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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the whole point of AWS that you can blame AWS engineers for downtime instead of your own (in this case) code deployment thingy?

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I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but no, it isn't. It's to provide building blocks for infrastructure. Down time is still on you. Only a lazy engineer blames their tools for their failures.

    > Down time is still on you

If you can say "It's not our fault, it's Amazon's", there are plenty of boards and customers who are fine with that, in my experience.

Yep. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" applies here.

Not sarcastic: aws is not a tool, it's a service. You're exchanging dollars for SLA. The SLA is built in: you're sometimes (rarely) down, and someone else gets called about it.

Your customers will blame you: you don't want it to happen. Even if amazon pay you some damage you may lose trust or your whole business in the meantime.

With a major AWS outage, customers will think "the Internet is having trouble today." Half the sites they visit will be down or broken in some way.

I think this perspective really depends on who you are supporting. This is my experience:

1) Actual customers: They want you to fix it. They don't care who's fault it is, they are dependent on you.

2) Internal customers: They want someone to blame. They don't really care that it's down, they just want to point the finger at someone when their report goes out late.

"Down time is still on you" - well put. And it is actually great when you can only blame yourself because then you can fix the issue right away. If someone other is to blame, you need to a) convince that person that there is a problem and b) wait for the issue to rise to the top of their queue. Which can be painful.

But in the case of Amazon they will likely know about the problem before you would have anyway. Sure, their problems tend to have a much larger scale, but their ops teams are pretty good.

Just because it's your fault, that doesn't mean that you can quickly and easily fix the problem yourself. Amazon has a team of people to keep EFS up and running, and AWS owns the entire storage, server, and network stack. When your own NFS server starts timing out, you may have only a few people to diagnose the problem.

Do you think that's still true in a "serverless" architecture?

Surprise! Serverless runs on... gasp servers!

http://www.whoownsmyavailability.com/

Hrm, so for the site 'whoownsMYavailability', the answer is someone else?

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