[gtsteve]

> Seriously: I don't understand why you guys stay with AWS.

Personally I've been using it for ages and I know most services inside and out. They do suffer downtime in some regions occasionally, but it'd be too expensive at this point to move.

And who doesn't suffer downtime? You can't avoid it; you just need a plan to deal with it. For example, having a backup replica bucket in another region and the ability to quickly switch your CDN over would probably be a good idea here; that's what I did.

If you want to go further you can replicate your data to another cloud provider entirely and use low TTLs to switch to a backup CDN if your system is that mission-critical (in the event of a worldwide AWS failure doomsday scenario).

All systems will fail you and it's our responsibility as IT professionals to have a plan to mitigate this.

[nicolaslem]

Low TTL on DNS entries might do more harm than good: if your DNS provider gets seriously DDoS, being able to rely on caches can save the day.

Anyway, I agree with your conclusion.

[johansch]

Sunk cost fallacy.

I do agree that we should all plan for failures.

However, I also think it's a sign of failure in planning and architecture foresight if it's too expensive to move away from a particular cloud provider.

[froogle]

The sunk cost fallacy is when you (irrationally) decide to stick with what you're doing purely because you've already spent a lot of resources on it. It doesn't apply when you've done an economic analysis and found out it doesn't make sense to swap.

There are plenty of cases where it just wouldn't make sense to switch after looking at the costs, opportunity costs, etc. For example, if his site makes him $10 a month, outages cost him $1 a month that could be mitigated by moving, and it would cost $1000 of labor to swap providers. (Depends on interest rates.)

Perhaps it was originally a failure to not have a plan to easily move from a provider, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that right now it may cost too many hours of work to justify the move.

[gtsteve]

It's not as though it would be impossible; our integration with AWS isn't that deep, it's not as though we use DynamoDB for our core data store or anything like that. But even migrating from one traditional datacenter to another isn't easy from an operational point of view.

There needs to be a clear financial win. Even taking into account the failures we've seen so far, I don't see a compelling reason to leave AWS.

[johansch]

(You're right, I used that term incorrectly.)

Still stand behind the other two points I made in that post though.