There's this short paper called "How Complex Systems Fail" [1] and one of the points is that "Complex systems run in degraded mode." Basically it means that eve

There's this short paper called "How Complex Systems Fail" [1] and one of the points is that "Complex systems run in degraded mode." Basically it means that everything is always partially on-fire at any give time. But keeping a "everything's OK" flag flying is a big part of a marketing image. I hate this too, but I get why they do it. A status page that shows things are constantly 1-10% broken doesn't inspire confidence. For example the AWS "all green" event you mention, misleading public-facing information is the bread and butter of the seemingly never-ending line of people that want to browbeat me about switching to $cloud_service_x. I'm not saying AWS isn't great, nor making a point specifically about AWS, but how do you convince people that they're a better cost:value ratio than having a good ops team that keeps our internal-facing services redundant across the basements of the three buildings closest to me? By pretending like the fires don't happen and hiding the ops cost behind ridiculous hourly hardware rates. [1] http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...