4 ms·

AWS has amazing marketing the truth of the matter is AWS Region has worse downtime than a single top tier DC. Mainly due to nightmarish complexity of their cont

by qaq 7y ago

AWS has amazing marketing the truth of the matter is AWS Region has worse downtime than a single top tier DC. Mainly due to nightmarish complexity of their control layer. They had outages that lasted many hours in a row multiple times. You need to carefully separate marketing claims from operational reality and actual track record. When US East has major issues there is not enough spare capacity to spin up everything that was running there in other regions.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
Amazon has some of the best uptime in the world, especially for basic services like EC2, even if you’re only considering the least reliable regions like US East. Their last major event was in 2017. There are few providers in the world that can compete with them in that respect, and there’s nothing that you or I or anybody else could build with 6-10 servers that could come close. If you were planning to try exceed their service levels yourself, there is no conceivable use case where a small to medium sized company could justify the requisite expenses to provide the redundancy and operational coverage necessary. What you are actually talking about is that you can meet your own needs without AWS, which is entirely plausible, but completely different from the absurd claims that you can build a low budget infrastructure that exceeds their service levels. That claim is so ridiculous, you might as well be saying that you can make a car faster than Toyota can, or that you can run a two minute mile.
- qaq 7y ago
  Our AWS monthly spend is deep 7 figures over the last 10 years our colo projects had better uptime than AWS US East. You keep living in the marketing bubble for AWS.
  - tekknik 7y ago
    I would love to see some data here. What service outages? What’s your infrastructure like? What’s your DCs uptime?
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      There’s a few confounding factors to address before you get to the believability of the claims (which are remarkably dubious). For starters they’ve only spoken about the AWS region which is least reliable by design (as it is the first to receive new features), and they’re talking about a 10 year time span (AWS in 2010 was much less reliable than it is today). It’s also not really clear what they’re talking about when they say AWS. If it’s just the core features you’d need to forklift an on-prem service into the cloud, then the claims are especially frivolous, but the SLA difference between EC2 and AWS Ground Station is more than an order of magnitude. Even if their claims are true (which I certainly don’t believe they are), you’d be more likely to get better uptime than EC2 with a small on-prem setup through dumb luck rather than through deliberate planning. Something still has to go wrong for you to have an outage, and you’re more likely to get an incredible lucky streak than you are to outperform their entire AWS infrastructure capability with a few people and half a rack of servers.
      - qaq 7y ago
        Are you from AWS marketing :) ? AWS SLA is meaningless as there are no meaningful penalties.
    - qaq 7y ago
      AWS outages you can google details 2011 April 21 Outage 2011 August 8 Outage 2012 June 29 Service disruption 2012 October 22 Outage 2012 December 24 Outage 2013 September 13 Outage 2014 November 26 Service disruption 2015 September 20 Outage 2016 June 5 Outage 2017 February 28 Outage 2018 March 2 Service degradation 2018 May 31 Outage
      - tekknik 7y ago
        There’s a terrible amount more information you’re missing here. What services were you using that went down? (not what services went down, how were you affected) What is your availability for your DC? it seems you’re being light in the details and perhaps there’s a reason why.
tekknik 7y ago
with high availability you don’t wait for an outage to spin up new resources, at that point it’s too late. it’s by definition not highly available and if you build infrastructure this way then you can’t blame AWS for an outage
- qaq 7y ago
  So you have say 3 Region deployment are you saying that you are running 50% more instances than you need in 2 regions that are not US East to make sure you will have capacity when US East goes down :) ? I somehow seriously doubt that.
  - tekknik 7y ago
    so you’re suggesting entire regions go down at once or one of the AZs? An entire region doesn’t go down. So again, you are not building for high availability.
    - qaq 7y ago
      US East as a whole went down several times plus a number of incidents when S3 or other critical services went down for the whole region.
      - tekknik 7y ago
        i don’t remember seeing us-east go down in its entirely. show me supporting evidence or this is FUD. multiple DCs physically separated, different flood planes make up a region. it’s not easy to down an entire region. the biggest event they had, the S3 one you’re talking about, effected only 2 AZs and didn’t allow new EC2 instances to start and iirc some EC2 instances failed as well. this is a far cry from the entirely of us-east having an outage.

