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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

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.

iofj 11y ago
I think the original point I made stands. Hosting on Amazon's platform essentially means I risk my revenue on Amazon's uptime. Actually using their infrastructure like S3 means I don't just risk my revenue but actually get locked in. Amazon is not willing to do the same, according to their total crap SLA. That tells me a lot. And to top it all of, Amazon is famous for "eating" businesses of their customers : use their infrastructure to see how one of their customers do business, then take it over. So if it's all the same, I'd rather have a decent SLA. Furthermore this sounds a lot like Amazon's not in fact giving me anything. Your point is that they'll do the right thing because otherwise their customers would leave. Customers you said in the previous paragraph they give "the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it?". Sounds like they really care about customers doesn't it ? > You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. I can get that guarantee at 1000 datacenters and colo providers, at least. Some of which have a decent SLA. But even among cloud IAAS, both Azure and Google provide both Amazon's guarantee, and better SLAs.
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  Again, you are tunneling... I used Amazon as an example. If you actually read what I'm saying, about how Cloud businesses in general depend on meeting their guarantees and not screwing over businesses, how their superior quality is because of scale and specialization, how they are reliable because one failure would doom them and they haven't failed yet, you could see that this has nothing to do with Amazon at all. You keep arguing that Amazon is a bad provider. So what? I was never interested in that at all. I'm not comparing them to Azure or Google or the supposed "1000 datacenters and colo providers" you seem to know of. I don't care who is better or worse, I was talking about using cloud services in general. Pay attention to the topic, pay attention to what my arguments were. Amazon's SLA is utterly irrelevant to anything, what are you even trying to convince me of? None of anything you've said is remotely relevant to my point. It's like arguing about whether Ford or Toyota makes better hybrids in a discussion about whether electric cars are a good idea, I just don't care.
  - iofj 11y ago
    It's funny how you put just the opposite argument of common sense forward and present it as an axiom. The more customers a company has, the worse they treat them. Called comcast recently ? The less choice customers have the worse they're treated. How's your electricity company ? But when you can easily switch ... surely that's better right ? Hmm companies with lots of customers that can easily switch. Have you called Bank Of America recently ? And frankly, they're one of the better ones. Amazon has superior quality ? They have at best average quality as a vps provider, unless you accept their products that cause lock-in. At which point you're at their mercy, and they have even less reason to treat you well. Amazon doesn't match, say, digital ocean (especially not in the transparency in billing department. WTF). There are other reasons to pick amazon of course, but quality, not one of them. Price ... not one of them. Service ? Not one of them. Stability ? Not one of them. Geographical reach ? At the moment Amazon does better (not that it matters unless you're in Asia). One failure would doom them ? Just from memory I know two big amazon cloud failures that you could not protect from with availability zones, the ones in a single datacenter, they don't even publish. The fact that they refuse to publish single cluster failures is probably another aspect of that superior quality you mentioned. Also, you can get fucked on an ongoing basis just by getting scheduled on a machine. I guess that's part of their superior quality (a lot of VPS providers of course have this problem, others are better at it).
lkbm 11y ago
Your statements about UPS and Netflix are absolutely true, and if you're Netflix or Amazon, that's a great comfort. It's less of a comfort to non-gorillas. Yes, Amazon has to be reliable or Netflix will find someone else, but being reliable and accountable to Netflix doesn't 100% translate to being 100% reliable and accountable to my puny business. We'll reap a lot of benefits, as it translates to a great extent, but not as completely as you seem to be implying.
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  I somewhat disagree here. There is heavy competition, and Amazon might be ahead of the pack, but for most puny businesses there are alternatives. One serious screwup and all of those puny businesses would abandon Amazon for something else, because the other major players would publish it everywhere. The Netflix/Amazon relationship reminds of the "you owe the bank $100, the bank is your problem, you owe the bank $1bil, you are the bank's problem" sentiment. Netflix is probably such a big business that they are dependent on each other. On the other hand, Amazon seriously screwing a small business would be like a bank failing a normal customer's withdrawal from their deposit. The second that information went public, the bank would essentially be dead.

