Hacker News Reader

Comment by aluminussoma | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the vendor is incentivized to publicly use whatever metric shows the highest availability. Otherwise, the vendor will have to pay back credits. The vendor's nines are never my nines.

View on HN

The only way this gets solved is through cloud consumers providing streams of telemetry (sanitized of any data of value besides success/failure metrics of the underlying cloud primitives) to a central reporting uptime stats broker (Speedtest.net meets DataDog meets the Internet Weather Map). The incentives to fudge or exaggerate you uptime claims as a vendor through sales and marketing is too high; let the data speak for itself.

Do you trust AWS' status page? Or are you coming to Hacker News to ask why your network latency between instances has skyrocketed unexpectedly?

I wonder if this is a sort of thing you could interest EFF or another organization to put funding behind.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

As an aside, once in a while I imagine what kind of field day Upton Sinclair would have with this trip around of the pendulum swing toward dystopia.

No, the vendor is incentived to provide a good experience to the customer, especially vendors that aren't AWS. They know they have everything to lose from customers changing clouds.

Ineptitude, and it being a hard problem, are sufficient to explain the status quo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com