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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

#491

Post by wholinator2 »

ornornor wrote: post #87
jrs235 wrote: post #30

I checked their health status page. All is good. /s https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

Yep, when it loads, it's all green. "nine nines!!!"

I thought that sounded ridiculous so I did the math and 99.9999999 uptime allows for 1.314 _seconds_ of downtime every 1000 years. It would take approximately 2.7 million years to acquire just an hours worth of allowable downtime, that's how long it takes light from the second nearest spiral galaxy and farthest visible object to the eye in perfect conditions [1]. Within a single quarter of a year, that's 328.5 μs (microseconds) or about 1200 blinks of an eye [2] or about 3 times faster than a typical electric capacitor camera flash [3], also approximately, and interestingly enough, less than 1% of my current ping to my ISP let alone Amazon's servers.

So yeah, having done that I now understand that it was probably a joke but it really puts into perspective just how ridiculous things can get with a few 9's.

[1] https://earthsky.org/clusters-nebulae-galaxies/triangulum-ga...

[2] https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-do-we-blink-our-eyes-3879...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(photography) (wikipedia's won't let me deep link on my phone, it's in electronic flash section under types)

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#492

Post by wholinator2 »

mwint wrote: post #469
sam0x17 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if everyone has a financial incentive to lie? (They do) Where do we go then? Also, saying "everyone just leave" is a lot easier than everyone "just leaving", but that's tired and repeated. There's a huge mess and tangle of incentives and drawbacks and I don't know if we'd ever get enough support to weed out a service that gets us above the n'th percentile of greatness. As one falls the other will begin to abuse its power, I dont trust any mega Corp to do otherwise. Do you?

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#493

Post by anaganisk »

ceejayoz wrote: post #215
yawnxyz wrote: post #111

Vercel is down too. My sites run on Cloudflare and Vercel, and I can't even log in to those right now. I'm curious — what does Hacker News run on? It seems impervious to any kind of downtime...

HN definitely gets overloaded at times, including during big outages when everyone stampedes here. I got a bunch of "sorry, we can't serve your request" a little while back. Pobody's nerfect.

Doesn’t HN run on top of firebase? Which ties it to Google? People seem to imply its run on a dedicated instance.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#494

Post by QuinnyPig »

jethro_tell wrote: post #484
reaperducer wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Amazon are competitors. Apple and Microsoft competitors. The postulation was that Apple and Amazon weren't competitors. Not that they're not competitors in a specific niche.

But the idea that Amazon or Microsoft or Google would host anything at apple is pretty out there. Apple uses their competitor's services because they can't build their own cloud and host their own shit. The big boys don't use competitors for services they are capable of building themselves.

And yet video.nest.com (Google) resolves to an Amazon load balancer.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#495

Post by ceejayoz »

anaganisk wrote: post #493
ceejayoz wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN definitely gets overloaded at times, including during big outages when everyone stampedes here. I got a bunch of "sorry, we can't serve your request" a little while back. Pobody's nerfect.

Doesn’t HN run on top of firebase? Which ties it to Google? People seem to imply its run on a dedicated instance.

No; a copy of the HN database is synced regularly to Firebase (https://github.com/HackerNews/API), but IIRC the site itself runs on a single process on a single machine with a standby ready.

edit: Yup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#496

Post by staticassertion »

rfoo wrote: post #489
elasticventures wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could have written the OP message a year ago -- I used to feel the same way. Plz don't disparage Rust evangelism! Rust is awesome. yes it is complex, frequently annoying, easy to learn difficult to master. I'm speaking from a 30 year dev career. a few months ago I intended to do a quick investigation into RUST to validate my "i really don't need to learn this" specifically for an embedded project. Within a few hour…

While I'm not sure whether you're serious ;), to be clear: what annoys me is they don't really understand why we are having "someone pwned your phone via a series of memory corruption bugs" daily. Until those Rust evangelists managed to rewrite the world with Rust (and I promise you there still will be a lot of security bugs), we still have to fix our shit in a low-cost way and their evangelism does not help at all a…

> what annoys me is they don't really understand why we are having "someone pwned your phone via a series of memory corruption bugs" daily.

No, I understand it. I started out in vuln research and have been in defense for a decade. It's probably fair to even say I'm an expert on it.

I'm going to keep advocating for rust as one the highest ROIs for improving security.

Re: Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

#497

Post by dilyevsky »

iso1631 wrote: post #490
dilyevsky wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like even worse deal for the customer since there is no refund

Depends on the service are I have some services which can cope with a 98.5% downtime, as long as they are available the specific 1.5% of the time we need them to run, as such "the cloud" is useless for that service

Right when you really want your thing to be up and can’t amortize hours of continuous downtime cloud has no solution for this. That’s something that often gets left out from the sales pitches tho =)
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