Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

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I think the main risk of the HN architecture is that (I believe) it's a single datacentre in a single location. Hopefully they have offsite backups.

The other risk I guess would be that all the NS are AWS/route53 severs, so if that went down they'd be up for about a minutes (looks like the DNS TTL is 2 minutes).

You could host your own NS servers in two different locations on two different providers, you could have a third hot spare server ready to go too, that would allow the service to survive an earthquake flattening San Diego (off site server ready to go), and cope with the loss of AWS DNS. Whether the cost/benefit ratio is there is another matter. I think the serving side of route53 is fairly reliable though (even when the interface to update records fails on a frequent basis), and the cost of being down isn't particularly terrible.

> I think the main risk of the HN architecture is that (I believe) it's a single datacentre in a single location.

Exactly, Amazon US EAST makes the same point several times a year! :)

We should ask this question to ourselves: As a user, if I have to manage the risk of US-East-1 going down, may be we should question this entire Cloud thing. It was marketed as "100% bulletproof" in 2005 when we discarded on-prem.

To be fair to amazon I don't think they've had an outage that affected different data centres at the same time, but yes I would far rather have my main and backup on two providers in two appropriately diverse locations.

but never forget that AWS uses us-east-1 to host core services that, when they go down, they take almost the whole thing down, no matter which region.

Which specific services?

I only use VMs and route53, and form what I've seen when us-east-1 is down I can still resolve my domains

What is the downside for a user to have a few minutes of downtime?

What is the upside for HN to add this engineering complexity to avoid a couple of minutes of downtime?

For HN it probably doesn't matter, although what's the value

For Amazon too it probably doesn't matter -- if I occasionally can't buy something I'm almost certain to simply try again 30 minutes later

For some services a couple of minutes of downtime isn't good enough. Imagine if the superbowl went dark for 5 seconds just as the winning play happened.

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