[Negitivefrags]

I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers?

I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable.

It's very tempting for them to reuse bits of infrastructure everywhere which increases the chances that if something goes wrong somewhere it will break your stuff. So for example, hosting instance images on S3 means that when S3 has issues, now EC2 has issues.

[RyanGWU82]

S3's uptime is probably an order of magnitude better than I can provide myself. From 2010-2011 I worked with a medium-size MogileFS cluster, with about 160 million files and 50 TB of data, triple-replicated. We had great uptime until we ran out of I/O capacity on the metadata DB. Then we had a week of 10% downtime, while we ordered new database servers from Dell.

As far as I remember, S3's US Standard region hasn't had a serious incident since Fall 2012. That's a pretty great uptime record in general, even though it's terribly frustrating on days like today.

My current company spends a few hundred dollars a month on S3. I certainly couldn't match S3's uptime at that budget. Maybe I could do it at 2-3X the budget, but with that budget it might be easier to mirror my files across multiple S3 regions.

[toomuchtodo]

> My current company spends a few hundred dollars a month on S3. I certainly couldn't match S3's uptime at that budget. Maybe I could do it at 2-3X the budget, but with that budget it might be easier to mirror my files across multiple S3 regions.

Exactly. Build multi-region support into your app(s), enable S3's replication so objects in your primary region are replicated to another region, and then properly handle loss of a region (go read-only or write to another region and restore consistency later).

You'll still be spending less than attempting to maintain a highly durable object store yourself across multiple datacenters or geographic areas.

[deanCommie]

AWS is so massive that even when 0.1% of the customers are having problems, it is huge news like this.

The reality is most customers are not affected, and overall service uptime is highest anywhere around.

Not to mention that whenever AWS is having issues it's always in one region at a time, and frequently a single availability zone. As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

[mnutt]

The reality is most customers are not affected, and overall service uptime is highest anywhere around.

Unfortunately it's really impossible to say in this case, since they don't release numbers. Informally everyone I know with S3 buckets in US-Default had issues this morning.

As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

What you say about multiple AZs is true for EC2, but many other AWS services (especially EBS-backed ones) tend to go down across the entire region. If you're serious about availability, you really need to be in multiple regions.

[anko]

> As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

This is a total crock. On the 31st of July, our ec2 instances across 2 availability zones were shutdown without warning. I waited 3 hours not being able to do anything. So far I've only got info from first level support and it's been "escalated".

[RyanGWU82]

S3 is already supposed to be AZ-tolerant. In the US Standard region, they say your data is actually replicated across multiple geographic locations in Virginia and the Pacific Northwest. That's probably true—your data may be highly durable—but availability incidents can apparently span both geographic regions.

[kordless]

> As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

And the perfect "out" for AWS, every single time they have issues.

[juliangregorian]

I avoid almost all of these snafus simply by not putting anything in Virginia.

[ceejayoz]

> I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers?

I haven't rented servers in about two years, but yes. My old MediaTemple dedicated servers and the pair we had colocated at a local telco's large datacenter experienced occasional network outages and whatnot just like AWS does.

IMO, AWS made load balancing and fault-tolerant setups much more accessible to small businesses. At the time of our switch, getting a load balancer at our colo was quite pricey whereas AWS charges $15ish a month for it. Getting a three-tier setup on AWS was easy, whereas at the colo we'd have to pay for at least 6U of space even for relatively small amounts of traffic.

[simonebrunozzi]

Former AWS employee here. I disagree. Amazon S3 is way more "complex" than you think. This is a talk I gave years ago, I guess most of the principles are still valid today: https://vimeo.com/7330740 In most cases, large cloud infrastructures have a higher uptime than a dedicated one. I said "most", because if your IT is particularly good and well funded, then their uptime might be better.

[spydum]

it's not all about uptime. It's about upfront capital costs.

It also highly depends on the service and solution you build. I know in traditional EC2 space, over the long term you absolute can self-host for far less money, but you are talking about 5-year TCO.

Things like S3 bring another advantage: a globally distributed data store is HARD to build and supply on your own dime. I would argue things like that are much harder to beat self-hosted.

[cbsmith]

> I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable.

Well, everyone has different definitions of stable.

> I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers?

I don't think it is inflammatory, but perhaps you have an idealized notion of how well teams manage uptime, and more importantly, failures, on average. Sure, a great team will do fantastic, but an average team will... not.

That said, it seems likely that AWS is hitting some kind of a rough patch right now. There are, however, other cloud services whose uptime records for the last year would be the envy of your typical company's internal hosting services, and I'd expect AWS to return to that fold shortly.

[bdcravens]

Uptime, probably. At best, I'd get equal (no I wouldn't, but for sake of discussion), but it'd cost me several orders of magnitude more, in terms of redundancy, security infrastructure, etc

[akamaka]

Yes, your comment is unneccessarily inflammatory, in case you're wondering why I'm downvoting you.

Nobody in this thread has made any comments about their uptime expectations before you brought up the subject. There's no sign here of the "people" you are referring to.

[cbsmith]

It's inflammatory to ask a question that is no doubt is some people's minds at times like this?

It's not inflammatory to ask a question that people are no doubt thinking, even if the answer is obvious.

[akamaka]

Colo versus cloud is not a typicial flamebait subject, but the way he worded it may as well have been trolling.

For example, think of someone writing "Do people really believe that Vi is better than Emacs?".

Yeah, I feel that starting off one's comment by bluntly stating one's incredulity at relying on the leading player in the cloud hosting industry is a bit inflammatory. There are a dozen other ways to word the question.

[kordless]

Not to mention the 'moving parts' are all closed source.