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Comment by jclouds-fan | Hacker News Reader

Why is reddit relying on only one cloud provider? AWS can/should do better but service providers of the size of reddit should be using mult-vendor set-ups for sure.

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They did say in their original post-mortem that spreading the load among multiple availability zones has been on their todo list for a while. It has just taken longer than they expected with their limited engineering staff.

It probably has something to do with the group being very small. Sure they turn a lot of traffic, but there's only so much you can do with a group of their size on what I imagine is still a limited budget.

Sounds like a case of similar to safety systems at a nuclear plant. Not pressing until it is REALLY PRESSING! Its the usual dilemma, investing time/moey on something that most likely wont be needed versus adding that cool feature all the users will immediately see the benefit of. In a competitive environment, it isn't difficult to understand how they ended up on one vendor.

If a nuclear plant has problems, it can kill a lot of people, and wreck the lives of many others.

If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.

So the tradeoffs they've made, in saving some money, are probably sensible.

> If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.

Actually, that's what happens when reddit is working :)

Well, depending on prevailing conditions, they might be more widely dispersed rather than contained within the special "echo chamber" that reddit has built for that purpose.

Is a multi-provider setup common? I certainly think Reddit should be on multiple availability zones within AWS, but spanning multiple providers seems hugely more difficult.

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