So in the end it's not better for the users at all, it's just for non-technical people to shift blame. Great "business reasoning".

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WJW 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nobody in this thread ever claimed it was better for the users. It's better for the people involved in the decision.

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zelphirkalt 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, you are correct. But actually, I am not claiming someone claimed it :) I am actually trying to get at the idea, that the "business people" usually bring up, that they are looking after the user's/customer's interest and that others don't have the "business mind", while actually when it comes to this kind of decision making, all of that is out of the window, because they want to shift the blame.

A few steps further stepped back, most of the services we use are not that essential, that we cannot bear them being down a couple of hours over the course of a year. We have seen that over and over again with Cloudflare and AWS outages. The world continues to revolve. If we were a bit more reasonable with our expectations and realistic when it comes to required uptime guarantees, there wouldn't be much worry about something being down every now and then, and we wouldn't need to worry about our livelihood, if we need to reboot a customer's database server once a year, or their impression about the quality of system we built, if such a thing happens.

But even that is unlikely, if we set up things properly. I have worked in a company where we self-hosted our platform and it didn't have the most complex fail-safe setup ever. Just have good backups and make sure you can restore, and 95% of the worries go away, for such non-essential products, and outages were less often than trouble with AWS or Cloudflare.

It seems that either way, you need people who know what they are doing, whether you self-host or buy some service.

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growse 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And this speaks to the lack of alignment about what's good for the decision makers Vs what's good for the customer.

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PunchyHamster 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not tho, they have workers that they pay not making money, all while footing bigger bill for the "pleasure"

	▲	notKilgoreTrout 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's more a small business owner perspective. For a middle manager rattling some cages during a week of IBM downtime is adequate performance while it is unclear how much performative response is necessary if mom&pops is down for a day.

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oconnor663 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You have to consider the class of problems as a whole, from the perspective of management:

- The cheap solution would be equally good, and it's just a blame shifting game.

- The cheap solution is worse, and paying more for the name brand gets you more reliability.

There are many situations that fall into the second category, and anyone running a business probably has personal memories of making the second mistake. The problem is, if you're not up to speed on the nitty gritty technical details of a tradeoff, you can't tell the difference between the first category and the second. So you accept that sometimes you will over-spend for "no reason" as a cost of doing business. (But the reason is that information and trust don't come for free.)

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dilyevsky 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This excuse only works for one or maybe two such outages in most orgs

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nwallin 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> non-technical people

It's also better for the technical people. If you self host the DB goes down at 2am on a Sunday morning all the technical people are gonna get woken up and they will be working on it until it's fixed.

If us-east goes down a technical person will be woken up, they'll check downdetector.com, and they'll say "us-east is down, nothin' we can do" and go back to sleep.