471–480 of 1001 posts
Every week or so we interview a company and ask them if they have a fall-back plan in case AWS goes down or their cloud account disappears. They always have this deer-in-the-headlights look. 'That can't happen, right?' Now imagine for a bit that it will never come back up. See where that leads you. The internet got its main strengths from the fact that it was completely decentralized. We've been systematically erodin…
Planning for an AWS outage is a complete waste of time and energy for most companies. Yes it does happen but very rarely to the tune of a few hours every 5-10 years. I can almost guarantee that whatever plans you have won’t get you fully operational faster than just waiting for AWS to fix it.
Hosting your services on AWS while having a status page on AWS during an AWS outage is an easily avoidable problem.
Choosing us-east-1 as your primary region is good, because when you're down, everybody's down, too. You don't get this luxury with other US regions!
If you're down for 5 minutes a year because one of your employees broke something, that's your fault, and the blame passes down through the CTO.
If you're down for 5 hours a year but this affected other companies too, it's not your fault
From AWS to Crowdstrike - system resilience and uptime isn't the goal. Risk mitigation isn't the goal. Affordability isn't the goal.
When the CEO's buddies all suffer at the same time as he does, it's just an "act of god" and nothing can be done, it's such a complex outcome that even the amazing boffins at aws/google/microsoft/cloudflare/etc can't cope.
If the CEO is down at a different time than the CEO's buddies then it's that Dave/Charlie/Bertie/Alice can't cope and it's the CTO's fault for not outsourcing it.
As someone who likes to see things working, it pisses me off no end, but it's the way of the world, and likely has been whenever the owner and CTO are separate.
As this incident unfolds, what’s the best way to estimate how many additional hours it’s likely to last? My intuition is that the expected remaining duration increases the longer the outage persists, but that would ultimately depend on the historical distribution of similar incidents. Is that kind of data available anywhere?
Maybe unrelated, but yesterday I went to pick up my package from an Amazon Locker in Germany, and the display said "Service unavailable". I'll wait until later today before I go and try again.
Every week or so we interview a company and ask them if they have a fall-back plan in case AWS goes down or their cloud account disappears. They always have this deer-in-the-headlights look. 'That can't happen, right?' Now imagine for a bit that it will never come back up. See where that leads you. The internet got its main strengths from the fact that it was completely decentralized. We've been systematically erodin…
Every week or so we interview a company and ask them if they have a fall-back plan in case AWS goes down or their cloud account disappears. They always have this deer-in-the-headlights look. 'That can't happen, right?' Now imagine for a bit that it will never come back up. See where that leads you. The internet got its main strengths from the fact that it was completely decentralized. We've been systematically erodin…
Planning for an AWS outage is a complete waste of time and energy for most companies. Yes it does happen but very rarely to the tune of a few hours every 5-10 years. I can almost guarantee that whatever plans you have won’t get you fully operational faster than just waiting for AWS to fix it.
It’s not hard to imagine events that would keep AWS dark for a long period of time, especially if you’re just in one region. The outage today was in us-east-1. Companies affected by it might want to consider at least geographic diversity, if not supplier diversity.
Every week or so we interview a company and ask them if they have a fall-back plan in case AWS goes down or their cloud account disappears. They always have this deer-in-the-headlights look. 'That can't happen, right?' Now imagine for a bit that it will never come back up. See where that leads you. The internet got its main strengths from the fact that it was completely decentralized. We've been systematically erodin…