If anything, centralisation shields companies using a hyperscaler from criticism. You’ll see downtime no matter where you host. If you self host and go down for a few hours, customers blame you. If you host on AWS and “the internet goes down”, then customers treat it akin to an act of God, like a natural disaster that affects everyone.

It’s not great being down for hours, but that will happen regardless. Most companies prefer the option that helps them avoid the ire of their customers.

Where it’s a bigger problem is when a critical industry like retail banking in a country all choose AWS. When AWS goes down all citizens lose access to their money. They can’t pay for groceries or transport. They’re stranded and starving, life grinds to a halt. But even then, this is not the bank’s problem because they’re not doing worse than their competitors. It’s something for the banking regulator and government to worry about. I’m not saying the bank shouldn’t worry about it, I’m saying in practice they don’t worry about it unless the regulator makes them worry.

I completely empathise with people frustrated with this status quo. It’s not great that we’ve normalised a few large outages a year. But for most companies, this is the rational thing to do. And barring a few critical industries like banking, it’s also rational for governments to not intervene.

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BlackFly 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this really depends on your industry.

If you cannot give a patient life saving dialysis because you don't have a backup generator then you are likely facing some liability. If you cannot give a patient life saving dialysis because your scheduling software is down because of a major outage at a third party and you have no local redundancy then you are in a similar situation. Obviously this depends on your jurisdiction and probably we are in different ones, but I feel confident that you want to live in a district where a hospital is reasonably responsible for such foreseeable disasters.

	▲	testdelacc1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I mentioned banking because of what I was familiar with but medical industry is going to be similar. But they do differ - it’s never ok for a hospital to be unable to dispense care. But it is somewhat ok for one bank to be down. We just assume that people have at least two bank accounts. The problem the banking regulator faces is that when AWS goes down, all banks go down simultaneously. Not terrible for any individual bank, but catastrophic for the country. And now you see what a juicy target an AWS DC is for an adversary. They go down on their own now, but surely Russia or others are looking at this and thinking “damn, one missile at the right data Center and life in this country grinds to a halt”.

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graemep 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If anything, centralisation shields companies using a hyperscaler from criticism. You’ll see downtime no matter where you host. If you self host and go down for a few hours, customers blame you.

Not just customers. Your management take the same view. Using hyperscalers is great CYA. The same for any replacement of internally provided services with external ones from big names.

	▲	testdelacc1 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. No one got fired for using AWS. Advocating for self-hosting or a smaller provider means you get blamed when the inevitable downtime comes around.

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DeathArrow 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>If anything, centralisation shields companies using a hyperscaler from criticism. You’ll see downtime no matter where you host. If you self host and go down for a few hours, customers blame you.

What if you host on AWS and only you go down? How does hosting on AWS shield you from criticism?

	▲	testdelacc1 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This discussion is assuming that the outage is entirely out of your control because the underlying datacenter you relied on went down. Outages because of bad code do happen and the criticism is fully on the company. They can be mitigated by better testing and quick rollbacks, which is good. But outages at the datacenter level - nothing you can do about that. You just wait until the datacenter is fixed. This discussion started because companies are actually fine with this state of affairs. They are risking major outages but so are all their competitors so it’s fine actually. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze to them, unless an external entity like the banking regulator makes them care.