iofj 11y ago

I think the original point I made stands. Hosting on Amazon's platform essentially means I risk my revenue on Amazon's uptime. Actually using their infrastructure like S3 means I don't just risk my revenue but actually get locked in. Amazon is not willing to do the same, according to their total crap SLA. That tells me a lot. And to top it all of, Amazon is famous for "eating" businesses of their customers : use their infrastructure to see how one of their customers do business, then take it over. So if it's all the same, I'd rather have a decent SLA. Furthermore this sounds a lot like Amazon's not in fact giving me anything. Your point is that they'll do the right thing because otherwise their customers would leave. Customers you said in the previous paragraph they give "the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it?". Sounds like they really care about customers doesn't it ? > You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. I can get that guarantee at 1000 datacenters and colo providers, at least. Some of which have a decent SLA. But even among cloud IAAS, both Azure and Google provide both Amazon's guarantee, and better SLAs.

BookmarkSaver 11y ago
Again, you are tunneling... I used Amazon as an example. If you actually read what I'm saying, about how Cloud businesses in general depend on meeting their guarantees and not screwing over businesses, how their superior quality is because of scale and specialization, how they are reliable because one failure would doom them and they haven't failed yet, you could see that this has nothing to do with Amazon at all. You keep arguing that Amazon is a bad provider. So what? I was never interested in that at all. I'm not comparing them to Azure or Google or the supposed "1000 datacenters and colo providers" you seem to know of. I don't care who is better or worse, I was talking about using cloud services in general. Pay attention to the topic, pay attention to what my arguments were. Amazon's SLA is utterly irrelevant to anything, what are you even trying to convince me of? None of anything you've said is remotely relevant to my point. It's like arguing about whether Ford or Toyota makes better hybrids in a discussion about whether electric cars are a good idea, I just don't care.
- iofj 11y ago
  It's funny how you put just the opposite argument of common sense forward and present it as an axiom. The more customers a company has, the worse they treat them. Called comcast recently ? The less choice customers have the worse they're treated. How's your electricity company ? But when you can easily switch ... surely that's better right ? Hmm companies with lots of customers that can easily switch. Have you called Bank Of America recently ? And frankly, they're one of the better ones. Amazon has superior quality ? They have at best average quality as a vps provider, unless you accept their products that cause lock-in. At which point you're at their mercy, and they have even less reason to treat you well. Amazon doesn't match, say, digital ocean (especially not in the transparency in billing department. WTF). There are other reasons to pick amazon of course, but quality, not one of them. Price ... not one of them. Service ? Not one of them. Stability ? Not one of them. Geographical reach ? At the moment Amazon does better (not that it matters unless you're in Asia). One failure would doom them ? Just from memory I know two big amazon cloud failures that you could not protect from with availability zones, the ones in a single datacenter, they don't even publish. The fact that they refuse to publish single cluster failures is probably another aspect of that superior quality you mentioned. Also, you can get fucked on an ongoing basis just by getting scheduled on a machine. I guess that's part of their superior quality (a lot of VPS providers of course have this problem, others are better at it).

lkbm 11y ago

Your statements about UPS and Netflix are absolutely true, and if you're Netflix or Amazon, that's a great comfort. It's less of a comfort to non-gorillas. Yes, Amazon has to be reliable or Netflix will find someone else, but being reliable and accountable to Netflix doesn't 100% translate to being 100% reliable and accountable to my puny business. We'll reap a lot of benefits, as it translates to a great extent, but not as completely as you seem to be implying.

BookmarkSaver 11y ago
I somewhat disagree here. There is heavy competition, and Amazon might be ahead of the pack, but for most puny businesses there are alternatives. One serious screwup and all of those puny businesses would abandon Amazon for something else, because the other major players would publish it everywhere. The Netflix/Amazon relationship reminds of the "you owe the bank $100, the bank is your problem, you owe the bank $1bil, you are the bank's problem" sentiment. Netflix is probably such a big business that they are dependent on each other. On the other hand, Amazon seriously screwing a small business would be like a bank failing a normal customer's withdrawal from their deposit. The second that information went public, the bank would essentially be dead.