Hacker News Reader

Comment by xbar | Hacker News Reader

This set of facts comes to light every 3-5 years when US-East-1 has another failure. Clearly they could have architected their way out of this blast radius problem by now, but they do not.

Why would they keep a large set of centralized, core traffic services in Virginia for decades despite it being a bad design?

View on HN

It’s probably because there is a lot of tech debt plus look at where it is - Virgina. It shouldn’t take much of imagination to figure out why that is strategic

They could put a failover site in Colorado or Seattle or Atlanta, handling just their infrastructure. It's not like the NSA wouldn't be able to backhaul from those places.

You mean the surveillance angle as reason for it being in Virginia?

AWS _had_ architected away from single-region failure modes. There are only a few services that are us-east-1 only in AWS (IAM and Route53, mostly), and even they are designed with static stability so that their control plane failure doesn't take down systems.

It's the rest of the world that has not. For a long time companies just ran everything in us-east-1 (e.g. Heroku), without even having an option to switch to another region.

The parent seems to be implying there is something in us-east-1 that could take down all the various regions?

So the control plane for DNS and the identity management system are tied to us-east-1 and we’re supposed to think that’s OK? Those seem like exactly the sorts of things that should NOT be reliant on only one region.

It's worse than that. The entire DNS ultimately depends on literally one box with the signing key for the root zone.

You eventually get services that need to be global. IAM and DNS are such examples, they have to have a global endpoint because they apply to the global entities. AWS users are not regionalized, an AWS user can use the same key/role to access resources in multiple regions.

not quite true - there are some regions that have a different set of AWS users / credentials. I can't remember what this is called off the top of my head.

These are different AWS partitions. They are completely separate from each other, requiring separate accounts and credentials.

There's one for China, one for the AWS government cloud, and there are also various private clouds (like the one hosting the CIA data). You can check their list in the JSON metadata that is used to build the AWS clients (e.g. https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/blob/1a7301b01cbf7e74e4... ).

What is the motivation of an effective Monopoly to do anything?

I mean look at their console. Their console application is pretty subpar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com