amount of failures, but it definitely has made these failures more catastrophic. Our profession is busy makin the world less reliable and more fragile, we will have our reconning just like the shippi…
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My on prem infrastructure goes down drastically less than Amazon's. ...My home Internet even is scoring better than Amazon right now, in fact. Yours probably is too.
I have a bolt lying on my desk. It hasn't failed since 1970 when it was produced. It must have been built better than Space Shuttle, then.
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Think about it this way: 1) Can you make your on prem infrastructure go down less than Amazon's? 2) Is it worth it? In my experience most people grossly underestimate how expensive it is to create reliable infrastructure and at the same time overestimate how important it is for their services to run uninterrupted. -- EDIT: I am not arguing you shouldn't build your more reliable infrastructure. AWS is just a point on…
On the other hand, perhaps the large cloud providers bring a level of complexity that outweighs their skills at keeping everything up. What I mean is, a basic redundancy and failover setup with two data centers is kind of straightforward. Sure you need a person on call 24/7 to oversee it, but it's conceptually not that complicated. And if you're running bare metal, you get a surprising level of performance per dollar…
As a counterpoint, though, my last place had a large Java app, split between colo'd metal and AWS. Seemed like the colo'd stuff failed more (bad RAM mostly, a few CPUs, and an occasional PSU). Entirely anecdotal.