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How would this have helped? In the event of an AWS outage, you have all-hands of one of the biggest tech companies in the world working to fix your infrastruct

by cle 11y ago

How would this have helped? In the event of an AWS outage, you have all-hands of one of the biggest tech companies in the world working to fix your infrastructure. This outage lasted a few hours, wouldn't it take you that long to switch providers anyway? If you don't abdicate responsibility for maintaining the infrastructure, you lose a lot of the operational benefits of using a cloud service...in general, I think it makes a lot more sense to embrace whatever cloud provider you're using (provided you made a good choice) so that you can focus your efforts on your product and not on maintaining infrastructure.

kordless 11y ago
> you have all-hands of one of the biggest tech companies in the world working to fix your infrastructure No, they are fixing their infrastructure. The point here is that all single provider systems are destined for periodic failure. Not relying on one single provider is, in theory, a service's means of providing higher reliability. This is the general argument for regions and availability zones on Amazon, but that relies on trusting there is no single point of failure with the system (i.e. inside Amazon). I've worked for several companies who run the majority of their services on AWS, yet maintain functional systems on other providers in the case of an AWS outage.
rdtsc 11y ago
> wouldn't it take you that long to switch providers anyway? It might, or might not, depends how you built it. > you have all-hands of one of the biggest tech companies in the world working to fix your infrastructure. And it still was out for hours... You might see it as a great success, but you can also interpret it as "what good is it, even if with so many people behind the scenes they still failed for hours...". The problem is that because that services ends up being embedded in so many services and products, half the internet ends being down. Even Amazon dogfoods their own stuff so services rely on each other. Dynamo is down, maybe SQS will be down or analytics as well.

by cle 11y ago

kordless 11y ago

> you have all-hands of one of the biggest tech companies in the world working to fix your infrastructure No, they are fixing their infrastructure. The point here is that all single provider systems are destined for periodic failure. Not relying on one single provider is, in theory, a service's means of providing higher reliability. This is the general argument for regions and availability zones on Amazon, but that relies on trusting there is no single point of failure with the system (i.e. inside Amazon). I've worked for several companies who run the majority of their services on AWS, yet maintain functional systems on other providers in the case of an AWS outage.

rdtsc 11y ago

> wouldn't it take you that long to switch providers anyway? It might, or might not, depends how you built it. > you have all-hands of one of the biggest tech companies in the world working to fix your infrastructure. And it still was out for hours... You might see it as a great success, but you can also interpret it as "what good is it, even if with so many people behind the scenes they still failed for hours...". The problem is that because that services ends up being embedded in so many services and products, half the internet ends being down. Even Amazon dogfoods their own stuff so services rely on each other. Dynamo is down, maybe SQS will be down or analytics as well.