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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

#461

Post by danielheath »

nefitty wrote: post #341
cloverich wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a very general level once you move past subsistence farming you become reliant on society to provide your needs. And in turn provide some value that can only come from spending your time on things other than farming. And that is I suppose how civilization advances. Its kind of funny to work backwards though, because even subsistence farmers are reliant on society for protection -- they are farmers not soldiers aft…

There's an interesting misconception that humans developed agricultural societies because they achieved better outcomes as individuals. Research shows that hunter-gatherers were healthy and better nourished than humans in early agricultural settlements. What's probably closer to truth is that many humans were forced to join farming communities. Stronger individuals or tribes probably enslaved others, and then forced…

Forced labor was absolutely the norm for the pre-modern state, and provided the bulk of the workforce [1].

AFAIK humanity is yet to produce a society where the majority of farm laborers are fully free to leave the land they work on (whether via having their papers confiscated, their wages held until the season ends, by having transport provided to a remote farm but the trip back withheld etc). We've seen improvements in the degree of freedom, particularly over the past century and especially the past 50 years, but it's still very low compared to urban dwellers.

1: "Against the Grain", James C Scott

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#462

Post by gizmodo59 »

kenhwang wrote: post #449
tomlagier wrote: post #347

I wonder if AWS will make more or less money from these outages? Will large players flee because of excessive instability? Or will smaller players go from single-AZ to more expensive multi-AZ? My guess is that no-one will leave and lots of single-AZ tenants who should be multi-AZ will use this as the impetus to do it. Honestly, having events like this is probably good for the overall resilience of distributed systems…

If my company is any indication, they're going to make more money since everyone will simply check the multi-AZ or multi-region checkboxes they didn't before and throw more money at the problem instead of doing proper resiliency engineering themselves.

It doesn’t matter how much of resiliency engineering you do. Having everything in a single AZ is a risk. If this is acceptable then it’s fine if not you need to think of multi az from day 1.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#463

Post by kazen44 »

jjav wrote: post #448
marcosdumay wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This creates some really fun failure cases on the form of "I need to enter the building so anybody can enter the building". Depending on the cloud is certainly a very stupid decision. keeping everything inside the building is better, but still not ideal.

Any electronic access system like this requires manual backup. As in, some doors with regular locks using physical keys.

it requires an override anyways in case of emergencies like a fire.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#464

Post by 10000truths »

cle wrote: post #329
waynecochran wrote: post #322

There was a brief period of time back in the early 90's where I felt I understood how Linux worked -- the kernel, startup scripts, drivers, processors, boot tools, etc... I could actually work on all levels of the system to some degree. Those days are long gone. I am far removed from many details of the systems I use today. I used to do a lot of assembly programming on multiple systems. Today I am not sure how most o…

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.

Funny, I feel the exact opposite way. The low level stuff is where all the magic happens, where performance improvements can scale by orders of magnitude rather than linearly with a CTO’s budget. I’d much rather figure out how to condense some over-engineered distributed solution down to one machine with resources to spare.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#465

Post by urthor »

tomlagier wrote: post #347

I wonder if AWS will make more or less money from these outages? Will large players flee because of excessive instability? Or will smaller players go from single-AZ to more expensive multi-AZ? My guess is that no-one will leave and lots of single-AZ tenants who should be multi-AZ will use this as the impetus to do it. Honestly, having events like this is probably good for the overall resilience of distributed systems…

The actual answer?

In the next 5 calendar years the bottom line will still grow.

However, the brand damage means they permananently lose market share. Which impacts their growth ceiling.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#466

Post by jdavis703 »

FooHentai wrote: post #357
jdavis703 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend you buy a local book on foraging. Keep in case of emergency. But give it a read (at least the first few chapters) so you can get a basic understanding of how to forage without killing yourself. I also recommend keeping viable seeds and a camping shovel around as an insurance policy. These items aren’t in my earthquake bag (I have enough energy bars to last until the National Guard shows up). Instead…

On the seeds front, you really have to be practicing growing food from seed for several years before depending on them for basic caloric needs - after a few years of providing a fraction of our household calories on the property I can see the pitfalls, effort and planting diversity needed were we to need to scale it to that level. The previous me would have had some seeds and a dream, and have died real quick. Even n…

Yes we provide a few hundred annual calories from seed. Not nearly enough to survive. But hopefully enough to learn from while foraging or enough to link up with actual experts who might just be lacking in seeds or labor.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#467

Post by mrslave »

QuinnyPig wrote: post #410
QuiiBz wrote: post #43

I tried to monitor services status using https://stop.lying.cloud , but they are also hosted to AWS, and down too.

Yeah, I homed https://stop.lying.cloud out of us-west-2. Oops.

Considering the sea of bright green circles, reds might stand out but blues get lost in a fast scroll. Perhaps fade or mute the green icon to improve visibility of non-green which is the interesting information?

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#468

Post by mrslave »

synergy20 wrote: post #88
QuiiBz wrote: post #43

I tried to monitor services status using https://stop.lying.cloud , but they are also hosted to AWS, and down too.

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.

A similar reason drives businesses to host `status.product.bigcorp` on a different server. And if your product is a cloud then your suggestion makes sense.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#469

Post by mwint »

sam0x17 wrote: post #393
hatware wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would love to see them called out via new regulations or a lawsuit, however :)

Why is new regulation the answer here? Let everyone move to Azure, if they care that much about status pages and SLAs.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#470

Post by dylan604 »

Hamuko wrote: post #457
chasd00 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone tripped over the fiber run i bet. Or, a cleaning person unplugged a router to plugin a vacuum (that actually happened but to a minicomputer iirc)

Usually the problem is "an idiot with a digger".

nah man, it's never the digger that's the idiot. it's always the project manager that told the digger where to dig. just like it's never the dev's fault as the PM made them do it. /s
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