When AWS is down, everybody knows it. People don’t really question your hosting choice. It’s the IBM of cloud era.
There’s a ton of momentum associated with the prior dominance, but between the big misses on AI, a general slow pace of innovation on core services, and a steady stream of top leadership and engineers moving elsewhere they’re looking quite vulnerable.
As much as I might not like AWS, I think they’ll remain #1 for the foreseeable future. Despite the reasons the guy listed.
The improvements to core services at AWS hasn't really happened at the same pace post covid as it did prior, but that could also have something to do with overall maturity of the ecosystem.
Although it's also largely the case that other cloud providers have also realized that it's hard for them to compete against the core competency of other companies, whereas they'd still be selling the infrastructure the above services are run on.
I'm not sure what feature they're really missing, but my favorite is the way they handle AWS Fargate. The other cloud providers have similar offerings but I find Fargate to have almost no limitations when compared to the others.
It means no longer being hungry. Then you start making mistakes. You stop innovating. And then you slowly lose whatever kind of edge you had, but you don't realize that you're losing it until it's gone
I only got €100.000 bounded to a year, then a 20% discount for spend in the next year.
(I say "only" because that certainly would be a sweeter pill, €100.000 in "free" credits is enough to make you get hooked, because you can really feel the free-ness in the moment).
Simultaneously too confused to be able to make their own UX choices, but smart enough to understand the backend of your infrastructure enough to know why it doesn't work and excuses you for it.
I liked your point though!
In technically sophisticated organizations, this disconnect simply floats to higher levels (e.g. CEO vs. CTO rather than middle manager vs. engineer).
Unless you lose a significant amount of money per minute of downtime, there is no incentive to go multicloud.
And multicloud has its own issues.
In the end, you live with the fact that your service might be down a day or two per year.
This is hilarious. In the 90s we used to have services which ran on machines in cupboards which would go down because the cleaner would unplug them. Even then a day or two per year would be unacceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage#Impact
Somewhat related tip of the day, don't host your status page as a subdomain off the main site. Ideally host it with a different provider entirely
Seems like large cloud providers, including AWS, are down quite regularly in comparison, and at such a scale that everything breaks for everyone involved.
If I am affected, I want everyone to be affected, from a messaging perspective
Take the hit of being down once every 10 years compared to being up for the remaining 9 that others are down.
Hosting on second- or even third-tier providers allows you to overprovision and have much better redundancy, provided your solution is architected from the ground up in a vendor agnostic way. Hetzner is dirt cheap, and there are countless cheap and reliable providers spread around the globe (Europe in my case) to host a fleet of stateless containers that never fail simultaneously.
Stateful services are much more difficult, but replication and failover is not rocket science. 30 minutes of downtime or 30 seconds of data loss rarely kill businesses. On the contrary, unrealistic RTOs and RPOs are, in my experience, more dangerous, either as increased complexity or as vendor lock-in.
Customers don't expect 100% availability and noone offers such SLAs. But for most businesses, 99.95% is perfecty acceplable, and it is not difficult to have less than 4h/year of downtime.
This is alongside "live" reporting on the Israel/Gaza conflict as well as news about Epstein and the Louvre heist.
This is mainstream news.
Perhaps some parts of the migration haven't been completed, or there is still a central database in us-east1
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s internet based cloud service connecting businesses to people using their apps or online platforms.”
Uh.. yeah.
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources over the internet, allowing businesses to scale and pay only for what they use.”
This part:
> access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources
Most people who know little about computers can still imagine a giant mainframe they saw in a movie with a bunch of blinking lights. Not so different, visually, from a modern data center.
It's the same as having a computer room but in someone else's datacentre.
> An Amazon Web Services outage is causing major disruptions around the world. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Boston Globe.
> On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services.