[jimwalsh]

Actually, occasionally you do need to think about it. Reference the various times AWS emails customers about unplanned outages that need to occur because of hardware issues/patching/etc.

Cloud is great, but there str still plenty of reasons to run your own datacenter. Yes for many startups it might not make sense, but at a certain sized company/application it can easily make sense.

[ak217]

AWS just announced a few days ago that their latest Xen patch will be deployed through a live update to their hypervisor kernel, and that going forward they expect patches like this to be rolled out live.

The real upside of AWS is that they have relentlessly pursued and killed off reasons for you to care about things like this. They've eliminated points of failure in their infrastructure and given operators a wealth of tools to ensure their apps stay up through any update or event (AZ-affine ELBs and autoscaling groups, single-IP ELBs, continuous improvements to EBS and S3, etc.) Given the scale of their infrastructure in us-east-1, it's now also highly unlikely that any customer will manage to overload it on their own.

[Nick-Craver]

I can't resist reminding you that 1 command from a sysadmin routing traffic to the wrong network was the cause of the last major outage there :)

They are getting much better, as all providers are. They're still just not a fit for many people because of performance requirements that are either impossible or too costly to meet on that type of infrastructure.

I've always said this: the cloud isn't a good fit for us; do what works for you.

[duggan]

> I can't resist reminding you that 1 command from a sysadmin routing traffic to the wrong network was the cause of the last major outage there :)

If you're going to bring that up, I can't resist reminding you of that time you had poor sysadmins running up and down stairs with buckets of fuel to keep your servers running[1].

> I've always said this: the cloud isn't a good fit for us; do what works for you.

There are costs. Frankly, it appears Stack Exchange prefers to lay those on its people rather than its purse.

[1]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/11/se-podcast-36-we-got-h...

[Nick-Craver]

As Kyle says, we were helping our sister company Fog Creek keep their servers online (as well as other people in that facility like Squarespace) because we cared. Our traffic was not being served from that data center and in fact we shut down most of our servers during that to conserve generator fuel. Our traffic was flowing just fine from Oregon. A decision Kyle and I made the night before when concluding they would probably shut down power to lower manhattan in preparation for flooding.

When your neighbor's house is on fire you don't argue over the price of the hose. You help. Our remote people that couldn't come help in person also helped them replicate their entire network in AWS as a backup plan.

I don't usually post pissed off comments, but you're dead wrong here and intetionally or not demeaning a good company and good people whom, because they cared, came to help in a time of emergency. I take it you weren't in New York during Sandy; it looked like a post-apocalyptic war zone afterwards.

TL;DR - You don't know what you're talking about.

[vacri]

intetionally or not demeaning a good company

It's sad that you can't handle a snarky comment (right or wrong) that was given in response to your own snarky comment. If you can't handle being poked and it pisses you off, don't poke others.

Also, you seem particularly offended that your altruism is being maligned, when you're also complaining that the GP was unaware that the action was altruistic in the first place (???).

[mentat]

His comment wasn't snarky in the first place, it was pointing out that mistakes scale too. The response was totally inappropriate.

[KyleBrandt]

That wasn't stack exchange. We failed over to our secondary data center during sandy.