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Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

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Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#81

Post by AmIFirstToThink »

If your architecture means your system goes down if AWS is down, then the question becomes can you replace AWS with something better that you can build, have means to build, have time to build, can keep running, can get enough momentum in term of sheer size of customer base to fund the upkeep of the platform?

If you can't build/run a better AWS replacement then it's a mute point, isn't it?

Then the question turns into if you can't build better AWS, can you architect your application to handle AWS failures? AWS itself lets you handle many kind of failures at AZ/DC level. Are you using that? For global AWS outages, can you have skeleton, survival critical system running on GCP or Azure?

Have you thought about outages that would be out of your control and out of AWS's control e.g. malware, DDoS, DNS, ISP, Windows/Android/iOS/Chrome/Edge zero day? How are you going to handle outages due to those issues?

If you are prepared to handle outages (communication, self-preservation, degraded mode, offline mode) then can a serious AWS outage be managed just like those outages?

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#82

Post by dastbe »

fovc wrote: post #11

I think about this problem every now and then for my own business, but not sure what the right answer is. Supporting multiple clouds requires more involved management of some pieces of infrastructure (e.g., DNS + healthchecks, DB replication), which introduces another point of failure. How do people who need to have more nines of availability manage this issue with cloud providers? (EC2 and RDS promise 3.5 nines per…

for people who need more 9s of availability on a single cloud provider, you have to start going multi-region. aws takes region isolation/independence very seriously, and along with geographic independence gives you effectively two entirely independent clouds which just so happen to have the exact same APIs. Some of the (really great) Netflix blog posts[0] have talked about multi-region services.

If you do go multi-cloud, I would be wary of picking regions that are located very close to each other. While you'll obviously get independent code and (likely) independent deployments, you're still susceptible to issues correlated with the physical location.

[0] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/global-cloud-active-acti...

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#83

Post by BurningFrog »

peteretep wrote: post #38
gaius wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

legitimate national security concern, and the government steps in to provide protection There are a LOT of far softer targets that go unprotected. A terrorist attack on a sewage plant for a major city would be far more devastating than knocking out a few websites.

I feel like the point of the article we're commenting on is that AWS is far from "a few websites"

Knocking out all of AWS is very different from knocking out a single data center.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#84

Post by adventured »

awkwarddaturtle wrote: post #75
tyfon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate the "too big to fail" meme and I strongly agree with Bernie in that if you are too big to fail you are too big to exist. That should be the priority.

> I really hate the "too big to fail" meme and I strongly agree with Bernie in that if you are too big to fail you are too big to exist. That seems like the most reasonable response. And yet, since the great recession, our policy has been "make 'too big to fail' even bigger". The problem is that the banks have become too powerful for anyone to challenge. A Teddy Roosevelt type of political leader can't exist today.

Corporate entities were radically more powerful in Teddy Roosevelt's day, far beyond what they are today. They were almost entirely unchained in regards to economic power, whereas today there is hyper regulation (tens of thousands of pages of it, including direct Fed control over the banking system).

Standard Oil was as powerful as the US Government in that era, as were the railroads. JP Morgan was far more powerful than the US Treasury. Cornelius Vanderbilt - pre Roosevelt - all by himself had greater financial capability at his peak than the US Government at the time.

The difference, is back then there was wide-spread and growing fear of the combinations and would-be monopolies. Today, Americans are relatively unconcerned by Microsoft (desktop), Google (search, android), Walmart & Amazon (retail), Intel (microprocessors), Facebook (social), Cisco, Boeing, etc.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#85

Post by mtl_usr »

arethuza wrote: post #69
michaelt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, nobody pays /more/ than the published prices. And prospective users can look at the published prices, and see that historically they've gone down more than they've gone up (although obviously that trend could reverse). So people think they're safe from the risk of Amazon quadrupling their bill over night. Of course, vendor lock-in can have other negative effects, but apparently people aren't worried about them…

Well, if you aren't in the US there is forex risk - Azure certainly increased their prices in the aftermath of the Brexit vote decrease of GDP against the USD.

Doing any kind of business in non-USD currency is itself not a great move.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#86

Post by tdb7893 »

awkwarddaturtle wrote: post #75
tyfon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate the "too big to fail" meme and I strongly agree with Bernie in that if you are too big to fail you are too big to exist. That should be the priority.

> I really hate the "too big to fail" meme and I strongly agree with Bernie in that if you are too big to fail you are too big to exist. That seems like the most reasonable response. And yet, since the great recession, our policy has been "make 'too big to fail' even bigger". The problem is that the banks have become too powerful for anyone to challenge. A Teddy Roosevelt type of political leader can't exist today.

Here is an smbc comic making fun of this phenomenon. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3794

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#87

Post by bluedino »

cm2187 wrote: post #30
mediascreen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you have to blow up at least all the datacenters in a region to make an impact?

All you need to blow is a few cables.

Why blow up anything or damage any cables? Hack the computer of an Amazon employee and do your damage there. The last S4 outage was because of someone fat fingering a script, imagine what someone could do that really wanted to mess stuff up.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#88

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

smegel wrote: post #51
askvictor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cascading electrical grid failure? I don't know if there are any interconnects between the regions with the DC's, but if there were that might be a concern. Though at that stage, presumably most of the US is without power, hence not so much need for AWS.

Well I guess a nationwide power outage will have bigger implications than Netflix going down...

Yeah, it might take down Netflix and YouTube! Then what are we supposed to do while we wait for the electricity to come back on?!

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#89

Post by pyroinferno »

adventured wrote: post #84
awkwarddaturtle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really hate the "too big to fail" meme and I strongly agree with Bernie in that if you are too big to fail you are too big to exist. That seems like the most reasonable response. And yet, since the great recession, our policy has been "make 'too big to fail' even bigger". The problem is that the banks have become too powerful for anyone to challenge. A Teddy Roosevelt type of political leader can't exist today.

Corporate entities were radically more powerful in Teddy Roosevelt's day, far beyond what they are today. They were almost entirely unchained in regards to economic power, whereas today there is hyper regulation (tens of thousands of pages of it, including direct Fed control over the banking system). Standard Oil was as powerful as the US Government in that era, as were the railroads. JP Morgan was far more powerful…

Why leave it at American companies? The Dutch East India Company was far more powerful and bigger than any company seen today.

Re: Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

#90

Post by YawningAngel »

mediascreen wrote: post #21
peteretep wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanted to blow something up to make the west suffer, an AWS datacenter would probably be a pretty good target. I wonder at what point that becomes a legitimate national security concern, and the government steps in to provide protection.

Wouldn't you have to blow up at least all the datacenters in a region to make an impact?

There are probably some people careless enough that destroying a single data centre would damage them. Most serious contenders (e.g. My employer) have fully redundant active-active setups across regions, so you'd have to engineer a massive outage to take out real shops.

Of course, if you completely remove an entire AWS region you might induce very damaging stresses on other regions as people fail over.

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