True. You have to design for failure with AWS. Which does have a large amount of cognitive overhead. If you don't design for failure you're going to have a bad

True. You have to design for failure with AWS. Which does have a large amount of cognitive overhead. If you don't design for failure you're going to have a bad time. However, designing for strict SLAs is not impossible with AWS. You just need to have multi-region redundancy and you can get very very good with multi-availability zone redundancy. I have no excuse for the IAM outage, it sucked for our ops team. I guess my only two consultations are: 1. We haven't had a customer-visible outage due to AWS in years because we follow best practices (which does cost more - but see my previous point on more smaller machines vs many large machines) 2. If we were running our own authentication and access control system similar to IAM, it too could have an outage. But I agree, that is a bad thing about AWS.