Are software development and release processes improving to mitigate these outages? We don't know. You have to trust the marketing. Will regions ever be fully isolated? We don't know. Will AWS IAM and console ever not be global services? We don't know.
Blah blah blah "We'll do better in the future". Right. Sure. Some service credits will get handed out and everyone will forget until the next outage.
Disclaimer: Not a software engineer, but have worked in ops most of my career. You will have downtime, I assure you. It is unavoidable, even at global scale. You will never abstract and silo everything per region.
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/16/aws-hits-snag-after-amazon-p...
[3] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-cloud-issues-causes-outages...
[4] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/microsoft-blames-...
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/9/cell-architectures....
> Facebook Platform Appears to be down
> A check of https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/ returns an error and I'm unable to login with facebook to some of my mobile apps.
I agree, in general, outages are almost inevitable, but global outages shouldn't occur. It suggests at least a couple of things:
1) Bad software deployments, without proper validation. A message elsewhere in this post on HN suggest that problems have been occurring for at least 5 days, which makes me think this is the most likely situation. If this is the case, presumably given this is multiple days in to the issue, rolling back isn't an option. That doesn't say good things about their testing or deployment stories, and possibly their monitoring of the product? Even if the deployment validation processes failed to catch it, you'd really hope alarming would have caught it.
or:
2) Regions aren't isolated from each other. Cross-region dependencies are bad, for all sorts of obvious reasons.