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Comment by Moissanite | Hacker News Reader

The key to this is: which is worse for middle management; a 15 minute outage which is your fault, or a 2 hour outage you can blame on AWS?

Cloud is to the IT department as big consulting companies are to HR.

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Except realistically AWS is down maybe 2 hours a year and if you blow an on-prem switch with no configuration backup or a database server hard crashes while syncing its backup, you might be down days.

> if you blow an on-prem switch with no configuration backup or a database server hard crashes while syncing its backup, you might be down days.

Switches are easy and cheap to put in a fail-over config. DB's are also running atleast in a primary / standby config everywhere. Besides if your running a single DB instance in a cloud VM the same thing can happen.

And don't get me started on the trouble you can get in with for example GCP SaaS PostgreSQL...

In a former life (before clouds) we had a SAN go down because of a backplane problem. It was down for days while being diagnosed/fixed and then in read-only mode for another couple of days while the disks were in repair mode. I know people say things like "you should have a backup device" or "switches are cheap" but sometimes it IS the backup system that goes down and sometimes that system is VERY expensive.

I learned recently that the customers kick you in the balls once per minute either way. Loudly on Twitter.

Your average person doesn't listen to twitter, they listen to the mainstream news.

And mainstream news will be either "company X offline for hours" if its just you, or "Amazon cloud outage takes multiple companies off line for hours" - the latter is better.

That’s not true in our sector. We’re very industry specific and everyone shitposts on twitter and follows everyone else.

Your sector != average person.

Average person hears on the news that company X or cloud Y had an outage, at most they have some anger towards the company for a day or so until the next thing in the news cycle comes along.

In my experience, an average person seeing that one of their commonly-used tools is down due to a big tech company failure is just going to proclaim "snow day!" and not really mind at all.

Depends if it gets in the way of them making commission or money.

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