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Comment by SahAssar | Hacker News Reader

Do people not take responsibility for their choice of vendors? If boeing crashed a bunch of planes and said "Not our fault, our subcontractor made shitty software" would we accept it? If a startup leaked all their customers data would we accept "Blame this other company, we just gave them all our data for analysis" as an excuse?

If you accept that then it means that we need to investigate and scrutinize the whole supply chain of any product before trusting it and it would also mean that any company switching even the smallest part of their supply chain would require us to reevaluate their product.

When we buy things (either products, services or software) we consider the company selling it to be responsible for the whole and deferring responsibility to a vendor is basically just saying that you were either promising more than you knew could deliver or that you did not do a good job picking vendors.

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It used to be "No one got fired for buying IBM." Now it's AWS. Many CTOs are very risk averse, and having someone to blame is incredibly valuable to them. My company has a large multi-region set of datacenters, but we're using AWS for a lot of new projects, despite being able to deliver similar services with better performance and cost, on-prem.

Some of the reasons are no one wants to be seen using old tech; stuck being the last COBOL dev. So there's a big incentive for developers and their managers to be using the latest tech; it looks good on the devs resume and grants them job security in the field, and it makes their managers look like they're sharp and on top of new technology.

Also, recruiting people familiar with AWS services is often easier than finding someone versed in on-prem tech. And for companies in less than desirable locations, this helps remove a staffing issue since it can all be done remotely.

And when something goes wrong on-prem, the CTO is expected by the rest of the C-suite to fix the issue. When it's a reputable 3rd party, he can absolve both himself and his team of responsibility.

> he can absolve both himself and his team of responsibility.

Everything up until this sentence makes sense in a twisted sort of way, but that's the part I don't get. When did we absolve companies from their choice of vendors? If I buy a service and that service does not work then the company selling that service does not get to blame their vendors, that they chose, just like they don't get to blame individual devs that they hired.

>When did we absolve companies from their choice of vendors?

>just like they don't get to blame individual devs that they hired.

When the vendors become a symbol, a public utility status or practically the only choice. And this isn't a Tech company thing. It can be applied to all other industry. You can fire and hire another Dev. If you are looking at cloud vendor, you only have AWS, Azure and GCP to choose. For lots of reason the latter two may not be an option due to competition or features. And AWS is the best you can get, are you sure the Dev they have are the best they can hire?

> a symbol, a public utility status or practically the only choice

The first, I can agree with, but the latter two are definitely not the case. If they were a public utility they would be regulated as one and if they were they only choice there would not be companies online during these outages. The site you are writing this on is an example, an online service with a pretty large (although not massive) following that is online enough to be the place where all the people who work at companies that depend on cloud services come to discuss their outages.

>Public Utility

It is not whether they are one as in business or one as in politics that has to be regulated. They are utility like as people treated it as one and it behaves as one. Many things goes down with it with AWS just like many things goes down with the grid.

HN is comparatively tiny and simple. Doesn't requires any of the features on AWS. And has no reliability requirements like SaaS. HN doesn't even use CDN. Even though I am not a cloud advocate for 99% of cases it makes zero sense to build a SaaS with your own Server.

The company trusts the CTO; the CTO trusts AWS, and if AWS goes down, he can deflect responsibility onto AWS. The other C-Suite officers are largely ignorant about tech (that's why they have a CTO), and nod their heads.

Life-critical industries like airlines, cars, healthcare, etc. are probably the exception?

If a restaurant ran out of some menu item for a few days because a supplier didn't have a good harvest, eh, it happens. If a bookstore doesn't stock a certain book, no big deal. Grocery store self-checkout broken yet again? Oh well. Band got too drunk and can't perform? Reschedule it. No snow at the slopes? Climate change.

In the real world, shit happens, and most of it isn't critical.

If you offer a 99.999% guarantee and your customers pay for it, well, you better deliver -- subcontractors or not. But many businesses don't need to do that and a few hours of downtime a year is just a minor inconvenience. To go from "a few days of downtime" to "a few hours" is really easy; just about any provider can offer that. To go from "a few hours of downtime" to "a few seconds" is a huge investment and not worth it to many folks.

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