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Comment by impure | Hacker News Reader

We already have diversification. You can rent a VPS from hundreds of possible companies. And people are very happy with them, it seems every month or two there’s a post here about how some company slashed their cloud bill by switching to a VPS. What we have here is a lock-in and marketing problem.

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>You can rent a VPS from hundreds of possible companies. And people are very happy with them, it seems every month or two there’s a post here about how some company slashed their cloud bill by switching to a VPS.

Companies are using higher-level "PaaS" suite of services from AWS such as DynamoDB, RedShift, etc and not just the lower-level "IaaS" such as basic EC2 instances or pure containers. Same "lock-in" situation with using the higher-level services from MS Azure and Google Cloud.

For those dependent on high-level services, migrating to a VPS like Hetzner or self-hosting is not possible unless they re-invent the AWS stack by installing/babysitting a bunch of open-source software. It's going to be a lot more involved than just installing a PostgreSQL db instance on a VPS.

> It's going to be a lot more involved

Yes, and you can't escape that by outsourcing it. The complexity is still there, and it will still bite you when your outsourcer fails to manage it.

Same thing applies to AWS...

I’m not really making a point here as much as an observation, but if my stack that I manage atop VMs in a data center goes down, my customers are pissed at me. If AWS goes down along with half the Internet, my customers are completely sympathetic.

Maybe just for you and after they realize it's part of the ongoing AWS outages, but for most folks, an outage is still their problem, and their SLA, regardless of if it's upstream from them.

I disagree. I think most customers are much more sympathetic to an AWS outage than they are to a self-managed outage. Whether that ought to be the case or not is a different question.

But if your services are up when everyone on AWS is down you look like a wizard.

Unfortunately, people rarely notice when something is working, and the few who do will probably just assume you weren’t on AWS in the first place and move on with their day.

And every comment in those threads is how AWS is webscale and wont go down, while the vps will have uptime of 1 day a month

Amazon offers VPS as well, EC2 instances, were those affected? I think they weren't.

Our actual running instances were pretty much fine throughout, as was the RDS cluster, but we had no way to launch new instances (or auto-scale), and no way to invoke any of the other AWS services (IAM, SQS, Lambda, etc). Also no cloud watch logs/metrics for the duration, so limited visibility.

Overall not that bad for us, but if you had more high-level service dependencies, there would have been impact.

> While most operations are recovered, requests to launch new EC2 instances (or services that launch EC2 instances such as ECS) in the US-EAST-1 Region are still experiencing increased error rates.

> We continue to investigate the root cause for the network connectivity issues that are impacting AWS services such as DynamoDB, SQS, and Amazon Connect in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified that the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network.

So, kinda? Some global services depend on us-east-1...

> Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues.

Basically, you know it's going to be a bumpy day when us-east-1 has an issue because your ability to run across regions depends on what the issue is what the impact is.

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