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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious ... do you not assign any value to having a backup outside of Amazon ?

AWS can certainly provide geographical diversity, but on the organizational abstraction layer, all eggs are in one basket, yes ?

Is having organizational redundancy something you assign zero value to, or something whose value conflicts with the egress costs so as to make it a difficult decision ?

Again, genuinely very interested ...

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Not OP, but of all the things that could kill the startup I work at, AWS shutting down is about on spot 63864664 on the list.

I mean we have like 2 millions of line of python code written for lambda, S3, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Redshift etc using boto3. So if AWS dies, it's not like data backup will save my startup. We're dead.

That sounds troublesome, no?

Not the parent, but they mentioned that they are a startup. AWS "dying" has killed zero startups so far. Time to market has killed many more, same for "not-invented-here" syndrome, and prematurely building for the future.

Maybe? I'm not an influential enough engineer to change something that fundamental. Seniors say it's troubling but they're already married to AWS so it's very expensive to have a plan B. I don't think AWS dying is high on the list of why the startup can die. There are bigger dangers and they can only be solved by writing code that works.

I see the bigger danger as not AWS falling over, but AWS deciding to charge more money once you're locked-in.

We attempted to be cloud agnostic (using terraform instead of CloudFormation for example) and then later multi-cloud. The amount of complexity and cost around it was just too much.

If AWS goes down, more or less a good portion of the internet goes dark. It's an acceptable risk at this point unless you are truly massive and entirely self contained- if you are using any 3rd party services, IE for auth, payment, whatever- they may be using AWS as well and you are still exposed.

We backup data that's not on S3 outside of AWS (code, operational databases), but most of our S3 data is effectively stuck due to the insane export prices. It's not the end of the world if we were to lose everything in S3 anyway.

To anyone reading this: Don't store lots of small files on S3. It's a terrible idea.

Collocation providers now have options to put your physical environment on network with your amazon account to avoid egress fees.

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