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Comment by Just1689 | Hacker News Reader

I think this introduces some interesting points to the DR and BCP conversation.

Is it a safe bet that we can rely on the cloud to have capacity? Normally I wouldn't doubt it but in this sort of situation is becomes more likely they will be put under capacity stress.

Will the cloud vendors learn and build slack in? I think they're very lean operations and maybe this kind of slack would damage the profitability too much.

If the cloud vendors can't guarantee capacity ( I suspect this will be the conclusion ) then what does they mean for our DR and BCP planning?

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> Normally I wouldn't doubt it but in this sort of situation

Then you're very misinformed.

As a cloud administrator, I see resource availability and account limits on a weekly basis going back years.

I tell people:

- to pre-provision at least some extra servers rather than wait for an autoscaling operation to fail.

- that new instance types often are rolled out gradually, and lead time is often 1 month in AWS

- that killing a 1000-node cluster then expecting to immediately rebuild it often doesn't work.

- for DR and BCP planning, each region (or AZ) should be able to handle enough load at all times in case one region (or AZ) is unavailable. I've never seen anybody do that, even after I told them, because cost.

For AWS, limit monitor is a handy tool for "small" customers:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/limit-monitor/

It starts having issues when you get to 5,000+ ec2 instances, but it's somewhat understandable that they don't aim to support that level of usage within a single AWS account.

On another bullet point: if you go serverless (API/HTTP Gateway, Lambda, Dynamo DB), you automatically get full region DR. I personally recommend HTTP Gateway if you can swing it, API gateway is only worth of it you are doing personal projects (mostly free tier) or are seriously leveraging the API gateway specific features

Seems like there's some confusion on what that one really does.

It only notifies you about your own Service Limits, so you will know before you hit one in an unfortunate moment. It's important to monitor that, but it doesn't protect or notify you against cloud provider's own limitations. A scale-out event can still fail if AWS has no more extra capacity ("full") even if your limits allow you otherwise.

AFAIK there's currently no way to know it beforehand if they actually have the capacity or not.

Assuming they expand the list of services it can provide, products like the AWS Outpost might be the eventual fix for that. Very expensive and limited right now though.

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