Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am being cynical here, but one advantage of AWS is that when it goes down, the whole online world looks like it is on fire.

So if you have a database on AWS, and AWS goes down, you likely don't even need to tell your CEO that AWS is down, they already probably know that from the news or because their favorite website/app is also down.

However, if PlanetScale goes down, likely everything else appears to be working except yours.

View on HN

I don't think this is cynical, it's a restatement of the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" adage. Choosing PlanetScale at this stage in its market penetration is almost certainly going to be seen as the riskier business choice over RDS Aurora (even though it's not quite apples:apples) or GCP Spanner (which is). You can choose to spend your innovation token there, but you better be prepared for the downside when PlanetScale goes down and everything else is up.

I love the Innovation Token blog post, but. it's been a while since I've seen the OG post. Do you have a link?

http://boringtechnology.club/

I have my problems with this statement mostly because IBM actually does suck. The amount of products its bought and promptly did a full thrust crash into the ground are many. AWS has its problems but 99.99999% of the time the "core" products perfectly fine, I dont know about its multitude of side-hustles though.

I think you're missing the context that the adage "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" dates back to the 1970s at least. It's not meant to refer to IBM as it is now, but rather to IBM as it was then, an industrial behemoth with a near monopoly on business machines, some of which happened to be general purpose computers.

IBM used to be good

PlanetScale probably runs on AWS or GCP, so that’s a solved problem (:

Reply on news.ycombinator.com