Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail?

Re:Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail? by arethuza on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @05:27AM (#14909136)

I used to work at a company that had a large cage in a local data center - one of the other cages in the same room was apparently for the local police force (we weren't supposed to know this!).

It wouldn't surprise me if those police systems have moved, or are moving, to Azure or AWS data centers.

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Re:Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail? by dx034 on Thursday August 03, 2017 @08:56AM (#14919098)

Police would probably still work fine without data centers for a few days. As long as they can communicate and 911 works, they can do most of their job in the short run.

It's much worse if benefits or paychecks don't get paid. For many people that means that they won't be able to buy groceries as soon as a few days later. Not the standard HN crowd, but many people depend on regular paychecks and can be in trouble if it comes even one day late.

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Re:Is Amazon's cloud service too big to fail? by gaius on Thursday August 03, 2017 @04:44PM (#14923699)

As long as they can communicate

Funny thing with the police, in the 60s there was flooding and they couldn't coordinate a response, so radio amateurs had to step in and provide comms. Those enthusiasts are still around under the codename RAYNET. The police eventually got their act together and invested in a system called TETRA which is self-contained and independent of any other infrastructure so they would never be caught with their pants down again.

Now they've ditched TETRA to save money and they just run over the 4G network like anyone else...

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