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> However, cloud providers have often had global outages in the past, and there is no reason to assume that cloud datacenters will be down any less often than y

> However, cloud providers have often had global outages in the past, and there is no reason to assume that cloud datacenters will be down any less often than your individual servers. A nice thing about being in a big provider is when they go down a massive portion of the internet goes down, and it makes news headlines. Users are much less likely to complain about your service being down when it's clear you're just caught up in the global outage that's affecting 10 other things they use.

ramesh31 4y ago
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM!
- notjustanymike 4y ago
  We may need to update this one, I would definitely fire someone today for buying IBM.
  - dtparr 4y ago
    These days we just call it licensing Red Hat.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS!
    - lanstin 4y ago
      The AWS people now are just like the IBM people in the 80s - mastering a complex and not standards based array of products and optional product add-ons. The internet solutions were open and free for a few decades and now it’s AWS SNADS I mean AWS load balancers and edge networks.
      - namose 4y ago
        AWS services are usually based on standards anyway. If you use an architecturally sound approach to AWS you could learn to develop for GCP or Azure pretty easily.
  - riku_iki 4y ago
    that's funny, since IBM is actually promoting one very fat and reliable server.
andrepew 4y ago
This is a huge one -- value in outsourcing blame. If you're down because of a major provider outage in the news, you're viewed more as a victim of a natural disaster rather than someone to be blamed.
- tjoff 4y ago
  This seems like a recently popular exaggeration, I'd wager no one but a select few in the HN-bubble actually cares. You will primarily be judged by how much of an inconvenience the outage was to every individual. The best you can hope for is that the local ISP gets the blame, but honestly. It can't be more than a rounding error in the end.
  - treis 4y ago
    I think it's more of a shield against upper management. AWS going down is treated like an act of god rendering everyone blameless. But if it's your one big server that goes down then it's your fault.
    - phkahler 4y ago
      >> AWS going down is treated like an act of god rendering everyone blameless. Someone decided to use AWS, so there is blame to go around. I'm not saying if that blame is warranted or not, just that it sounds like a valid thing to say for people who want to blame someone.
      - flatiron 4y ago
        “Nobody gets fired for using aws” is pretty big now a days. We use GCP but if they have an issue and it bubbles down to me nobody bats an eye when I say the magical cloud man made ut oh whoopsie and it wasn’t me.
        dijit 4y ago
        That’s because your CTO is getting raked over the coals. They just think it’s something they can justify- cloud is synonymous with velocity and the perception of lower staffing costs. A little bit of unavailability is seen as a fair trade off. This is my impression as a c-level.
taylodl 4y ago
Users are much more sympathetic to outages when they're widespread. But, if there's a contractual SLA then their sympathy doesn't matter. You have to meet your SLA. That usually isn't a big problem as SLAs tend to account for some amount of downtime, but it's important to keep the SLA in mind.
- hans1729 4y ago
  This just holds when you are b2b. If you’re serving end users, they don’t care about the contract, they care about their UX.
nrmitchi 4y ago
There is also the consideration that this isn't even an argument of "other things are down too!" or "outsourcing blame" as much as, depending on what your service is of course, you are unlikely to be operating in a bubble. You likely have some form of external dependencies, or you are an external dependency, or have correlated/cross-dependency usage with another service. Guaranteeing isolation between all of these different moving parts is very difficult. Even if you're not directly affected by a large cloud outage, it's becoming less-and-less common that you, or your customers, are truely isolated. As well, if your AWS-hosted service mostly exists to service AWS-hosted customers, and AWS is down, it doesn't matter if you are down. None of your customers are operational anyways. Is this a 100% acceptable solution? Of course not. But for 95% of services/SaaS out there, it really doesn't matter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ustolemyname 4y ago
This has given me a brilliant idea: deferring maintenance downtime until some larger user-visible service is down. This is terrible for many reasons, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone has done this.
- gorjusborg 4y ago
  Ah yes, the 'who cut the cheese?' maintenance window.
bilekas 4y ago
I can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing though! Imagine the clout of saying : "we stayed online while AWS died"
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  Depends on how technical your customer base is. Even as a developer I would tend not to ascribe too much signal to that message. All it tells me is that you don't use AWS. "We stayed online when GCP, AWS, and Azure go down" is a different story. On the other hand, if those three go down simultaneously, I suspect the state of the world will be such that I'm not worried about the internet.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    I would expect there are BGP issues that could do that, at least for large swaths of the internet.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - namose 4y ago
    I do also remember in one of the recent AWS outages, the google cloud compute service had lower availability due to failovers hitting all at once
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > "We stayed online when GCP, AWS, and Azure go down" is a different story. On the other hand, if those three go down simultaneously, I suspect the state of the world will be such that I'm not worried about the internet. If nothing else, with those three all down, so will most news sources be -- so even if you're up, your customers won't get to hear about it.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  HN implicitly gets this clout - it became the real status page of most of the internet.
pdpi 4y ago
Another advantage is that the third-party services you depend on are also likely to be on one of the big providers, so it's one less point of failure.
z3t4 4y ago
You also have to calculate in the complexity of running thousands of servers vs running just one server. If you run just one server it's unlikely to go down even once in it's lifetime. Meanwhile cloud providers are guaranteed to have outages due to the share complexity of managing thousands of servers.
arwhatever 4y ago
When migrating from [no-name CRM] to [big-name CRM] at a recent job, the manager pointed out that when [big-name CRM] goes down, it's in the Wall Street Journal, and when [no-name] goes down, it's hard to get their own Support Team to care!
hsn915 4y ago
No. Your users have no idea that you rely on AWS (they don't even know what it is), and they don't think of it as a valid or reasonable excuse as to why your service is down.

