A single manual configuration mistake should never be able cause this type of complete system failure. For AWS to be engineered this way, the engineers you met

A single manual configuration mistake should never be able cause this type of complete system failure. For AWS to be engineered this way, the engineers you met must not have been as smart as they seemed. EBS may be extremely sophisticated in other respects, but if this type of thing was even a possibility, the AWS team are very fallible, and probably far from the best in their field. >In short, take my word for it, the people working on this are smarter than you and me, by an order of magnitude. There is no way you could do better, and it is unlikely that if you are building anything that needs more than a handful of servers you could build anything more reliable. Ever since the AWS outage, I've seen a number of these "the AWS guys are so smart, I've met them." type comments. And then paraphrased: "There sort-of can't be that much to blame on them because of how smart they are, and they are so smart anyway, who could do better?" That's not a valid argument, not everyone is equally impressed by an individuals intelligence, perhaps your assessment is wrong. And even if someone is insanely smart, they still can commit practical errors which indicates they are smart, but still flawed in their understanding of engineering in significant ways. Perhaps AWS simply does need a higher caliber of engineer that wouldn't miss out on these dead-simple safeguards that would have prevented this outage.