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When AWS is down, everybody knows it. People don’t really question your hosting choice. It’s the IBM of cloud era.
by jpalomaki 1y ago
When AWS is down, everybody knows it. People don’t really question your hosting choice. It’s the IBM of cloud era.
- antihero 1y agoAmazon is up, what are they doing?
- sisve 1y agoThat is 100% true. You cant be fired for picking AWS... But I doubt its the best choice for most people. Sad but true
- zejn 1y agoYou can't be fired, but you burn through your runway quicker. No matter which option you choose, there is some exothermic oxidative process involved.
- rafaelmn 1y agoAWS is smart enough to throw you a few mill credits to get you started.
- dijit 1y agoMILL?! I only got €100.000 bounded to a year, then a 20% discount for spend in the next year. (I say "only" because that certainly would be a sweeter pill, €100.000 in "free" credits is enough to make you get hooked, because you can really feel the free-ness in the moment).
- echoangle 1y agoMille is thousand in Latin so they might have meant a few thousand dollars.
- brazukadev 1y agoUsually, 2 founders creating a startup can't fire each other anyway so a bad decision can still be very bad for lots of people in this forum
- dijit 1y agoSchrodingers user; Simultaneously too confused to be able to make their own UX choices, but smart enough to understand the backend of your infrastructure enough to know why it doesn't work and excuses you for it.
- Macha 1y agoWell, at that level of user they just know "the internet is acting up this morning"
- dijit 1y agoI thought we didn't like when things were "too big to fail" (like the banks being bailed out because if we didn't the entire fabric of our economy would collapse; which emboldens them to take more risks and do it again).
- 1dom 1y agoThe morning national TV news (BBC) was interrupted with this as breaking news, and about how many services (specifically snapchat for some reason) are down because of problems with "Amazon's Web Services, reported on DownDetector" I liked your point though!
- HelloNurse 1y agoA typical manager/customer understands just enough to ask their inferiors to make their f--- cloud platform work, why haven't you fixed it yet? I need it! In technically sophisticated organizations, this disconnect simply floats to higher levels (e.g. CEO vs. CTO rather than middle manager vs. engineer).
- ExoticPearTree 1y agoEvery one of the big hyperscalers has a big outage from time to time. Unless you lose a significant amount of money per minute of downtime, there is no incentive to go multicloud. And multicloud has its own issues. In the end, you live with the fact that your service might be down a day or two per year.
- firesteelrain 1y agoWhen we looked at this our conclusion was not multi cloud but local resiliency with cloud augmentation. We still had our own small data center
- ta1243 1y ago> In the end, you live with the fact that your service might be down a day or two per year. This is hilarious. In the 90s we used to have services which ran on machines in cupboards which would go down because the cleaner would unplug them. Even then a day or two per year would be unacceptable.
- stefan_ 1y agoAnd yet they still all activate their on call people (wait why do we have them if we are on the cloud?) to do .. nothing at all.
- petesergeant 1y ago100%. When AWS was down, we'd say "AWS is down!", and our customers would get it. Saying "Hetzner is down!" raises all sorts of questions your customers aren't interested in.
- sph 1y agoI've ran a production application off Hetzner for a client for almost a decade and I don't think I have had to tell them "Hetzner is down", ever, apart from planned maintenance windows.
- Nervhq 1y agoA bold strategy to think they'll never have an outage though, right? Maybe even a little naive and a little arrogant...
- Arch-TK 1y agoThe point seems to be not that Hetzner will never have an outage, but rather that they have a track record of not having outages large enough for everyone to be affected. Seems like large cloud providers, including AWS, are down quite regularly in comparison, and at such a scale that everything breaks for everyone involved.
- petesergeant 1y ago> The point seems to be not that Hetzner will never have an outage, but rather that they have a track record of not having outages large enough for everyone to be affected. If I am affected, I want everyone to be affected, from a messaging perspective
- Arch-TK 1y agoOkay, that helps for the case when you are affected. But what about the case when you are not affected and everyone else is? Doesn't that seem like good PR? Take the hit of being down once every 10 years compared to being up for the remaining 9 that others are down.
- jamesbelchamber 1y agoTo back up this point, currently BBC News have it as their most significant story, with "live" reporting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5y8k7k6v1rt https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5y8k7k6v1rt This is alongside "live" reporting on the Israel/Gaza conflict as well as news about Epstein and the Louvre heist. This is mainstream news.
