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Comment by jdimov10 | Hacker News Reader

They should consider moving to AWS ;)

In that event, AWS would respond by saying:

    The EC2 has responded, and informed me that they do not provide analysis of individual issues in AWS infrastructure.

    They referred to the AWS SLA that states that "AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS each available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.95%".

    The AWS SLA is available here:
    https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/

(The above is a part of the response I received when I attempted to ask AWS about sporadic reboots and outages on one of my instances.)

Another gem from AWS in response to a query that mentioned that every major DNS server around the world had picked up a change made to the A record of a domain except for Amazon DNS (even after 2 hours of the change):

  Thanks for that information. It really help us understand the issue faced. As you know changing a A record for a domain can take time to replicate through all the Root DNS servers and then onto the none authoritative servers from there on. When you are editing your DNS Zone file it is highly related to the TTL settings for quicker updates on changes to them.

  However it really isn't uncommon to see full DNS replication when making changes to an A record.

  ..

  Also for even more control and perhaps faster DNS resolving times within AWS look into our Route53 service.
  https://aws.amazon.com/route53/
  I hope this has addressed your questions and please feel free to ask if there is anything else.

Tools like http://mxtoolbox.com/dnspropagation.aspx and http://www.viewdns.info/propagation/ indicated that the change had been picked up by every listed server but for AWS.

Solution proposed by AWS: Use Route53.

Nah, they should just host it themselves. Bandwidth is much cheaper than AWS.

Not only bandwidth, but also disk.

And don't forget the CPU throttling, noisy neighbors, IOPS and what not.

Is that a problem with AWS? I thought people accept paying a premium because they don't have to deal with these issues anymore. If bandwidth is relatively expensive less people are going to abuse it, etc...

You pay a premium because you expect things to work well.

When things don't work, AWS doesn't tell you a reason why it didn't work. Instead they teach you lessons about how to architect your applications for failure by saying:

    The EC2 team also recommend that you architect for failure using the white paper linked below:
    https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices.pdf

See my earlier comment as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822298

EC2 was designed around the idea of having highly parallel and intensive workloads for short periods of time.

For people who use it as a VPS provider, they are going to be hard hit by other tenants who are applying the intended purpose.

Reminds me of Larry Ellison's old joke, "So when building our cloud, we decided to go with Oracle... we got a good price..."

Unlike any other customer ever.

Even with 80% discounts for large "friends of the business", yes, I agree that better AND cheaper alternatives should be pursued ;)

haha

They do use AWS.

That's the joke.

It's only partially true though. There are tons of teams that Amazon that do not use AWS. They use legacy internal data centers that do not have an ounce of AWS infrastructure. And for some reason it is nearly impossible for them to transition.

It may have been a while since you worked there. Very few teams are not using AWS (primarily EC2). For all of retail, marketplace, and digital, it was increasingly difficult to get legacy or bare metal hosts. The only teams that I interacted with still on legacy hosts were either operationally deficient or still running their own databases.

> The only teams that I interacted with still on legacy hosts were either operationally deficient or still running their own databases.

There are a ton of these teams. AFT (several hundred devs), for example, is practically on their 10th year of a 3 year mandate to get off of their monolithic Oracle database backends, a constraint which forces them to run in legacy datacenters. You'll find similar issues with plenty of Supply Chain, Operations, and Transportation teams as well. The primary data warehouse clusters (non-redshift) and management interfaces are also in legacy data centers, last I recall.

A lot of AWS teams don't use AWS because of the circular dependencies that would create during a new region buildout.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com