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Comment by vageli | Hacker News Reader

> An 11 year history is hardly worth betting what could be the future of your company on. Especially for something just slightly more convenient than what can be built in-house.

So you can build a globally distributed, redundant, eventually consistent object store with high availability easily and conveniently and without allocating developer time that could be better used building..oh I don't know, the actual business logic? Not to mention ongoing maintenance and its expense.

It's ridiculous to suggest that the entirety of the AWS offering is something that is just slightly more convenient than what could be built in house.

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S3 is not globally distributed. Each region is fully independent of each other. If Virgina is nuked, you lose anything in us-east-1. I’ve confirmed this with AWS staff because of a prior HN discussion :)

The ease through which Amazon provides the ability to architect incredibly globally redundant applications is unmatched. But your business probably can’t afford to implement at that scale, Amazon or otherwise (geographically load balanced DNS, multiple primary databases across regions and their associated followers, replicating S3 objects from all primary region buckets to secondary regions, instances for each application running multi-AZ in multiple regions, etc).

Of course, if a S3 region gets nuked, it can have repercussions in other zones too. Remember the S3 outage?

Coming from an tech|infra|dev/ops background, I remember all AWS outages painfully ;)

Not speaking about S3 specifically but overall I disagree. Assuming there’s a business case that requires multi-AZ or multi-region redundancy of multiple services it’s hard to match AWS in terms of price and simplicity.

S3 is optionally globally distributed.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/crr.html

> Cross-region replication is a bucket-level configuration that enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across buckets in different AWS Regions. We refer to these buckets as source bucket and destination bucket. These buckets can be owned by different AWS accounts.

Casually underestimating the effort to build something by at least one order of magnitude is a favorite pastime on HN. The Dropbox thread is the canonical example.

This statement would hold water if the primary source of revenue wasn't EC2.

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