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Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

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Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#61

As bad as this article makes AWS sound, it's actually the reason you should go with AWS over say Azure or GCP; when AWS goes down, its owners actually feel the pain with you, Microsoft and Google run their own stuff elsewhere...

Well you definitely don't understand Azure or GCP then.

Office 365, Teams, Dynamics, xcloud, xbox live - they all run on Azure.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#62
post #18

Check out the Amazon Flex Drivers subreddit[0], there are tons of people saying they were paid for the day of deliveries without delivering any packages and told to go home. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexDrivers/comments/rb3ggn/i...

I read many comments and didn't see one that was saying that but you might be right as I was too lazy to read everything.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#63

I've seen mention of a major cable tv operator/last-mile residential ISP that had their entire field-tech dispatch system go down (based on a web gui https app that people can use on their phones) because it's hosted in AWS.

My friend lives in very cold Alaska. She has an app on her car that lets her remotely warm her car, which is a requirement before driving because it's so cold. The AWS outage meant her phone couldn't talk to her car. She was 20 mins late to work because of that.

This is the future. AWS has an outage and your car won't work.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#64
post #59

As bad as this article makes AWS sound, it's actually the reason you should go with AWS over say Azure or GCP; when AWS goes down, its owners actually feel the pain with you, Microsoft and Google run their own stuff elsewhere...

> Microsoft and Google run their own stuff elsewhere... That is simply not true. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-moves-closer-to-runn...

[deleted]

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#65
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Region outages happen, which is why the guidance is to build in multiple regions, but even Amazon sometimes doesn't take their own advice. Sometimes the reason is good, sometimes it isn't.

I thought the guidance was to be multi-AZ, as an AZ is the failure boundary?

AZs are in one physical location. If that physical location has a problem, all AZs within it will go down.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#66

I've seen mention of a major cable tv operator/last-mile residential ISP that had their entire field-tech dispatch system go down (based on a web gui https app that people can use on their phones) because it's hosted in AWS.

My friend lives in very cold Alaska. She has an app on her car that lets her remotely warm her car, which is a requirement before driving because it's so cold. The AWS outage meant her phone couldn't talk to her car. She was 20 mins late to work because of that. This is the future. AWS has an outage and your car won't work.

Couldn’t remote start the car with the fob? Viper/Directed has a paid cloud/app service for convenience, but the primary/default method to activate the remote start is RF.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#67
post #18

Check out the Amazon Flex Drivers subreddit[0], there are tons of people saying they were paid for the day of deliveries without delivering any packages and told to go home. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexDrivers/comments/rb3ggn/i...

Wouldn't surprise me. I mean, DSPs wouldn't be able to scan packages to pick them up without being able to access the flex app, so unless there's a procedure in place to allow packages to be picked up and manually marked as having been picked up... they wouldn't be able to do anything. Moreover, even if they could pick anything up, they wouldn't have any way to navigate, drop packages off, snap photos, and otherwise record all that offline for later upload... because drivers probably can't even sign in.

What's worse, though, is that this also implies that even if an outage is localized to a particular region, data for deliveries to that region isn't multihomed, so you can't just failover flex app service to another region and keep delivering. For a service that lives and dies on being able to deliver everything faster than everyone else... that seems like a massive oversight... but also completely in-character for Amazon.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#68

As bad as this article makes AWS sound, it's actually the reason you should go with AWS over say Azure or GCP; when AWS goes down, its owners actually feel the pain with you, Microsoft and Google run their own stuff elsewhere...

No, not true at all. What do you think Google and Microsoft run their cloud services on?

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#69
post #18

Check out the Amazon Flex Drivers subreddit[0], there are tons of people saying they were paid for the day of deliveries without delivering any packages and told to go home. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexDrivers/comments/rb3ggn/i...

Wouldn't surprise me. I mean, DSPs wouldn't be able to scan packages to pick them up without being able to access the flex app, so unless there's a procedure in place to allow packages to be picked up and manually marked as having been picked up... they wouldn't be able to do anything. Moreover, even if they could pick anything up, they wouldn't have any way to navigate, drop packages off, snap photos, and otherwise…

It happened once. My expectation of Amazon is that it would be fixed before it became a trend.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#70

Those Increasing error rates with some customers affected... /s All green https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29473630

Yeah "increased error rates" is an understated way to describe a massive outage that took several services offline for a full business day.
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