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So far most major AWS instances I’ve paid attention to have been ultimately caused by their own Rube Goldberg inspired infra. Nothing at AWS just is something,

So far most major AWS instances I’ve paid attention to have been ultimately caused by their own Rube Goldberg inspired infra. Nothing at AWS just is something, it practically all relies on something else at AWS, and when there are outages at the apparently lowest level, the issues are wide spread. With such convoluted systems, fat finger syndrome seems to be a not insignificant factor in their downtime, and the interdependence just makes it blow up. But sure. If you want to trust everything to aws you go right ahead and do that. As for rising prices - I have no idea - no company has done anything until they do it the first time. AWS doesn’t really need to increase prices to be a more expensive solution for the vast majority of companies using it. If you don’t rely on proprietary aws “solutions” in the first place, there’s no extra “time and cost” involved. It’s just running your setup process - whatever that may be - with another location, another vendor, whatever. Like I said if you want real HA you’re going to be running in multiple vendors all the time - it’s not something you’re going to say “well shit aws is down again let’s go sign up for azure”. You’re going to sit back and eat crumpets because your site is running fine in spite of aws or azure or whoever’s latest brown pants event. And to be clear I’m not suggesting using aws is a smart move over bare metal or even just regular rented virtual machines at a normal facility - the concept of HA across vendors applies the same.

scarface74 7y ago
Yes because colos never have a problem with reliability and most companies have better managed infrastructure than AWS/Azure/GCP. How many companies need higher reliability than you get from any of the cloud vendors if you architect your site to across multiple AZ’s or multiple regions? And “running your setup” means duplicating functionality on VMs where you could use managed offerings - the absolutely most expensive and least reliable way of using cloud providers and it costs more in time and resources to manage. And you are ignoring how much money you can save by not needing as many infrastructure people. Heck, half the time you can get away with having a much cheaper shared services/managed service provider. Are all of the companies big and small who are using cloud vendors proprietary solutions delusional?
- stephenr 7y ago
  I see you're a graduate of the school of strawman tactics. Of course traditional colo and rental VM hosting have outages. That's literally why I said, multiple times, if you want actual HA, you need to be using multiple vendors, regardless of what that vendor provides you - whether it's bare racks or a web GUI to "push a button to make it go now". I didn't explicitly state it, but I kind of assumed you'd realise that means different vendors in different physical DCs/locations. Complaining to me that using basic VMs in a "cloud" service is more expensive, is like complaining to a duck that water is wet. No shit, EC2 is more expensive than even a regular rented VPS/VM service from a more 'traditional' hosting service, and much more expensive than either renting or owning physical gear in a rack. I didn't suggest you use EC2 or AWS at all - but just because you use self-managed services doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the one thing a "cloud" service offers which traditional VM hosting doesn't: essentially instant spin up and time usage billing. If you want to split your workload across two or three cloud providers, and run resources split such that you have just slightly more than 100% of the resources you need for regular operations, and then when (not if) one of those providers has an outage, you increase the capacity at the other provider(s) to handle the increased load it'll handle. I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved. I don't know what motivations each company has when deciding what technologies they should use. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved. I didn’t say that you didn’t need any I said that you didn’t need “as many”. But yes, at smaller companies you can get away with no dedicated infrastructure people and just use a managed service provider. At a slightly larger company you can get away with a few people on site that manage your MSP. So you want HA by running in multiple DCs - Exactly what happens when you run in multiple AZs and/or regions. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive. So you think, Netflix for instance, who started off running all of their own servers and now are AWS biggest customers were being “naive”? Instead of thinking that all of these companies are being irrational - including major enterprises - by using cloud providers and their proprietary servers, maybe they know something that you don’t know?

scarface74 7y ago

Yes because colos never have a problem with reliability and most companies have better managed infrastructure than AWS/Azure/GCP. How many companies need higher reliability than you get from any of the cloud vendors if you architect your site to across multiple AZ’s or multiple regions? And “running your setup” means duplicating functionality on VMs where you could use managed offerings - the absolutely most expensive and least reliable way of using cloud providers and it costs more in time and resources to manage. And you are ignoring how much money you can save by not needing as many infrastructure people. Heck, half the time you can get away with having a much cheaper shared services/managed service provider. Are all of the companies big and small who are using cloud vendors proprietary solutions delusional?

stephenr 7y ago
I see you're a graduate of the school of strawman tactics. Of course traditional colo and rental VM hosting have outages. That's literally why I said, multiple times, if you want actual HA, you need to be using multiple vendors, regardless of what that vendor provides you - whether it's bare racks or a web GUI to "push a button to make it go now". I didn't explicitly state it, but I kind of assumed you'd realise that means different vendors in different physical DCs/locations. Complaining to me that using basic VMs in a "cloud" service is more expensive, is like complaining to a duck that water is wet. No shit, EC2 is more expensive than even a regular rented VPS/VM service from a more 'traditional' hosting service, and much more expensive than either renting or owning physical gear in a rack. I didn't suggest you use EC2 or AWS at all - but just because you use self-managed services doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the one thing a "cloud" service offers which traditional VM hosting doesn't: essentially instant spin up and time usage billing. If you want to split your workload across two or three cloud providers, and run resources split such that you have just slightly more than 100% of the resources you need for regular operations, and then when (not if) one of those providers has an outage, you increase the capacity at the other provider(s) to handle the increased load it'll handle. I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved. I don't know what motivations each company has when deciding what technologies they should use. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved. I didn’t say that you didn’t need any I said that you didn’t need “as many”. But yes, at smaller companies you can get away with no dedicated infrastructure people and just use a managed service provider. At a slightly larger company you can get away with a few people on site that manage your MSP. So you want HA by running in multiple DCs - Exactly what happens when you run in multiple AZs and/or regions. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive. So you think, Netflix for instance, who started off running all of their own servers and now are AWS biggest customers were being “naive”? Instead of thinking that all of these companies are being irrational - including major enterprises - by using cloud providers and their proprietary servers, maybe they know something that you don’t know?