ramesh31 4y ago

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM!

notjustanymike 4y ago
We may need to update this one, I would definitely fire someone today for buying IBM.
- dtparr 4y ago
  These days we just call it licensing Red Hat.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS!
  - lanstin 4y ago
    The AWS people now are just like the IBM people in the 80s - mastering a complex and not standards based array of products and optional product add-ons. The internet solutions were open and free for a few decades and now it’s AWS SNADS I mean AWS load balancers and edge networks.
    - namose 4y ago
      AWS services are usually based on standards anyway. If you use an architecturally sound approach to AWS you could learn to develop for GCP or Azure pretty easily.
- riku_iki 4y ago
  that's funny, since IBM is actually promoting one very fat and reliable server.

andrepew 4y ago

This is a huge one -- value in outsourcing blame. If you're down because of a major provider outage in the news, you're viewed more as a victim of a natural disaster rather than someone to be blamed.

tjoff 4y ago
This seems like a recently popular exaggeration, I'd wager no one but a select few in the HN-bubble actually cares. You will primarily be judged by how much of an inconvenience the outage was to every individual. The best you can hope for is that the local ISP gets the blame, but honestly. It can't be more than a rounding error in the end.
- treis 4y ago
  I think it's more of a shield against upper management. AWS going down is treated like an act of god rendering everyone blameless. But if it's your one big server that goes down then it's your fault.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> AWS going down is treated like an act of god rendering everyone blameless. Someone decided to use AWS, so there is blame to go around. I'm not saying if that blame is warranted or not, just that it sounds like a valid thing to say for people who want to blame someone.
    - flatiron 4y ago
      “Nobody gets fired for using aws” is pretty big now a days. We use GCP but if they have an issue and it bubbles down to me nobody bats an eye when I say the magical cloud man made ut oh whoopsie and it wasn’t me.
      - dijit 4y ago
        That’s because your CTO is getting raked over the coals. They just think it’s something they can justify- cloud is synonymous with velocity and the perception of lower staffing costs. A little bit of unavailability is seen as a fair trade off. This is my impression as a c-level.

taylodl 4y ago

Users are much more sympathetic to outages when they're widespread. But, if there's a contractual SLA then their sympathy doesn't matter. You have to meet your SLA. That usually isn't a big problem as SLAs tend to account for some amount of downtime, but it's important to keep the SLA in mind.

hans1729 4y ago
This just holds when you are b2b. If you’re serving end users, they don’t care about the contract, they care about their UX.

nrmitchi 4y ago

There is also the consideration that this isn't even an argument of "other things are down too!" or "outsourcing blame" as much as, depending on what your service is of course, you are unlikely to be operating in a bubble. You likely have some form of external dependencies, or you are an external dependency, or have correlated/cross-dependency usage with another service. Guaranteeing isolation between all of these different moving parts is very difficult. Even if you're not directly affected by a large cloud outage, it's becoming less-and-less common that you, or your customers, are truely isolated. As well, if your AWS-hosted service mostly exists to service AWS-hosted customers, and AWS is down, it doesn't matter if you are down. None of your customers are operational anyways. Is this a 100% acceptable solution? Of course not. But for 95% of services/SaaS out there, it really doesn't matter.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ustolemyname 4y ago

This has given me a brilliant idea: deferring maintenance downtime until some larger user-visible service is down. This is terrible for many reasons, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone has done this.

gorjusborg 4y ago
Ah yes, the 'who cut the cheese?' maintenance window.

bilekas 4y ago

I can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing though! Imagine the clout of saying : "we stayed online while AWS died"

dghlsakjg 4y ago
Depends on how technical your customer base is. Even as a developer I would tend not to ascribe too much signal to that message. All it tells me is that you don't use AWS. "We stayed online when GCP, AWS, and Azure go down" is a different story. On the other hand, if those three go down simultaneously, I suspect the state of the world will be such that I'm not worried about the internet.
- lanstin 4y ago
  I would expect there are BGP issues that could do that, at least for large swaths of the internet.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- namose 4y ago
  I do also remember in one of the recent AWS outages, the google cloud compute service had lower availability due to failovers hitting all at once
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > "We stayed online when GCP, AWS, and Azure go down" is a different story. On the other hand, if those three go down simultaneously, I suspect the state of the world will be such that I'm not worried about the internet. If nothing else, with those three all down, so will most news sources be -- so even if you're up, your customers won't get to hear about it.
Nextgrid 4y ago
HN implicitly gets this clout - it became the real status page of most of the internet.

pdpi 4y ago

Another advantage is that the third-party services you depend on are also likely to be on one of the big providers, so it's one less point of failure.

z3t4 4y ago

You also have to calculate in the complexity of running thousands of servers vs running just one server. If you run just one server it's unlikely to go down even once in it's lifetime. Meanwhile cloud providers are guaranteed to have outages due to the share complexity of managing thousands of servers.

arwhatever 4y ago

When migrating from [no-name CRM] to [big-name CRM] at a recent job, the manager pointed out that when [big-name CRM] goes down, it's in the Wall Street Journal, and when [no-name] goes down, it's hard to get their own Support Team to care!

hsn915 4y ago

No. Your users have no idea that you rely on AWS (they don't even know what it is), and they don't think of it as a valid or reasonable excuse as to why your service is down.