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Eh... I think that the maybes you are using are a little bit misleading. When a company sells space in their "cloud", like maybe Microsoft or Amazon, there is a

Eh... I think that the maybes you are using are a little bit misleading. When a company sells space in their "cloud", like maybe Microsoft or Amazon, there is a business guarantee that goes along with it. If Amazon were to randomly lose a big chuck of Netflix data, AWS's business would tank immediately. AWS is a giant system that uses its scale and number of customers to efficiently provide a more stable system at a lower cost than all of those individual customers could achieve by building and maintaining their own IT. I think it is sort of like a delivery system. If USPS or FedEx or USP started losing a massive number of packages (I know that they do lose some) then they would get abandoned, just like "Cloud" companies have an incentive to maintain a baseline level of quality. The alternative is that every business would have to create their own shipping services. I think it makes sense to assume that in most cases, unless the business is already massive enough to warrant it, that it is cheaper and more reliable to use the aggregate, dedicated ones for hire. The "Cloud" will be cheaper than individual implementations, and it won't be nearly as suspect to individual implementation errors because the identical system will have been proven by many other customers (otherwise it would be abandoned).

fleitz 11y ago
> If Amazon were to randomly lose a big chuck of Netflix data, AWS's business would tank immediately. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/ AWS is the new Microsoft / IBM, nobody ever got fired for picking AWS.
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  There is a difference between a service outages, which do happen and are unavoidable no matter who builds your system, and actually losing permanent data. Which is Amazon does guarantee only 99.95% uptime. There is a difference in a discussion about trusting the Cloud with your data and services between it going down briefly on occasion (somewhat acceptable, within very narrow limits) and actually losing data or longterm traffic because of a service failure. Seriously breaching the SLA causes compensation as well as a big loss of reputation and business, going down for a couple hours once a year is hardly the type of instability that would terrify most online businesses, nor is it something that individual companies are able to avoid themselves.
iofj 11y ago
That must be why Amazon's SLA is defined as follows[1] : If amazon loses more than 3 datacenters (only total loss of external connectivity for all of your instances in an entire availability zone, or total loss of hard disk access, again only counts if all your instances completely lose hard disk/EBS access) for more than 45 minutes in a month you get 10% of what you pay as a voucher for future ec2 usage. If they lose it for more than 7 hours you get 30%. So no, Amazon, or at least their legal department, does not trust their own competency. Or at least, they're not willing to risk any revenue on that, but they're willing to give you a small future discount to encourage you to restart using the service. Oh and you only get that if you explicitly ask for it. If they lose your data on EBS/S3/Dynamo/..., you get nothing. So having any data exclusively on any Amazon service should be cause for getting fired, and this of course also means that using Dynamo for storing anything non-trivial is a big no-no from a disaster recovery standpoint. So I have to say, I would suggest you do not trust Amazon with either your data, nor with keeping your site online. Yes, historically their performance has been better than this, but ... This reads worse than the SLAs on internet connectivity from places like level3 and cogent (pay 10% less if they fuck up completely for more than 2 days). [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it? Second, if a company on AWS was severely impacted by a genuine Amazon screw-up, the compensation SLA is the least of Amazon's concerns. It would be like if UPS lost 20% of Amazon deliveries for one day. They wouldn't be nearly as concerned with the explicit liability of compensating Amazon for those deliveries, however much they guarantee for them contractually, they would be far more concerned with everyone immediately switch to another shipping company because they could no longer trust UPS. That is the motivation. Second, you've completely ignored the actual key points. For one thing, "Cloud" companies make their business by providing a stable service. You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. That is a huge amount of statistical reliability. Compared to hiring your own IT department and cobbling together your own system, that is actually really good indicator. Second, the cost difference is potentially massive. Again, it is for similar reasons that shipping via UPS is a much better deal than shipping via your own private distribution network. You might have to still pay some people to handle your own inventory from its source (like you'd have to have some people to work on your system in the cloud) but you'd be taking advantage of a much larger, more efficient system instead of having to build and maintain your own.

fleitz 11y ago

> If Amazon were to randomly lose a big chuck of Netflix data, AWS's business would tank immediately. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/ AWS is the new Microsoft / IBM, nobody ever got fired for picking AWS.

BookmarkSaver 11y ago
There is a difference between a service outages, which do happen and are unavoidable no matter who builds your system, and actually losing permanent data. Which is Amazon does guarantee only 99.95% uptime. There is a difference in a discussion about trusting the Cloud with your data and services between it going down briefly on occasion (somewhat acceptable, within very narrow limits) and actually losing data or longterm traffic because of a service failure. Seriously breaching the SLA causes compensation as well as a big loss of reputation and business, going down for a couple hours once a year is hardly the type of instability that would terrify most online businesses, nor is it something that individual companies are able to avoid themselves.

iofj 11y ago

That must be why Amazon's SLA is defined as follows[1] : If amazon loses more than 3 datacenters (only total loss of external connectivity for all of your instances in an entire availability zone, or total loss of hard disk access, again only counts if all your instances completely lose hard disk/EBS access) for more than 45 minutes in a month you get 10% of what you pay as a voucher for future ec2 usage. If they lose it for more than 7 hours you get 30%. So no, Amazon, or at least their legal department, does not trust their own competency. Or at least, they're not willing to risk any revenue on that, but they're willing to give you a small future discount to encourage you to restart using the service. Oh and you only get that if you explicitly ask for it. If they lose your data on EBS/S3/Dynamo/..., you get nothing. So having any data exclusively on any Amazon service should be cause for getting fired, and this of course also means that using Dynamo for storing anything non-trivial is a big no-no from a disaster recovery standpoint. So I have to say, I would suggest you do not trust Amazon with either your data, nor with keeping your site online. Yes, historically their performance has been better than this, but ... This reads worse than the SLAs on internet connectivity from places like level3 and cogent (pay 10% less if they fuck up completely for more than 2 days). [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/

BookmarkSaver 11y ago
You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it? Second, if a company on AWS was severely impacted by a genuine Amazon screw-up, the compensation SLA is the least of Amazon's concerns. It would be like if UPS lost 20% of Amazon deliveries for one day. They wouldn't be nearly as concerned with the explicit liability of compensating Amazon for those deliveries, however much they guarantee for them contractually, they would be far more concerned with everyone immediately switch to another shipping company because they could no longer trust UPS. That is the motivation. Second, you've completely ignored the actual key points. For one thing, "Cloud" companies make their business by providing a stable service. You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. That is a huge amount of statistical reliability. Compared to hiring your own IT department and cobbling together your own system, that is actually really good indicator. Second, the cost difference is potentially massive. Again, it is for similar reasons that shipping via UPS is a much better deal than shipping via your own private distribution network. You might have to still pay some people to handle your own inventory from its source (like you'd have to have some people to work on your system in the cloud) but you'd be taking advantage of a much larger, more efficient system instead of having to build and maintain your own.