[prophesi]

The difference is that when AWS goes down, Netflix/Spotify still have backups and could adapt infrastructure if the outage involved permanent data-loss. You're talking about the people who built https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey

I'd argue that it should be _easier_ for a 2-man company to adapt to cloud service outages, as they likely don't have to keep up with nearly as many backups or moving parts.

[nikanj]

Another practical difference: When AWS goes down, it makes the news outside the tech bubble too. Customers are much more likely to forgive you, if you send a link to NY Times that says "Amazon is suffering a global outage, affecting tens of thousands of companies"

[Dylan16807]

So pretend they had offsite backups. That's a separate issue from an entire contingency plan. The ability to adapt is not the same thing. This company could certainly adapt to a new host if they had an extra backup.

[prophesi]

The ability to adapt is the definition of a contingency plan. It's essentially, "If this person/service/database/customer/etc vanished off the face of the earth, what do?"

[Dylan16807]

Okay, then that means they did have a contingency plan, except for a single rsync.

Which would mean you disagree strongly with coldtea?

[prophesi]

I'm really not sure what your argument is.

Their entire business was completely reliant on DO droplets. It doesn't take much foresight to think, "hey, I should probably make a backup in case this VPS goes down."

Nothing in this comment thread, or the OP twitter thread mentions anything about the rest of this imaginary contingency plan of theirs.

[Dylan16807]

Coldtea said they need to explain their lack of contingency plan wrt "servers, colocation, another cloud offering, etc...".

PostPost said they didn't, that even huge companies don't have contingency plans.

I agree with PostPost, and I'm trying to figure out which one you agree with.

If you define being able to adapt as a contingency plan, well, I have confidence that this company is fully able to adapt! Their architecture is small and pretty easy to move. The only problem is a lack of external backup, which will be remedied very soon, and once that happens they could easily shift to another service even if DO re-disabled their account.

So that would mean you agree with PostPost. But you don't seem to agree at all.

I'm struggling to reconcile "The ability to adapt is the definition of a contingency plan." and "this imaginary contingency plan of theirs". If you demand a preexisting written plan then that means you're not accepting "the ability to adapt" as a valid answer at all.