They got it fixed within 48 hours, globally, which, if you ask me, is incredible at their scale.
I would hardly describe anything AWS does as amateur. But maybe that's just me.
Sorry their updates weren't to your liking but they were responding and posting bulletins the whole time and again: they solved the issue very quickly given the number of clients they support.
It's pretty fucking professional to update the infrastructure that runs half the internet in under 48 hours with no issues. But again, communication can be a problem when you have as many customers as they do.
OP raised some legitimate concerns, but his credibility was undercut by attacking Amazon and calling them names. Ironically, his post was a much more amateur move as his concerns would likely be taken more seriously if he had stuck to the issues and not resorted to name-calling. The essence of professionalism is sticking to the issues at hand and not being sidetracked by extraneous factors.
Folks, this is an account created 19 hours ago making half an apology and then rationalizing not listening to customers because they solved a "big" problem quickly. That's an ad hominum argument and as a result, a big tell on intent.
From my perspective, pushing out a new SSL build to a bunch of load balancers in a highly automated network like AWS is probably, by this point, a trivial task. Actually listening to the customer and responding decently is MUCH harder. Clearly it could be done better, which is the point of the post.
Rise above getting offended/scared about being called "amateurs" and start talking more about what goes on in that creepy black box that is AWS. You owe the world that much, at the very least.
To clarify: I'm a long time HN reader that finally got around to making an account (and certainly not for the express purpose of defending Amazon). However, I did want to call the author out on writing a terribly unfair knee-jerk, heat-of-the-moment indictment of AWS (this type of thing is unfortunately all-too-common in the tech community: actual amateurs writing as if they are a central authority about subjects that they have something approaching 0 understanding of. For example: the multitude of complex engineering and PR challenges a service provider like AWS faces during something like the Great OpenSSL Exploit of 2014). What I'm trying to say is: cut them some slack. Their response seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
Hope this helps.
The way to respond to an asinine comment, if you must respond, is to politely refute it.
In retrospect, what I should have done is called out the blaming statements you made in your first post. That's what brought me to action and caused me to write my response the way I did. I should know better than trying to rationalize with someone who is in dissonance. BTW, narrowrail called you out below for this blaming statement here. Pay attention - people are giving you feedback. Take it or leave it.
Vote down all my comments if that makes you feel better. Karma is meant to burn. It's also a tell that this story dropped off the main page and I'm still getting downvotes on my comment. AWS koolaid much?
Oh, and FWIW, I am a super sleuth. A super sleuth of human behavior and emotional response. I also watch what I say about others, trying not to blame and indicate opinion where needed. That's why I said your behaviors were a 'tell on intent'. I have no idea who you are or why you created an account just to comment on this story, but I guarantee there is more to it than what meets the eye.
These responses I always see on HN when there is an AWS issue always show me how disconnected many of the commenters are from reality, or from ever being involved in a huge infrastructure.
Sure the AWS status page doesn't have a hip web 2.0 AJAX backed d3.js powered cool looking status page. Yes they don't update it every 3 minutes with new info, but many (most) of the problems that one off customers see do not reach a threshold that would ever effect enough customers to make it into a dashboard post. I do think they need to speed up their status updates, but these posts need to get OK'd by a decent number of people before they get thrown up.
There are usually multiple ELB instances living on every rack of every datacenter in every AZ in every region of AWS. Relaunching / patching hundreds of thousands of instances in 48 hours with minimial disruption to customers, is a lot harder than you think.
My primary point agrees with your second paragraph, which is that they could do better on the status updates. Unfortunately this has been going on for YEARS at AWS, so it's worth ratcheting up the tone when talking about it. It's important, and they need to fix it.
It's a nightmare to know when your problem is due to your infrastructure or if their's a bigger scale issue at AWS cause they never talk about it...
Sadly this page is not updated often enough. I mean, when there's a known issue on one of the aws service this page display a little "i" icon, which is barely visible.
And when, you encounter some problem with your AWS stuff that clearly come from their side, if the problem it's not wide, they just say nothing. At that point you can search yourself for hour to be sure it's not your responsibility, and after-woods, you just wait, blind.
In this case, they probably didn't want to be too explicit about the details of patching tens of thousands of machines while the remediation was still ongoing.
I do agree that it's unexpectedly hard to find a link to the "security notice" page anywhere.
Also, how'd you find that link? If you happened to just have it laying around, that's fine but it would be better if they had these things linked somewhere customers can find them when new ones are posted (like a page covering service post-mortems) and the timeline is missing little details like the year when the outage happened and a point of contact (it's signed by "the aws team") if you have questions.
That's a great point. I found it by googling "AWS post mortem", but I only knew it existed because I had been linked to this page before.