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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Because Amazon has never had outages? It happens to everyone at some point.

Been happening quite a lot to amazon compare this to a tier 1 telco where having a switch (central office /exchange) go down which is once in every other generation experience for the developed world.

It does happen to everyone including those hosting their own. What if your transit provider in your colo goes down? What if their UPS goes boom? That is why if you are hosting your own and will lose significant money on downtime you need to have another colo which adds a lot of cost. If you want to stay in AWS you can provision machines in other availability zones if things go bad quite quickly or have them running in other zones. You could also have redundancy by having assets with other cloud providers too.

You should have offsite backups anyway, no matter what service you're using, and a quick way to deploy to other providers if whatever host/datacenter you're using dies. That applies no matter what sort of host you use really, which I think is what the OP tried to say - not that self-hosting is bullet-proof, but that AWS is not bullet-proof either.

AWS outages in one zone do sometimes affect other zones too, so it is not disaster proof:

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-the-hidden-bugs-tha...

I don't know about Amazon, but Microsoft pays you in credit for Azure when they have outages

I'll feel really good when I get my $500 credit for an outage that cost me $50,000 in business.

Then engineer your cloud provided architecture to be resilient, in the same manner you do so with hardware.

At least you get $500 - with an onsite, self-owned infrastructure outage, you lose that $50k...and get nothing but pain and direct blame!

Correct on both counts. Ultimately, if you lose $50,000 in revenue to an outage it is at least partially your fault. Whether you want the direct control of the entire cluster in exchange for the extra responsibility is an individual choice. My point is that offering to rebate a trivial amount of money in that case is pretty meaningless. Hell, I think its meaningless even if you have full redundancy and don't suffer any actual losses. I certainly don't see it as a perk of cloud providers.

Not making $50,000 is in no way the same as someone removing $50,000 from your bank account. It's an opportunity cost.

"[I]n no way the same"? Either one reduces my profit for the year by $50,000. One comes out of revenue, the other comes out of cash on hand (or increases debt, as the case may be). Yes, there are trade-offs and differing side effects from the situations, but they are similar in their effect on the bottom line.

Also, losing $50,000 in business because of a supplier or subcontractor failure is not an opportunity cost.

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