- addandsubtract 1y agoI like how their headline starts with Snapchat and Roblox being affected.
- Maxion 1y agoThe journalist found out about it from their tween.
- Nervhq 1y ago[dead]
- flakracquet 1y ago[dead]
- kijin 1y agoThey're the only apps English people are allowed to use, the rest of the internet is banned by Ofcom. /s
- throwdbaaway 1y agoActually I am keen to know how Roblox got impacted. Following the terrible Halloween Outage in 2021, they posted 2 years ago about migrating to a cell based architecture in https://corp.roblox.com/newsroom/2023/12/making-robloxs-infrastructure-efficient-resilient https://corp.roblox.com/newsroom/2023/12/making-robloxs-infr... Perhaps some parts of the migration haven't been completed, or there is still a central database in us-east1
- abujazar 1y agoThat depends on the service. Far from everyone is on their PC or smartphone all day, and even fewer care about these kinds of news.
- patshead 1y agoOn the other side of that coin, I am excited to be up and running while everyone else is down!
- throw-10-13 1y agomost people dont even know aws exists
- cubix 1y agoNon-techies don’t. Here’s how CNN answered, what is AWS? “Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s internet based cloud service connecting businesses to people using their apps or online platforms.” Uh.. yeah.
- hansmayer 1y agoThat's actually a fairly decent description for the non-tech crowd and I am going to adopt it, as my company is in the cloud native services space and I often have a problem explaining the technical and business model to my non-technical relatives and family - I get bogged down in trying to explain software defined hardware and similar concepts...
- cubix 1y agoI asked ChatGPT for a succinct definition, and I thought it was pretty good: “Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources over the internet, allowing businesses to scale and pay only for what they use.”
- hansmayer 1y agoFor us techies yes, but to the regular folks that is just as good as our usual technical gobbledy-gook - most people don´t differentiate between a database and a hard-drive.
- throwaway2037 1y agoYou make a good point. This part: > access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources could be simplified to: access to computer servers Most people who know little about computers can still imagine a giant mainframe they saw in a movie with a bunch of blinking lights. Not so different, visually, from a modern data center.
- JCM9 1y agoYes, but those days are numbered. For many years AWS was in a league of its own. Now they’ve fallen badly behind in a growing number of areas and are struggling to catch up. There’s a ton of momentum associated with the prior dominance, but between the big misses on AI, a general slow pace of innovation on core services, and a steady stream of top leadership and engineers moving elsewhere they’re looking quite vulnerable.
- cmiles8 1y agoLooks like you’re being down voted for saying the quiet bit out loud. You’re not wrong though.
- cj 1y agoOr because people don’t agree with “days are numbered”. As much as I might not like AWS, I think they’ll remain #1 for the foreseeable future. Despite the reasons the guy listed.
- JCM9 1y agoGiven recent earnings and depending on where things end up with AI it’s entirely plausible that by the end of the decade AWS is the #2 or #3 cloud provider.
- zjaffee 1y agoI couldn't agree more, there was clearly a big shift when Jassy became CEO of amazon as a whole and Charlie Bell left (which is also interesting because it's not like azure is magically better now). The improvements to core services at AWS hasn't really happened at the same pace post covid as it did prior, but that could also have something to do with overall maturity of the ecosystem. Although it's also largely the case that other cloud providers have also realized that it's hard for them to compete against the core competency of other companies, whereas they'd still be selling the infrastructure the above services are run on.
- deleted 1y ago
- citrin_ru 1y agoOn one hand it's allows to shift the blame but on other hand is shows a disadvantage of hyper centralization - if AWS is down too many important services are down at the same time which makes it worse. E. g. when AWS is down it's important to have communication/monitoring services UP so engineers can discuss / co-ordinate workarounds and have good visibility but Atlassian was (is) significantly degraded today too.
- anonymars 1y agoFacebook had a comically bad outage a few years ago wherein the internal sign-in, messaging, and even server keycard access went down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage#Impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage#Impact Somewhat related tip of the day, don't host your status page as a subdomain off the main site. Ideally host it with a different provider entirely
- nutjob2 1y agoWhich eventually leads to the headline "AWS down indefinitely, society collapses".