4 ms·

NodeJS and Javascript yes, but critical things absolutely run on AWS.

Tom4hawk 10y ago
Of course it depends on your definition of "critical". There was AWS outage ~2 months ago and banking systems around the world worked pretty well, same with military, big factories didn't stop because of this outage, planes were still flying etc. It was inconvenient for some people (quite frankly I didn't even notice anything - I've read about that in my RSS reader few days later ;)) but nobody died(excluding heart attacks), countries didn't collapse, wars didn't start because of this.
- openasocket 10y ago
  The outage was for S3, and only in the us-east-1 region. Any critical system should have multi-region fail over. Yeah, factories and planes and stuff are critical and wouldn't use AWS, mostly because those are embedded systems that shouldn't even rely on an Internet connection. But as for banking, Capital One is a huge AWS customer for example. DISCLAIMER: probably should have mentioned this earlier, I'm an AWS employee :)
apaprocki 10y ago
We're one of the largest JS users in the world, and I'm pretty sure we'd fall into the category of "critical" (in terms of impact, not end-of-the-world).
myrandomcomment 10y ago
Running on AWS and doing it correctly so that one of the many regional outages does not cause you an issue is really hard and is a software problem. On the other hand using a system of tested proven code that runs on a system that is redundant by design at the lowest level of component (a mainframe cluster) where the software does not have to have knowledge of the redundancy is a bit simpler. I really think people miss this very important point. Redundancy is transparent for 99.9999% of the software you run on the old big iron systems. For something like a modern application on AWS you have to know, understand and code for the infrastructure.
- openasocket 10y ago
  We're talking about two different issues here. First is the architecture/software of a mainframe system, with all of its redundancy and scaling. Second is the issue of hosting and maintaining your own hardware. On the first issue I'll admit I don't know enough about mainframes, perhaps they provide redundancy transparently to the programmer, but I'm a bit skeptical. Perhaps you simply think the redundancy is transparent because you understand the mainframe infrastructure deeply and internalized it? The second issue I'll push back on. If you just want to host your servers on EC2, the SLA is 99.95% uptime. So that's about 4 hours of downtime due to outage a year. Put your servers in a multi-AZ autoscaling group and you're pretty solid. Bonus points for having autoscaling groups in more than one region. If you don't want to use any of the other services AWS provides, you can simply use them as a basic hosting service and get pretty amazing uptime. I've never used an old mainframe system, can you get greater uptime than that? Including hardware failures, power outages, network outages?
  - myrandomcomment 10y ago
    There was one point in my life when I was working for a large mainframe company ;) A bank wanted to move a system to a new site. The uptime on that system was 11 years. Uptime on a mainframe system is pretty much considered 100% 4 hours downtime a year is just way to much for some systems. Just have a google for "mainframe uptime". Yes the software is abstracted from the HW redundancy. You can pull CPUs with running code in systems and things keep working. Really - walk up and pull the CPU out. No impact to running code. Heck you can run your private cloud on one: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-ibm-is-still-building-mainframes.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-...

Of course it depends on your definition of "critical". There was AWS outage ~2 months ago and banking systems around the world worked pretty well, same with military, big factories didn't stop because of this outage, planes were still flying etc. It was inconvenient for some people (quite frankly I didn't even notice anything - I've read about that in my RSS reader few days later ;)) but nobody died(excluding heart attacks), countries didn't collapse, wars didn't start because of this.

openasocket 10y ago
The outage was for S3, and only in the us-east-1 region. Any critical system should have multi-region fail over. Yeah, factories and planes and stuff are critical and wouldn't use AWS, mostly because those are embedded systems that shouldn't even rely on an Internet connection. But as for banking, Capital One is a huge AWS customer for example. DISCLAIMER: probably should have mentioned this earlier, I'm an AWS employee :)

apaprocki 10y ago

We're one of the largest JS users in the world, and I'm pretty sure we'd fall into the category of "critical" (in terms of impact, not end-of-the-world).

myrandomcomment 10y ago

Running on AWS and doing it correctly so that one of the many regional outages does not cause you an issue is really hard and is a software problem. On the other hand using a system of tested proven code that runs on a system that is redundant by design at the lowest level of component (a mainframe cluster) where the software does not have to have knowledge of the redundancy is a bit simpler. I really think people miss this very important point. Redundancy is transparent for 99.9999% of the software you run on the old big iron systems. For something like a modern application on AWS you have to know, understand and code for the infrastructure.

openasocket 10y ago
We're talking about two different issues here. First is the architecture/software of a mainframe system, with all of its redundancy and scaling. Second is the issue of hosting and maintaining your own hardware. On the first issue I'll admit I don't know enough about mainframes, perhaps they provide redundancy transparently to the programmer, but I'm a bit skeptical. Perhaps you simply think the redundancy is transparent because you understand the mainframe infrastructure deeply and internalized it? The second issue I'll push back on. If you just want to host your servers on EC2, the SLA is 99.95% uptime. So that's about 4 hours of downtime due to outage a year. Put your servers in a multi-AZ autoscaling group and you're pretty solid. Bonus points for having autoscaling groups in more than one region. If you don't want to use any of the other services AWS provides, you can simply use them as a basic hosting service and get pretty amazing uptime. I've never used an old mainframe system, can you get greater uptime than that? Including hardware failures, power outages, network outages?
- myrandomcomment 10y ago
  There was one point in my life when I was working for a large mainframe company ;) A bank wanted to move a system to a new site. The uptime on that system was 11 years. Uptime on a mainframe system is pretty much considered 100% 4 hours downtime a year is just way to much for some systems. Just have a google for "mainframe uptime". Yes the software is abstracted from the HW redundancy. You can pull CPUs with running code in systems and things keep working. Really - walk up and pull the CPU out. No impact to running code. Heck you can run your private cloud on one: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-ibm-is-still-building-mainframes.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-...