My contention for a long time has been that cloud is full of single points of failure (and nightmarish security hazards) that are just hidden from the customer.
"We can't run things on just a box! That's a single point of failure. We're moving to cloud!"
The difference is that when the cloud goes down you can shift the blame to them, not you, and fixing it is their problem.
The corporate world is full of stuff like this. A huge role of consultants like McKinsey is to provide complicated reports and presentations backing the ideas that the CEO or other board members want to pursue. That way if things don't work out they can blame McKinsey.
You act as if that is a bug not a feature. As hypothetically someone who is responsible for my site staying up, I would much rather blame AWS than myself. Besides none of your customers are going to blame you if every other major site is down.
> As hypothetically someone who is responsible for my site staying up, I would much rather blame AWS than myself.
That's a very human sentiment, and I share it. That's why I don't swap my car wheels myself, I don't want to feel responsible if one comes loose on the highway and I cause an accident.
But at the same time it's also appalling how low the bar has gotten. We're still the ones deciding that one cloud is enough. The down being "their" fault really shouldn't excuse that fact. Most services aren't important enough to need redundancy. But if yours is, and it goes down because you decided that one provider is enough, then your provider isn't solely at fault here and as a profession I wish we'd take more accountability.
How many businesses can’t afford to suffer any downtime though?
But I’ve led enough cloud implementations where I discuss the cost and complexity between - multi-AZ (it’s almost free so why not), multi region , and theoretically multi cloud (never came up in my experience) and then cold, warm and hot standby, RTO and RPO, etc
And for the most part, most businesses are fine with just multi-AZ as long as their data can survive catastrophe.
I'm saying the importance is on uptime, not on who to blame, when services are critical.
You don't have one data center with critical services. You know lots of companies are still not in the cloud, and they manage their own datacenters, and they have 2-3 of them. There are cost, support, availability and regulatory reasons not to be in the cloud for many parties.
Or it is a matter of efficiency. If 1 million companies design and maintain their servers, there would be 1 million (or more) incidents like these. Same issues. Same fixes. Not so efficient.
It might be worse in terms of total downtime but it likely would be much less noticable as it woould be scattered individual outages not everyone at the same time.
"We can't run things on just a box! That's a single point of failure. We're moving to cloud!"
The difference is that when the cloud goes down you can shift the blame to them, not you, and fixing it is their problem.
The corporate world is full of stuff like this. A huge role of consultants like McKinsey is to provide complicated reports and presentations backing the ideas that the CEO or other board members want to pursue. That way if things don't work out they can blame McKinsey.