4 ms·

Cutting corners assumes not doing things that are necessary. What I've found is that systems in the cloud are often unnecessarily resilient in areas which they

Cutting corners assumes not doing things that are necessary. What I've found is that systems in the cloud are often unnecessarily resilient in areas which they do not need to be. The example of S3 is apt as often ephemeral files are kept in S3 in which case they don't need the reliability storage guarantees that you'll get with S3. I've also found that just because you're paying over the odds for AWS's SLA doesn't mean jack to your systems actual uptime. All systems I've dealt with in AWS / Azure have had unplanned outages. I think almost all of these have been problems in the software itself nothing that AWS will help you with.

acdha 5y ago
> Cutting corners assumes not doing things that are necessary. … The example of S3 is apt as often ephemeral files are kept in S3 in which case they don't need the reliability storage guarantees that you'll get with S3. … or which didn't seem necessary until something breaks. For example, the cost of using S3 for temporary files is often negative because in most cases your usage charges are going to be lower than keeping a sufficiently-large storage volume provisioned 24x7 for it, and if you know that you don't need geographic redundancy you can use the one zone storage for that. In all cases, you'll benefit from things like bitrot protection which that scratch storage space doesn't have built-in. > I think almost all of these have been problems in the software itself nothing that AWS will help you with. Definitely. What you get from a cloud environment is better tools for dealing with this — for example, shifting load is easy and making it trivial to get new resources makes it easy to do things like high-fidelity testing, blue-green deployments, rolling reboots, etc. which most organizations struggle to do efficiently in a traditional data center environment.
8note 5y ago
Optimistically, those unplanned outages are software errors, instead of data center management errors. There is an impact to your uptime by using AWS, but it's relative to having the same thing runing on not-AWS rather than an absolute value of uptime. The scope of what you can screw up is smaller

acdha 5y ago

> Cutting corners assumes not doing things that are necessary. … The example of S3 is apt as often ephemeral files are kept in S3 in which case they don't need the reliability storage guarantees that you'll get with S3. … or which didn't seem necessary until something breaks. For example, the cost of using S3 for temporary files is often negative because in most cases your usage charges are going to be lower than keeping a sufficiently-large storage volume provisioned 24x7 for it, and if you know that you don't need geographic redundancy you can use the one zone storage for that. In all cases, you'll benefit from things like bitrot protection which that scratch storage space doesn't have built-in. > I think almost all of these have been problems in the software itself nothing that AWS will help you with. Definitely. What you get from a cloud environment is better tools for dealing with this — for example, shifting load is easy and making it trivial to get new resources makes it easy to do things like high-fidelity testing, blue-green deployments, rolling reboots, etc. which most organizations struggle to do efficiently in a traditional data center environment.

8note 5y ago

Optimistically, those unplanned outages are software errors, instead of data center management errors. There is an impact to your uptime by using AWS, but it's relative to having the same thing runing on not-AWS rather than an absolute value of uptime. The scope of what you can screw up is smaller