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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

I can always rely on HN for finding out why AWS is broken... Is it time to switch to GCP?

No, sometimes you GCP failures posted here too. Your best bet is to move to Oracle Cloud. I have never seen an Oracle Cloud (not Oracle Data Cloud, which is the ad-tech product) outage posted here so I think they must have 100% uptime.

Sarcasm detected! There's always going to be pros and cons to every provider, so the obvious choice is host everything on my home theater PC since I never turn that thing off.

Please don't consider this a counterpoint, but I have had single physically deployed servers that have significantly higher average uptime than my ec2 instances in AWS us-east-1 in the last 5 years.

(significantly higher == 100% availability, it hasn't gone down... yet)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

This doesn't apply. Having a server fail on you doesn't preclude you from posting to HN.

But it becomes uninteresting, which causes self-censorship. How many times did you hear about someone's server running for 12 minutes? How many times about server running for over a year? Nobody posts about the first one. (Unless it was a spectacular failure for some reason)

Similar issue comes with estimating how reliable things are. People are more likely to respond "I had an issue with X too, here's my story" rather than "all good, nothing to report".

(Not considering as a counterpoint, just want to point this out for whomever.)

When (not if) it does go down, however long it takes to replace is downtime that has to be amortized over the entire X years, to get an accurate picture. If it takes > 260 minutes to detect, replace, and fully recover, then you've already blown the four nines budget you "saved up" for the past five years, when amortizing.

Side-note from a recent twitter thread: If you're not rigorously monitoring availability (preferably with canaries/probes), it's probably much lower than you think. (Using the royal 'you' here, not pointing any fingers.)

I actually had a server with uptime in a decade+. Then my provider (Hetzner) decided they wanted to get rid of the hardware. Gave me fair warning and dumped it. I backed everything up and only restored my DNS and MX records from BIND (because I wanted to keep getting mail). Not the database, not the blog theme, nothing. One of these days I gotta do it.

Now I host everything on managed services. It was the right decision then, I was broke. Now, though, the cost of having to deal with it is higher.

That's not at all surprising because shutting down and starting new ec2 instances is expected to be a relatively common occurrence. High availability comes from a load balancer routing traffic to an instance that is currently available, not from having a single instance that just runs forever.

You've never seen my basement's outages posted here either.

That or IBM... A friend from high school also just set up what he calls "micro-cloud in the cloud". Haven't heard of any downtime yet, maybe that's a better bet...

How often the "____ is down" threads show up on HN is a function of the popularity and mission-critical-ness of the service. I wouldn't use it as a metric for choosing a cloud provider unless you control for popularity.

Even "controlling for popularity", frequency of HN posts is a terrible metric. If you're in the position to be making a significant investment in a cloud provider, you can probably afford the actual market research on reliability and uptime from reputable sources.

If aws is too unstable for your needs you’re in for a major adventure on gcp

I said this a bit facetiously after working with an organization that had massive troubles with GCP downtime early on, and a friend who works on their infra team and gives me reports of how often things go wrong. I guess it didn't translate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Why not both?

Azure. The web panel is a bazillion times better and they know AD... pretty well.

I think this is sarcasm.

But genuinely AzureAD is really good. Authentication and Authorization systems are difficult, AD has always been begrudgingly the most well rounded (yes, it has warts) but AzureAD really is nice.

I especially like that my local admin can delegate Enterprise Apps to me so I can create SAML/OAUTH2 SSO links between stuff we use without needing the keys to the kingdom.

I recently set up Enterprise Federation with GCP and it took less than a day. (compared with many months in my last company which used on-prem AD)

Does azure AD actually do active directory yet (LDAP and all)? Or is it still just a name?

All of our windows desktop machines use it as their login controller, but I’m not 100% sure of the implementation- it is likely there needs to be a local login server because from what I remember of Windows it’s using WINS to find a logon server, and that I think must be local.

It’s actually a new-ish “credential provider” system for logging into Windows. It’s not just Azure AD either, Gsuite can be used for logging into and managing Windows now. There is no longer a need for a local domain controller either.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthn/cred...

Oof, WINS is some super antique stuff. The (traditional) process to find and select a domain controller is known as "DC Locator"--or else search for DsGetDc--and is essentially DNS-based.

Caveat, I've been out of the Windows/AD game for 7+ years!

For systems expecting LDAP and Kerberos you can use either AAD Domain Services (a read-only DCaaS) or an on-premises AD controller.

It’s definitely not AD and isn’t compatible with many things that you’d expect. They just repurposed the name

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