> If people moved to other providers, things would still go down, more likely than not it would be more downtime in aggregate, just spread out so you wouldn't notice as much.
That is the point, though: Correlated outages are worse than uncorrelated outages. If one payment provider has an outage, chose another card or another store and you can still buy your goods. If all are down, no one can shop anything[1]. If a small region has a power blackout, all surrounding regions can provide emergency support. If the whole country has a blackout, all emergency responders are bound locally.
[1] Except with cash – might be worth to keep a stash handy for such purposes.
Yeah, exactly this. I don’t know why the person who responded to me is talking about survivorship bias… and I suppose I don’t really care because there’s a bigger point.
The internet was originally intended to be decentralised. That decentralisation begets resilience.
That’s exactly the opposite of what we saw with this outage. AWS has give or take 30% of the infra market, including many nationally or globally well known companies… which meant the outage caused huge global disruption of services that many, many people and organisations use on a day to day basis.
Choosing AWS, squinted at through a somewhat particular pair of operational and financial spectacles, can often make sense. Certainly it’s a default cloud option in many orgs, and always in contention to be considered by everyone else.
But my contention is that at a higher level than individual orgs - at a societal level - that does not make sense. And it’s just not OK for government and business to be disrupted on a global scale because one provider had a problem. Hence my comment on legislators.
It is super weird to me that, apparently, that’s an unorthodox and unreasonable viewpoint.
But you’ve described it very elegantly: 99.99% (or pick the number of 9s you want) uptime with uncorrelated outages is way better than that same uptime with correlated, and particularly heavily correlated, outages.
That is the point, though: Correlated outages are worse than uncorrelated outages. If one payment provider has an outage, chose another card or another store and you can still buy your goods. If all are down, no one can shop anything[1]. If a small region has a power blackout, all surrounding regions can provide emergency support. If the whole country has a blackout, all emergency responders are bound locally.
[1] Except with cash – might be worth to keep a stash handy for such purposes.