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I don't think the analogy is correct: suppose that John needed to buy life saving medicines. Would his course of action be reasonable and rational? No, because

by sklivvz1971 16y ago

I don't think the analogy is correct: suppose that John needed to buy life saving medicines. Would his course of action be reasonable and rational? No, because he would be dead. On mission critical systems you make damn well sure in advance you have a backup plan (or more if needed). John should have bought an extra set of medicines, and AWS should have had better backup plans - it seems to me that if it's taking so long to bring the systems up, there must be something not really well thought of there.

somic 16y ago
The post was not directed at AWS. A "normal accident" (one that can't be foreseen, usually due to confluence of factors and bad luck) happened and they are dealing with it. My post was directed at folks who said "web sites that went down as a result of such unprecedented EC2 problem made an engineering mistake by not building to be able to withstand." Again - I am emphasizing "engineering mistake", not business mistake or funding mistake or resource allocation mistake. My point is there are things you rationally protect against. But at some point, putting up defenses against more and more bad things stops being rational. For different systems this point (where it stops being rational) is different.