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by untog 3969 days ago
Slightly OT, but there's an interesting phenomenon at work now that so much of the internet depends on Amazon's infrastructure. When it goes down you might not even need to worry about it that much, as so many sites/apps will be broken that most users will just assume that the internet is broken.
2 comments
alpb 3969 days ago
It happened a few times before. And no Internet was not broken and not many sites are using AWS as you would assume. A lot of services still run on their datacenters or on-premise servers, or maintain a hot backup that they can switch to immediately.

>> When it goes down you might not even need to worry about it that much

I'm afraid this is pretty much getting the entire cloud thing wrong.

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untog 3969 days ago
lot of services still run on their datacenters or on-premise servers, or maintain a hot backup that they can switch to immediately.

I'm not an idiot, I'm well aware of that. My point is that when a large number of consumer-facing sites go down, users (who aren't aware of Amazon cloud servers) simply assume something is wrong with the internet.

Obviously if you have a mission critical service this isn't acceptable. But for a lot of average sites/apps it might not be worth the investment in time/effort to cover relatively small outages such as these.

I'm afraid this is pretty much getting the entire cloud thing wrong.

Not really. It's the utility of the cloud - if there's an outage there are already a lot of people working to fix it. If you're self-hosted, that's on you.

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tedunangst 3969 days ago
The first thing I do when Netflix goes down is complain on Facebook. Facebook up, Netflix down? It's not the Internet that's broken.
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kordless 3969 days ago
> I'm not an idiot

Nobody called you an idiot.

> I'm afraid this is pretty much getting the entire cloud thing wrong.

This was in reference to your comment "most users will assume the internet is broken". In the context of "it's OK because the customer thinks everything is down" the comment would be completely appropriate. It's being done wrong if this is the way we approach things.

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scott_karana 3968 days ago
Similarly, a lot of users will call tech support to complain that "the Internet is down" when it's merely their email provider, or Facebook, or League of Legends, and everything else is fine... :-)
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