They've been charging a premium for, and marketing, "Availability" for decades at this point. I worked for a competitor and made a better product: it could endure any of the zones failing.
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
(I'm assuming by zone you mean the equivalent of an AWS region, with multiple connected datacenters)
I'll let people guess for the sport of it, here's the hint: there were at least 30 of them comprised of Real Datacenters. Thanks for the doubt, though. Implied or otherwise.
At risk of more snark [well-intentioned]: Clouds aren't the Death Star, they don't have to have an exhaust port. It's fair the first one does... for a while.
No kidding! The customers differ, business/finance/governments, but the volume [systems/time/effort] was comparable to Amazon. The people involved in audits were consumed practically for a whole quarter, if memory serves. Not necessarily for testing itself: first, planning, sharing the plan, then dreading the plan.
Anyway, I don't miss doing this at all. Didn't mean to imply mitigation is trivial, just feasible :) 'AWS scale' is all the more reason to do business continuity/disaster recovery testing! I guess I find it being surprising, surprising.
Competitors have an easier time avoiding the creation of a Gordian Knot with their services... when they aren't making a new one every week. There are significant degrees to PaaS, a little focus [not bound to a promotion packet] goes a long way.
Real People would notice/care, but financially, it didn't matter. Contract said the edge had to be lost for a moment/restored. I've played both Incident Manager and SRE in this routine.
edit: Less often we'd do a more thorough test: power loss/full recovery. We'd disconnect more regularly given the simplicity.
Your experiment proves nothing. Anyone can pull it off.
The goal posts were fine: bomb the AZ of your choice, I don't care. The Cloud [that isn't AWS, in the case of 'us-east-1'] will still work.
Yes, everything has a weakness. Not every weakness is comparable to 'us-east-1'. Ours was billing/IAM. Guess what? They lived in several places with effective and routinely exercised redundancy. No single zone held this much influence. Service? Yes, that's why they span zones.
Said in the absolute kindest way: please fuck off. I have nothing to prove or, worse, sell. The businesses have done enough.
A Cloud with multiple regions, or zones for that matter, that depend on one is a poorly designed Cloud; mine didn't, AWS does. So, let's revisit what brought 'whatever1', here:
> Your experiment proves nothing. Anyone can pull it off.
Amazon didn't, we did. Hmm.
Not that "forgot to pay" is going to result in a cut off - that doesn't happen with the multi-megawatt supplies from multiple suppliers that go into a dedicated data centre. It's far more likely that the receivers will have taken over and will pay the bill by that point.
How’s not paying your AWS bill going for you?
There can be other valid usecases than your own.
Price is beside my original point: Amazon has enjoyed decades for arbitrage. This sounds more accusatory than intended: the 'us-south-1' problem exists because it's allowed/chosen. Created in 2006!
Now, to retract that a bit: I could see technical debt/culture making this state of affairs practical, if not inevitable. Correct? No, if I was Papa Bezos I'd be incredibly upset my Supercomputer is so hamstrung. I think even the warehouses were impacted!
The real differentiator was policy/procedure. Nobody was allowed to create a service or integration with this kind of blast area. Design principles, to say the least. Fault zones and availability zones exist for a reason beyond capacity, after all.
IAD datacenters have forever been the place where Amazon software developers implement services first (well before AWS was a thing).
Multi-AZ support often comes second (more than you think; Amazon is a pragmatic company), and not every service is easy to make TRULY multi-AZ.
And then other services depend on those services, and may also fall into the same trap.
...and so much of the tech/architectural debt gets concentrated into a single region.
Were the docs/tooling up to date? Tough bet. Much easier to fix BGP or whatever.