Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#81

Post by lell » Sun, Apr 24, 2011, 11:28 AM UTC

FreshCode wrote: post #69

Bullshit, linkbait post. After reading the whole thing, I would gladly spend karma to downvote this.

Are you referring to the link in the title? It is true that the company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2. This was not life threatening infrastructure, but that is not implied by the HN title. How is it linkbait?

The poster on Amazon's forum misrepresented the severity of the infrastructure and tries to backpedal later on in the thread. This is an example of someone using EC2 and fucking up, firstly for hosting production level infrastructure without backups, and secondly for misrepresenting the importance of the infrastructure in an attempt to get more technical support, making them look liable for some sort of medical malpractice.

The poster probably panicked when they realised their first mistake, and thought they were showing that they were trying to get back in control. I don't think the poster was totally stupid, maybe she/he didn't understand the risks of EC2, or maybe it wasn't even their decision to have no backups --- in which case they should have pressed harder at meetings or refused to continue to work on the project. And then they panicked. We can all learn something from this.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#82

Post by troels » Sun, Apr 24, 2011, 12:18 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #53

troels wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a host-abstraction layer, so that you can deal with different providers through a uniform interface?

I'm actually thinking of that. You deploy to the service that take care of deployment, backups and transfer in down times. It would make up of it another kind of hosting company, though.

Yes, it would essentially be a hosting company with multiple providers. That in it self is a single point of failure, but at least it would give some insurance against outage of the more physical kind.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#83

Post by rbanffy » Sun, Apr 24, 2011, 2:19 PM UTC

So, they experienced a Schrödinger situation...

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#84

Post by code_duck » Sun, Apr 24, 2011, 3:39 PM UTC

This is just supplementary monitoring, not a true life-or-death situation. Everyone (the company involved included) is welcome to stop blowing it out of proportion any time.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#85

Post by GrandMasterBirt » Mon, Apr 25, 2011, 2:13 PM UTC

stick wrote: post #67

This is a combination of posters not understanding what the technology is used for and the tech guy exaggerating the urgency of the situation. Remote cardiac monitoring isn't for people who are imminently going to die of catastrophic heart attacks or who risk dropping into a fatal arrhythmia (wonky heart rhythm). In fact, there isn't even solid evidence that it saves lives. What it is used for is investigating patien…

a) what stick said. Not such a critical system.

b) Good to know from responses that amazon's paid support is crap. They'll officially tell you "were on it".

c) People are bashing this person for relying on amazon not failing all at once. I would be surprised if they hosted on amazon relying on each individual node being up 99.98% of the time. That is crazy. You build on cloud computing knowing that each one node can fail at any moment, but you build it to fall over to another node. From experience, sometimes nodes just... die... or get really unstable.

d) People bashing the dude vs offering future advice. I'm sure if his company is in deep shit, he's well aware of it.