Who do you recommend instead (assuming in-house or Hetzner-equiv is out of reach)? Google Cloud? Azure? Rackspace?

I tried them all and Amazon is still the best.

Personally I've been using it for ages and I know most services inside and out. They do suffer downtime in some regions occasionally, but it'd be too expensive at this point to move.

And who doesn't suffer downtime? You can't avoid it; you just need a plan to deal with it. For example, having a backup replica bucket in another region and the ability to quickly switch your CDN over would probably be a good idea here; that's what I did.

If you want to go further you can replicate your data to another cloud provider entirely and use low TTLs to switch to a backup CDN if your system is that mission-critical (in the event of a worldwide AWS failure doomsday scenario).

All systems will fail you and it's our responsibility as IT professionals to have a plan to mitigate this.

You can use Adwords as a self-service user. Without knowing so much of details you can run your ads but also you can bery easily ruin your budget. But many enterprise customers use it very differently than those users and they are extremely optimizing the cost. Cloud is the same. If you don't know how big customers use AWS, it is normal that you are surprised because AWS is still leading the market.

You say GCP is better than AWS. Which part is better? GCP does not have many services of AWS we benefit from. How can you compare totally different providers? You can only say AWS EC2 is worse than GCP. But you cannot compare whole platforms in one sentence.

Which would make sense (and is sorta-kinda a best-practice) if Amazon wrote services such that they "crashed early"—but instead they're seemingly written so the backend lock up and be rendered completely useless at "doing its job" but will continue to run just fine.

Either of those two design decisions is potentially a good thing on its own, but they need to be considered in light of one-another if you want your status page to make any sense. If you want to report cluster failures, code your clusters to actually fail. If you want to keep your clusters up, write your monitoring checks as whole-stack acceptance tests.

You don't seem to have enough experience to comment on the issue.

Yes. Yes they are. Thankfully.

> 57.10 Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

Second, I know the lawyer and yes he had fun.

I'd bet that something broke (causing InternalError responses) and then nodes started marking themselves as failed (causing the timeouts and 503s soon after).

Increased Error Rates

We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region.

https://status.aws.amazon.com/

Increased Error Rates

We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region.