[sz4kerto]

This is a bit like the financial crisis in 2008.

In 2008, the idea was that if you bundle up a large bunch of mortgages, then the bundle will have low risk because the chances of everything failing at the same time is low. The cloud is designed so that resource usage spikes of individual customers can always be served because one customer is very small compared to the whole infrastructure.

However, in some cases, these mortgages/resource spikes become highly correlated.

[sksksk]

It's a pretty common model in many industries...

If every gym member visited the gym at the same time, they wouldn't all fit. Only a small fraction of the members use the gym at any one time, so it works.

Banks would crash if everyone tried to withdraw their money at the same time, but they don't, so the bank can loan the money out.

[buran77]

> Only a small fraction of the members use the gym at any one time

Only a fraction of the members use the gym at all. If every member of the gym wanted to use it there would be no reasonable schedule to make that possible. ~50% of gym members use it less than 100 times per year, and only ~25% use it consistently.

For banks depending on legislation they have to keep 0/3/10% in reserves, depending on the size of the bank. Which is far worse than most clouds or gyms would ever offer.

[axlee]

As a matter of fact, I cannot think of a single industry that can serve a full service to the entirety of their clients at a discrete point in time.

[Intermernet]

Garbage collection. As in the people who pick up your bins. They do this on a weekly basis.

[dragonwriter]

Garbage collectors, like clouds, have usage based pricing, and cannot handle everyone spiking at once. They can handle everyone at normal baseline usage, but that's just like saying a cloud provider can handle everyone using the same number of reserved instances they’ve purchased on a long-term basis.

[tdrgabi]

But if all their customers want their garbage picked up today, or everyday, it won't work.

[dragonwriter]

More relevant to the cloud analogy, if all their customers wanted to purchase a large extra pickup (beyond their normal baseline) on their normal day, which is part of garbage service offerings, they wouldn't be able to accommodate it.

[Intermernet]

Aha, thank you for finding the flaw in my example! I lounge corrected ;-)

[Intermernet]

On any single day, they only have a set list of customers. This is part of the contract.

[JackPoach]

That's really an interesting analogy. Of course all analogies are wrong BUT if AWS goes down, half the internet goes down (in terms of important services).

[ironic_ali]

Including the CIA. Snowden will be happy!

[cameronbrown]

Isn't AWS GovCloud a dedicated set of DCs for government? I'm sure the CIA can give DMV jobs the boot if need be.

[votepaunchy]

The AWS Secret Region is separate from GovCloud.

https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/

[sneak]

Just the US government. They even have special racist hiring policies to comply with the strict regulations set about who is allowed to be in the building where the US government holds your data.

[votepaunchy]

race != nationality != citizenship

[upofadown]

Racism is normally implemented on attibutes other than race. Instead some aspect of the targeted that the race is used. So this does not disprove the contention by itself.