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What the hell? Why is everyone taking responsibilty and giving amazon a free ride? I'm a firm believer that only victims make excuses, and it's admirable to ta

by dpcan 16y ago

What the hell? Why is everyone taking responsibilty and giving amazon a free ride? I'm a firm believer that only victims make excuses, and it's admirable to take responsibility, and maybe they should have more redundancy in place, but the way aws has been advertised, most of us felt this kind of thing should never happen even without a 100% uptime guarantee. So, take 100% of the responsibility, but I wouldn't think any less of heroku if they only took 50%.

spicyj 16y ago
Because Heroku isn't positioned as a way to manage your EC2 instances, it's a whole hosting solution. How much more confusing would it be for customers if Heroku said that they take responsibility for downtime that's not Amazon's fault? What counts as Amazon's fault? What about customers that know only Rails and don't care about how Heroku works on the backend?
- dpcan 16y ago
  I get what they are doing, and I would probably handle it the same way, but I think it is perfectly ok for them to place some blame here as their downtime WAS because aws was down technically. I think they took it too far by taking 100% of the blame. I'm on heroku's side, I don't think it was fair to themselves to take 100% pf the blame.
  - elliottcarlson 16y ago
    As a developer who uses AWS, it's complicated, but I agree that Heroku is at 100% fault. If I were providing a paid service and my dedicated servers went offline due to some reason (let's say the fiber line gets cut by road maintenance crews) - my customers wouldn't care what happened - perhaps some will offer sympathy - but in the end it's my fault, and my responsibility to offer any kind of contingency plan - which generally includes load balancing over multiple datacenters etc. The same view should have been taken here and too much reliance was set on one region (even though Amazon promised it would be safe - this is their fault ;)). In the end, they should take full blame and now learn from their mistakes.
    - learc83 16y ago
      The thing is, multiple availability zones are in multiple data centers. We now know that they have a common failure point, but how could anyone have known that before it happened. For all we know multiple regions could have an undiscovered common failure point. Don't get me wrong. Heroku isn't entirely blameless--I had a production app that was down for about 12 hours.
    - dpcan 16y ago
      I'm just saying it isn't fair to Heroku to take 100% responsibility. Do you now have to go to the customers of YOUR app hosted at Heroku and take 100% of the blame? Or do you tell them it was Heroku? Were YOU using more hosts than just Heroku? Where does it end? Is it 100% your customers' fault for using your service and not using multiple services that match your service to be redundant? I'm just making conversation here now, but I feel like Heroku did not have to go this far.
      - dholowiski 16y ago
        Yes. If I have an app that I host on Heroku and it goes down, it's MY fault for not putting in place the appropriate backups. I would apologize to my customers and offer them a refund for the downtime. I would not blame Heroku, or Amazon. Do you think my (hypothetical) paying customers care if my hosting provider goes down? No Fking way.
        dpcan 16y ago
        As someone who has been in the position of having to explain to my customers that our host went down, yes, they did understand, and because I had shown them through the years how hard I worked fir them not one expected a refund or anything. They knew that part of what they were paying me for was to fix these problems when the inevitably would come up. I'm not saying this will work for everyone, but I believe a lot of people are starting to understand the risks of doing business in the cloud, and the truth of the matter is, some patients is required.
      - elliottcarlson 16y ago
dholowiski 16y ago
I pay Heroku to host my rails apps, not Amazon. I don't give a flying fk what kind of back end infrastructure they use, as long as people can get to my app. It is surprising they don't talk refunds for the downtime, if they are taking responsibility. I'd imagine we will see this coming soon?
- dpcan 16y ago
  So you are saying if they are taking 100% of the responsibility they assume 100% of the liability? This is exactly why I'm suggesting they may have put their foot in their mouth. SOME of the fault reasonably lies with Amazon in my opinion, and I personally would not have cared if they took 50%. That's all really.
  - RyanKearney 16y ago
    What about this example. You have Acme Corp Datacenters who sell dedicated servers to their customers. If Acme Corp has a network outage because their single Comcast connection went down because Comcast was having some routing errors, the customers who are effected go to Acme Corp. It isn't the customers fault that Acme Corp wasn't prepared to deal with a downed connection and setup a redundant network. In this example, think of Amazon as Comcast and Acme Corp as Heroku. Heroku wasn't prepared to handle this type of failure, so they're at fault.
    - tzs 16y ago
      By that argument, the customers of Heroku who weren't prepared to handle Heroku's failure were at fault. They should have had alternate rails hosting lined up.
      - RyanKearney 16y ago
        Well it depends on what Heroku's SLA was, if any. If Heroku stated 100% uptime grantee, then Heroku would be to blame for not living up to their 100% uptime. If Heroku said hey listen, we can't guarantee any amount of uptime so be prepared and someone were to host some "mission critical" information on Heroku then yeah it would be the customers fault.

