Why do these companies still sign with AWS? Didn’t they learn from the last two major outages in us-east? To say nothing of the deceptive business practices to obfuscate service utilization to overcharge businesses?
My guess, the CFO showed that using AWS saves the company a few cents to a fraction of a cent per what ever unit they measure by. Those few cents to a fraction of a cent add up when multiplied by the millions or hundreds of millions of units and that savings makes the CEO look like they are more profitable and can give shareholders more profit.
When everything is about the quarterly results and the need to always show growth so the board and shareholders don’t fire you, you’ll cut corners and take the risk, as long as it has the potential to make you look good.
Stop using hyperscalers. Then when an outage does occur, it doesn’t take down half the internet, and instead only affects a much smaller subset of services.
Problem is that as a provider, if you are sure you are confident you’ll get hit by an outage at some point anyway, it’s actually better for you if a bunch of other big names are brought down at the same time.
Instead of “that one service sucked”, the story is “aws sucked”. If it happens too much people will more widely say “ok they suck for using aws”, but for now the transparency gets them treated more like being affected by an unavoidable external condition.
I’m grateful a lot of sites I like didn’t use aws, but I’m not exactly a common demographic and even I won’t know if she is the services even move or not until another such outage.
Like sure, it wouldn’t be all together like this, but that’s also not a reasonable ask for a lot of big cloud customers without huge investments for not actually anything extra reliability.
One potential advantage of being up while a whole lot of other companies are down is that some customers may end up switching to you during an outage involving the majority of your competitors.
Yes, you’d experience outages on the new service, but where you potentially lose X% of your business (I have no idea what that kind of number looks like - 0.1%? Higher? Lower?), in the event of AWS outage hitting all your competitors, they each lose 0.1% (or whatever) who disproportionately go to you because you were up while they, and other alternatives, were all down.
This potentially advantages the first companies to jump off AWS for a comparable alternative, which is fair sight better than if the advantages only showed up once some minimum of companies left AWS since no one would be incentived to be first.
From a worker point of view, nothing better than to shrug and say “not my hardware” and blame Amazon when your shit is down for two days, and take the opportunity to do some changes you’ve been putting off because they required scheduled downtime.
Nobody is switching businesses because the service they pay for it’s down for a day. If you run an individual service business (restaurant, florist) sure, but no one is seriously switching businesses over this. Reliable long term self hosting is expensive and your uptick of business for that one day won’t make up for it.
No one’s asking for perfect. But a better system would account for outages, which we’ve seen plenty of so far. How’s that saying go? Don’t let perfect be the enemy of progress? It’s out of reach for a reason.
Why do these companies still sign with AWS? Didn’t they learn from the last two major outages in us-east? To say nothing of the deceptive business practices to obfuscate service utilization to overcharge businesses?
My guess, the CFO showed that using AWS saves the company a few cents to a fraction of a cent per what ever unit they measure by. Those few cents to a fraction of a cent add up when multiplied by the millions or hundreds of millions of units and that savings makes the CEO look like they are more profitable and can give shareholders more profit.
When everything is about the quarterly results and the need to always show growth so the board and shareholders don’t fire you, you’ll cut corners and take the risk, as long as it has the potential to make you look good.
Bro casually and respectfully explaining enshittification over here.
Can you name a more reliable alternative? With citations?
Because every major cloud provider has outages. On prem clouds also have outages. Everyone does.
Stop using hyperscalers. Then when an outage does occur, it doesn’t take down half the internet, and instead only affects a much smaller subset of services.
Problem is that as a provider, if you are sure you are confident you’ll get hit by an outage at some point anyway, it’s actually better for you if a bunch of other big names are brought down at the same time.
Instead of “that one service sucked”, the story is “aws sucked”. If it happens too much people will more widely say “ok they suck for using aws”, but for now the transparency gets them treated more like being affected by an unavoidable external condition.
I’m grateful a lot of sites I like didn’t use aws, but I’m not exactly a common demographic and even I won’t know if she is the services even move or not until another such outage.
Okay, you know those have outages too right?
Like sure, it wouldn’t be all together like this, but that’s also not a reasonable ask for a lot of big cloud customers without huge investments for not actually anything extra reliability.
Did you read my entire comment? I know it’s more than one sentence, but your entire comment would be irrelevant if you read the whole thing.
One potential advantage of being up while a whole lot of other companies are down is that some customers may end up switching to you during an outage involving the majority of your competitors.
Yes, you’d experience outages on the new service, but where you potentially lose X% of your business (I have no idea what that kind of number looks like - 0.1%? Higher? Lower?), in the event of AWS outage hitting all your competitors, they each lose 0.1% (or whatever) who disproportionately go to you because you were up while they, and other alternatives, were all down.
This potentially advantages the first companies to jump off AWS for a comparable alternative, which is fair sight better than if the advantages only showed up once some minimum of companies left AWS since no one would be incentived to be first.
From a worker point of view, nothing better than to shrug and say “not my hardware” and blame Amazon when your shit is down for two days, and take the opportunity to do some changes you’ve been putting off because they required scheduled downtime.
Nobody is switching businesses because the service they pay for it’s down for a day. If you run an individual service business (restaurant, florist) sure, but no one is seriously switching businesses over this. Reliable long term self hosting is expensive and your uptick of business for that one day won’t make up for it.
No system is perfect.
Yes, and? Things can be better.
Sure, but perfect?
No one’s asking for perfect. But a better system would account for outages, which we’ve seen plenty of so far. How’s that saying go? Don’t let perfect be the enemy of progress? It’s out of reach for a reason.
AWS has outages. So the answer to your question is obvious, AWS is not an advantage over any other solution.