by qaq 7y ago

AmericanChopper 7y ago

Amazon has some of the best uptime in the world, especially for basic services like EC2, even if you’re only considering the least reliable regions like US East. Their last major event was in 2017. There are few providers in the world that can compete with them in that respect, and there’s nothing that you or I or anybody else could build with 6-10 servers that could come close. If you were planning to try exceed their service levels yourself, there is no conceivable use case where a small to medium sized company could justify the requisite expenses to provide the redundancy and operational coverage necessary. What you are actually talking about is that you can meet your own needs without AWS, which is entirely plausible, but completely different from the absurd claims that you can build a low budget infrastructure that exceeds their service levels. That claim is so ridiculous, you might as well be saying that you can make a car faster than Toyota can, or that you can run a two minute mile.

qaq 7y ago
Our AWS monthly spend is deep 7 figures over the last 10 years our colo projects had better uptime than AWS US East. You keep living in the marketing bubble for AWS.
- tekknik 7y ago
  I would love to see some data here. What service outages? What’s your infrastructure like? What’s your DCs uptime?
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    There’s a few confounding factors to address before you get to the believability of the claims (which are remarkably dubious). For starters they’ve only spoken about the AWS region which is least reliable by design (as it is the first to receive new features), and they’re talking about a 10 year time span (AWS in 2010 was much less reliable than it is today). It’s also not really clear what they’re talking about when they say AWS. If it’s just the core features you’d need to forklift an on-prem service into the cloud, then the claims are especially frivolous, but the SLA difference between EC2 and AWS Ground Station is more than an order of magnitude. Even if their claims are true (which I certainly don’t believe they are), you’d be more likely to get better uptime than EC2 with a small on-prem setup through dumb luck rather than through deliberate planning. Something still has to go wrong for you to have an outage, and you’re more likely to get an incredible lucky streak than you are to outperform their entire AWS infrastructure capability with a few people and half a rack of servers.
    - qaq 7y ago
      Are you from AWS marketing :) ? AWS SLA is meaningless as there are no meaningful penalties.
  - qaq 7y ago
    AWS outages you can google details 2011 April 21 Outage 2011 August 8 Outage 2012 June 29 Service disruption 2012 October 22 Outage 2012 December 24 Outage 2013 September 13 Outage 2014 November 26 Service disruption 2015 September 20 Outage 2016 June 5 Outage 2017 February 28 Outage 2018 March 2 Service degradation 2018 May 31 Outage
    - tekknik 7y ago
      There’s a terrible amount more information you’re missing here. What services were you using that went down? (not what services went down, how were you affected) What is your availability for your DC? it seems you’re being light in the details and perhaps there’s a reason why.

tekknik 7y ago

with high availability you don’t wait for an outage to spin up new resources, at that point it’s too late. it’s by definition not highly available and if you build infrastructure this way then you can’t blame AWS for an outage

qaq 7y ago
So you have say 3 Region deployment are you saying that you are running 50% more instances than you need in 2 regions that are not US East to make sure you will have capacity when US East goes down :) ? I somehow seriously doubt that.
- tekknik 7y ago
  so you’re suggesting entire regions go down at once or one of the AZs? An entire region doesn’t go down. So again, you are not building for high availability.
  - qaq 7y ago
    US East as a whole went down several times plus a number of incidents when S3 or other critical services went down for the whole region.
    - tekknik 7y ago
      i don’t remember seeing us-east go down in its entirely. show me supporting evidence or this is FUD. multiple DCs physically separated, different flood planes make up a region. it’s not easy to down an entire region. the biggest event they had, the S3 one you’re talking about, effected only 2 AZs and didn’t allow new EC2 instances to start and iirc some EC2 instances failed as well. this is a far cry from the entirely of us-east having an outage.