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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not all that angry over the situation but more disappointed that we’ve all collectively handed the keys over to AWS because “servers are hard”. Yeh they are but it’s not like locking ourselves into one vendor with flaky docs and a black box of bugs is any better, at least when your own servers go down it’s on you and you don’t take out half of North America.

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If you aren't going to rely on external vendors, servers are really, really hard. Redundancy in: power, cooling, networking? Those get expensive fast. Drop your servers into a data center and you're in a similar situation to dropping it in AWS.

A couple years ago all our services at our data center just vanished. I call the data center and they start creating a ticket. "Can you tell me if there is a data center outage?" "We are currently investigating and I don't have any information I can give you." "Listen, if this is a problem isolated to our cabinet, I need to get in the car. I'm trying to decide if I need to drive 60 miles in a blizzard."

That facility has been pretty good to us over a decade, but they were frustratingly tight-lipped about an entire room of the facility losing power because one of their power feeder lines was down.

Could AWS improve? Yes. Does avoiding AWS solve these sorts of problems? No.

Servers are not hard if you have a dedicated person (long time ago known as Systemadminstrator), and fun fact...it's sometimes even much cheaper and more reliable then having everything in the "cloud".

Personally i am a believer in mixed environments, public webservers etc in the "cloud", locally used systems and backup "in house" with a second location (both in Data-centers or at least one), and no, i don't talk about the next google but the 99% of businesses.

Not one person, at least four people to run stuff 24/7.

99% of businesses don't need 24/7 but two are the bare minimum (a admin, and a dev or admin)

That’s like saying that you’ve got a hard drive so you could be your own DropBox.

You vastly underestimate the amount of resources required. And what those resources cost.

That's why i wrote "not the next google, but the other 99%", and now that HN-guy comes around and compares it with dropbox....

99% of company's are hairdressers, lawyers, builders, insurance etc.....and NOT the next google/dropbox/facebook...are you so far away from reality?

I know how much it costs, because that's exactly what i do since ~19 years.

You could have a staff of a million-plus people and stuff could still go sideways.

Hint — it did.

Wow Sherlock....no BS? Look at the title of this article...

You can either pay a dedicated team to manage your on prem solution, go multi cloud, or simply go multi region on aws.

My company was not affected by this outage because we are multi region. Cheapest and quickest option if you want to have at least some fault tolerance.

> ... multi region. Cheapest and quickest option if you want to have at least some fault tolerance.

That is simple not true, you have to adapt your application to be multi region aware to start with, and if you do that on AWS you are basically locked-in, and one of the most expensive cloud providers out there.

You're saying it's not true, but do you have another example of a quick and cheap way to do this ?

I'm not saying this can be done in 1 day for 2 cents, I'm saying that it's quick and cheap compared to other options.

> adapt your application to be multi region aware

This vs adapting your application to support multi cloud deployments or go from the cloud to start doing on prem with a dedicated team, you can take your bets.

On aws you can setup route 53 to point to multiple regions based on health check or latency.

So was mine, but we couldn't log in

But yes, having services resilient to a single point of failure is essential. AWS is a SPOF.

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