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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of AWS is to forget about maintaining hardware infrastructure.

Amazon are the ones who should have made backups in multiple regions, and transfer the load on failure.

Actually, the whole point of AWS is to have options for using hardware that you don't own. They don't offer any magic "all your stuff in one package, guaranteed to work all the time" service. So yes, you do still need to think about your hardware infrastructure. You just don't have to own it.

And Amazon does have all their stuff available in multiple regions. It's up to you to use it though.

> The whole point of AWS is to forget about maintaining hardware infrastructure.

If that were the case, you wouldn't be presented with region and availability zone options.

"[S]hould" is the wrong word here. Clearly, they don't maintain such backups. This is clear to anyone using their service. They pay for the service anyway, so apparently it's still worth it to them, even without auto-backups.

Would it make sense for Amazon to maintain automatic backups (and potentially charge more for them)? I don't know. It might make business sense, it might not. But their service is apparently popular enough even without it.

Then it would be much more expensive at the bottom tiers, meaning I wouldn't be able to play with it on a whim without thinking about the money. That would suck.

Not sure if I could say Amazon should be doing that - but I'd love it if other value added providers (such as Heroku) could implement this.

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