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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, one thing that I've been really disappointed with is how UNRELIABLE the "cloud" is - unless you engineer all the reliability in the software itself.

We have the technology and the capability to do things like run a VM and have it move between hardware when that hardware fails or needs replacement.

but that would cost money.

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> the capability to do things like run a VM and have it move between hardware when that hardware fails

This is one of my favorite features of Google Cloud:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migrati...

Unfortunately, Google continues to be the third-string provider in the US, so I don't often get the opportunity to work with Google Cloud.

I want to be able to justify using Google Cloud for projects, but the fact that it’s a Google product is the main obstacle to that. If history is anything to go by, relying on Google products and services seems like a great way to set yourself up for major problems down the line. Either the product you’re using is shut down on short notice or some automation flags a false-positive and you’re left screaming into the void trying to get yourself unbanned.

It’s not a live migration. It’s running an a VM in a sysplex which is in lockstep with its peer. There’s not a failover in the tradition sense..the I/O just goes from one side to the other.

VMs can often be configured to do "live migration" but that doesn't protect a running instance if the hardware it is running on fails completely. There is such a thing as fault tolerant hardware/software stacks but, yes, most modern architectures shift application resiliency higher up the stack.

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