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Ya, it bothers me that their status messages for major outages are simply "elevated error rates".
by gschier 11y ago
Ya, it bothers me that their status messages for major outages are simply "elevated error rates".
- cperciva 11y agoI'm sure "elevated error rates" is the first alarm which goes off. And once they've put that description onto the status page, they're probably more worried about getting it fixed than going back and changing the wording.
- mrsirduke 11y agoThey should worry about that a lot. Amazon are notoriously bad at communicating during outages. They've gotten better, but they're big enough that it should have priority.
- cperciva 11y agoI agree. I was speculating, not trying to defend. :-)
- Perdition 11y agoAmazon isn't a couple of guys in a garage. They have hordes of administrative personnel who could be tasked to update a status page. Companies 1/1000th the size of Amazon can manage it.
- cperciva 11y agoYes and no. Sure, Amazon has administrative personnel. Sure, some of those administrative personnel would probably be happy to get paid extra to carry a pager and be summoned to work at 3AM to update a status page. But the last thing you want to do is put inaccurate information onto a status page; so mere administrative personnel isn't enough -- you'd need people who understand enough about the system to be able to write about it without introducing errors. I'm guessing that the intersection of "administrative personnel", "willing to carry pagers" and "understand the internals of AWS services" is a very small set.
- seiji 11y agoThis is a situation where "we pay you, now do as you're told" comes in handy. Not every job can be full of self-directed aspirational spiritual awakenings. If that were the case, nobody would deliver my dinner on a bike when it's -20ºF outside.
- Perdition 11y ago>I'm guessing that the intersection of "administrative personnel", "willing to carry pagers" and "understand the internals of AWS services" is a very small set Being a non-engineer doesn't mean they don't know anything about the technology. And they don't need to know the internals, just enough to convey information from the engineers managers to the public. Plenty of other organizations manage resolving issues while transmitting information about the issue to other stakeholders. Also, most administrative personnel have far less job opportunities than engineers. If they can get the engineers to carry pagers they can get a PR minion to carry one.
- cmdkeen 11y agoExcept "willing to carry pagers" is currently the basis of employment at Amazon, and not just for AWS but for whole chunks of their technical business. It's one of the many reasons why they have a pretty dire reputation (see plenty of discussions on here from former Amazon employees). They also claim to have "customer obsession" as a leadership principle, this whole thread is an excellent example of that being failed in a big way.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- codeonfire 11y agoYou would be surprised to learn just how few people run your favorite web service.
- nmjohn 11y agoWhats frustrating is when you have customers who are also down because of the outage - but when you say Amazon is experiencing severe outages causing 50% of our requests to be dropped and there's not much we can do, it makes us look pretty bad when they they go to the amazon dashboard and only see "Elevated Error Rates."
- ranman 11y agoOften times it's just that though. Just because many customers are experiencing something doesn't mean ALL customers are experiencing something. When I worked there what the media would describe as a major outage was really less than 1% of one region... this particular instance seems pretty odd though.