[tptacek]

It shouldn't scare you. It should spark recognition. This meta-failure-mode exists in every complex technological system. You should be, like, "ah, of course, that makes sense now". Latent failures are fractally prevalent and have combinatoric potential to cause catastrophic failures. Yes, this is a runbook they need to have, but we should all understand there are an unbounded number of other runbooks they'll need and won't have, too!

[lazystar]

the thing that scares me is that AI will never be able to diagnose an issue that it has never seen before. If there are no runbooks, there is no pattern recognition. this is something Ive been shouting about for 2 years now; hopefully this issue makes AWS leadership understand that current gen AI can never replace human engineering.

[tptacek]

I'm much less confident in that assertion. I'm not bullish on AI systems independently taking over operations from humans, but catastrophic outages are combinations of less-catastrophic outages which are themselves combinations of latent failures, and when the latent failures are easy to characterize (as is the case here!), LLMs actually do really interesting stuff working out the combinatorics.

I wouldn't want to, like, make a company out of it (I assume the foundational model companies will eat all these businesses) but you could probably do some really interesting stuff with an agent that consumes telemetry and failure model information and uses it to surface hypos about what to look at or what interventions to consider.

All of this is besides my original point, though: I'm saying, you can't runbook your way to having a system as complex as AWS run safely. Safety in a system like that is a much more complicated process, unavoidably. Like: I don't think an LLM can solve the "fractal runbook requirement" problem!

[janalsncm]

AI is a lot more than just LLMs. Running through the rats nest of interdependent systems like AWS has is exactly what symbolic AI was good at.

[Aeolun]

I think millions of systems have failed due to missing DNS records though.