[al_be_back]

Postmortem all you want - the internet is breaking, hard.

The internet was born out of the need for Distributed networks during the cold war - to reduce central points of failure - a hedging mechanism if you will.

Now it has consolidated into ever smaller mono nets. A simple mistake in on one deployment could bring banking, shopping and travel to a halt globally. This can only get much worse when cyber warfare gets involved.

Personally, I think the cloud metaphor has overstretched and has long burst.

For R&D, early stage start-ups and occasional/seasonal computing, cloud works perfectly (similar to how time-sharing systems used to work).

For well established/growth businesses and gov, you better become self-reliant and tech independent: own physical servers + own cloud + own essential services (db, messaging, payment).

There's no shortage of affordable tech, know-how or workforce.

[anyonecancode]

> The internet was born out of the need for Distributed networks during the cold war - to reduce central points of failure - a hedging mechanism if you will.

I don't think the idea was that in the event of catastrophe, up to and including nuclear attack, the system would continue working normally, but that it would keep working. And the internet -- as a system -- certainly kept working during this AWS outage. In a degraded state, yes, but it was working, and recovered.

I'm more concerned with the way the early public internet promised a different kind of decentralization -- of economics, power, and ideas -- and how _that_ has become heavily centralized. In which case, AWS, and Amazon, indeed do make a good example. The internet, as a system, is certainly working today, but arguably in a degraded state.

[al_be_back]

preventing a catastrophe was ARPA's mitigation strategy. the point is where it's heading, not where it is. It's not about AWS per se, or any one company, it's the way it is consolidating. AWS came about by accident - cleverly utilizing spare server capacity from amazon.com.

In it's conception, the internet (not www), was not envisaged as a economical medium - it's success was a lovely side-effect.

[protocolture]

>the internet is breaking, hard.

I dont see that this is the case, its just more people want services over the internet from the same 3 places that break irregularly.

Internet infrastructure is as far as I can tell, getting better all the time.

The last big BGP bug had 1/10th the comments of the AWS one. And had much less scary naming (ooooh routing instability)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44105796

>The internet was born out of the need for Distributed networks during the cold war - to reduce central points of failure - a hedging mechanism if you will.

Instead of arguing about the need that birthed the internet, I will simply say that the internet still works in the same largely distributed fashion. Maybe you mean Web instead of Internet?

The issue here is that "Internet" isnt the same as "Things you might access on the Internet". The Internet held up great during this adventure. As far as I can tell it was returning 404's and 502's without incident. The distributed networks were networking distributedly. If you wanted to send and received packets with any internet joined human in a way that didnt rely on some AWS hosted application, that was still very possible.

>A simple mistake in on one deployment could bring banking, shopping and travel to a halt globally.

Yeah but for how long and for how many people? The last 20 years have been a burn in test for a lot of big industries on crappy infrastructure. It looks like near everyone has been dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

I mean the entire shipping industry got done over the last decade.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/all-four-of-the-worlds-largest...

>Personally, I think the cloud metaphor has overstretched and has long burst.

It was never very useful.

>For well established/growth businesses and gov, you better become self-reliant and tech independent

For these businesses, they just go out and get themselves some region/vendor redundancy. Lots of applications fell over during this outage, but lots of teams are also getting internal praise for designing their systems robustly and avoiding its fallout.

>There's no shortage of affordable tech, know-how or workforce.

Yes, and these people often know how to design cloud infrastructure to avoid these issues, or are smart enough to warn people that if their region or its dependencies fail without redundancy, they are taking a nose dive. Businesses will make business decisions and review those decisions after getting publicly burnt.

[al_be_back]

I don't mean www, that's a different beast. i said distributed nets, as was before www. It's not actually about aws per se, or whether the cloud improves - evolution doesn't necessarily favor improvement just because.

the centralization of computing is distorting the Internet's core strength, the distributed nets (not aws/azure/gcloud zones).

since covid, if anything is telling, is that politics, economy and warfare has shifted into a new era, pretty much globally.

[protocolture]

>i said distributed nets

So which nets failed here? The write up doesnt mention any network layer issues, and I am not aware of any large scale network layer fallout.