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All 3 hyperscalers have vulnerabilities in their control planes: they're either single point of failure like AWS with us-east-1, or global meaning that a faulty

by ragall 8mo ago

All 3 hyperscalers have vulnerabilities in their control planes: they're either single point of failure like AWS with us-east-1, or global meaning that a faulty release can take it down entirely; and take AZ resilience to mean that existing compute will continue to work as before, but allocation of new resources might fail in multi-AZ or multi-region ways. It means that any service designed to survive a control plane outage must statically allocate its compute resources and have enough slack that it never relies on auto scaling. True for AWS/GCP/Azure.

tbrownaw 8mo ago
> It means that any service designed to survive a control plane outage must statically allocate its compute resources and have enough slack that it never relies on auto scaling. True for AWS/GCP/Azure. That sounds oddly similar to owning hardware.
- ragall 8mo ago
  In a way. It means that you can get new capacity most often, but the transition windows where a service gets resized (or mutated in general) has to be minimised and carefully controlled by ops.
everfrustrated 8mo ago
This outage talks about what appears to be a VM control plane failure (it mentions stop not working) across multiple regions. AWS has never had this type of outage in 20 years. Yet Azure constantly had them. This is a total failure of engineering and has nothing to do with capacity. Azure is a joke of a cloud.
- mirashii 8mo ago
  AWS had an outage that blocked all EC2 operations just a few months ago: https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/
  - everfrustrated 8mo ago
    This was the largest AWS outage in a long long time and was still constrained to a single AWS region. Which is my point. The same fault on Azure would be a global (all-regions) fault.
  - jamesfinlayson 8mo ago
    Yeah I remember one maybe four years ago? Existing workloads were fine but I had to go and tell my marketing department to not do anything until it was sorted because auto-scaling was busted.
- ragall 8mo ago
  I do agree that Azure seems to be a lot worse: its control plane(s) seems to be much more centralized than the other two.

by ragall 8mo ago

tbrownaw 8mo ago

> It means that any service designed to survive a control plane outage must statically allocate its compute resources and have enough slack that it never relies on auto scaling. True for AWS/GCP/Azure. That sounds oddly similar to owning hardware.

ragall 8mo ago
In a way. It means that you can get new capacity most often, but the transition windows where a service gets resized (or mutated in general) has to be minimised and carefully controlled by ops.

everfrustrated 8mo ago

This outage talks about what appears to be a VM control plane failure (it mentions stop not working) across multiple regions. AWS has never had this type of outage in 20 years. Yet Azure constantly had them. This is a total failure of engineering and has nothing to do with capacity. Azure is a joke of a cloud.

mirashii 8mo ago
AWS had an outage that blocked all EC2 operations just a few months ago: https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/
- everfrustrated 8mo ago
  This was the largest AWS outage in a long long time and was still constrained to a single AWS region. Which is my point. The same fault on Azure would be a global (all-regions) fault.
- jamesfinlayson 8mo ago
  Yeah I remember one maybe four years ago? Existing workloads were fine but I had to go and tell my marketing department to not do anything until it was sorted because auto-scaling was busted.
ragall 8mo ago
I do agree that Azure seems to be a lot worse: its control plane(s) seems to be much more centralized than the other two.