by dpcan 16y ago

spicyj 16y ago

Because Heroku isn't positioned as a way to manage your EC2 instances, it's a whole hosting solution. How much more confusing would it be for customers if Heroku said that they take responsibility for downtime that's not Amazon's fault? What counts as Amazon's fault? What about customers that know only Rails and don't care about how Heroku works on the backend?

dpcan 16y ago
I get what they are doing, and I would probably handle it the same way, but I think it is perfectly ok for them to place some blame here as their downtime WAS because aws was down technically. I think they took it too far by taking 100% of the blame. I'm on heroku's side, I don't think it was fair to themselves to take 100% pf the blame.
- elliottcarlson 16y ago
  As a developer who uses AWS, it's complicated, but I agree that Heroku is at 100% fault. If I were providing a paid service and my dedicated servers went offline due to some reason (let's say the fiber line gets cut by road maintenance crews) - my customers wouldn't care what happened - perhaps some will offer sympathy - but in the end it's my fault, and my responsibility to offer any kind of contingency plan - which generally includes load balancing over multiple datacenters etc. The same view should have been taken here and too much reliance was set on one region (even though Amazon promised it would be safe - this is their fault ;)). In the end, they should take full blame and now learn from their mistakes.
  - learc83 16y ago
    The thing is, multiple availability zones are in multiple data centers. We now know that they have a common failure point, but how could anyone have known that before it happened. For all we know multiple regions could have an undiscovered common failure point. Don't get me wrong. Heroku isn't entirely blameless--I had a production app that was down for about 12 hours.
  - dpcan 16y ago
    I'm just saying it isn't fair to Heroku to take 100% responsibility. Do you now have to go to the customers of YOUR app hosted at Heroku and take 100% of the blame? Or do you tell them it was Heroku? Were YOU using more hosts than just Heroku? Where does it end? Is it 100% your customers' fault for using your service and not using multiple services that match your service to be redundant? I'm just making conversation here now, but I feel like Heroku did not have to go this far.
    - dholowiski 16y ago
      Yes. If I have an app that I host on Heroku and it goes down, it's MY fault for not putting in place the appropriate backups. I would apologize to my customers and offer them a refund for the downtime. I would not blame Heroku, or Amazon. Do you think my (hypothetical) paying customers care if my hosting provider goes down? No Fking way.
      - dpcan 16y ago
        As someone who has been in the position of having to explain to my customers that our host went down, yes, they did understand, and because I had shown them through the years how hard I worked fir them not one expected a refund or anything. They knew that part of what they were paying me for was to fix these problems when the inevitably would come up. I'm not saying this will work for everyone, but I believe a lot of people are starting to understand the risks of doing business in the cloud, and the truth of the matter is, some patients is required.
    - elliottcarlson 16y ago

dholowiski 16y ago

I pay Heroku to host my rails apps, not Amazon. I don't give a flying fk what kind of back end infrastructure they use, as long as people can get to my app. It is surprising they don't talk refunds for the downtime, if they are taking responsibility. I'd imagine we will see this coming soon?

dpcan 16y ago
So you are saying if they are taking 100% of the responsibility they assume 100% of the liability? This is exactly why I'm suggesting they may have put their foot in their mouth. SOME of the fault reasonably lies with Amazon in my opinion, and I personally would not have cared if they took 50%. That's all really.
- RyanKearney 16y ago
  What about this example. You have Acme Corp Datacenters who sell dedicated servers to their customers. If Acme Corp has a network outage because their single Comcast connection went down because Comcast was having some routing errors, the customers who are effected go to Acme Corp. It isn't the customers fault that Acme Corp wasn't prepared to deal with a downed connection and setup a redundant network. In this example, think of Amazon as Comcast and Acme Corp as Heroku. Heroku wasn't prepared to handle this type of failure, so they're at fault.
  - tzs 16y ago
    By that argument, the customers of Heroku who weren't prepared to handle Heroku's failure were at fault. They should have had alternate rails hosting lined up.
    - RyanKearney 16y ago
      Well it depends on what Heroku's SLA was, if any. If Heroku stated 100% uptime grantee, then Heroku would be to blame for not living up to their 100% uptime. If Heroku said hey listen, we can't guarantee any amount of uptime so be prepared and someone were to host some "mission critical" information on Heroku then yeah it would be the customers fault.