I just finished a 2+ week support ticket w/ AWS. We were unable to connect over TLS to several of our instances, because the instance's hostname was not listed on the certificate. This is a niche bug that's trivially fixable if you own the service, but with AWS, it's a lot harder: you're going to need a technical rep who understands x509 — and nobody understands x509.

I've found & reported a bug in RDS whereby spatial indexes just didn't work; merely hinting the server to not use the spatial index would return results, but hinting it to use the spatial index would get nothing. (Spatial indexes were, admittedly, brand new at the time.)

I've had bugs w/ S3: technically the service is up, but trivial GETs from the bucket take 140 seconds to complete, rendering our service effectively down.

I've found & worked w/ AWS to fix a bug in ELB's HTTP handling.

All of these were problems with the service, since in each case it's failing to correctly implement some well-understood protocol. AWS is not perfect. (Still, it is worth it, IMO. But the parent is right: you are trading one set of issues for another, and it's worth knowing that and thinking about it and what is right for you.)

Okay, I'm sorry you thought I said AWS was perfect and bug free. I didn't, however, say that. I said (implied, really) it's better than anything you could possibly home brew. Nothing you've said here changes that.

Further, didn't I say that it's trading one set of issues for another? Or at least, I explicitly agreed with that.

I feel like you didn't read what I wrote honestly, and kind of came in with your own agenda. All I ever said was that the issues you trade off are orchestration issues vs. operational issues, and operational issues are 10x harder than orchestration issues because you don't get to decide when to work on operational issues, you tend to have to deal with them when they happen.

You wrote “The point is with a managed service, none of your problems will be with the service.”

What deathanatos wrote sounds awfully like problems with the service to me.

I don’t think S3 taking 100+ seconds to respond to a GET request can be solved by orchestration alone.

It definitely can. Reasonable timeouts and redundant systems.

It's amazing the length some people are willing to go to to defend AWS marketing slogans as a source of truth. I've seen vendor lock-in before, but AWS seems to be unique in that people actually enjoy working with a vendor whose services go down randomly to the point where they blame themselves for not being "fault-tolerant".

Guess what, if your service is not required to be up because the consuming service is super tolerant to it timing out after 140 seconds, self-hosting it becomes even more of a no-brainer. After all, you clearly need none of the redundancy AWS features.

If it makes you feel better, everything I'm saying about AWS can be said about GCP as well.

Sorry, but AWS/GCP is infinitely better at managing infrastructure than you or your company will ever be.

That's the promise but in reality every software has bugs, including managed services.

Not really, not anything like what you're describing.

12 outages since 2011, and none of them are anything like what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...

We've moved from on-prem to AWS fully and we see random issues all the time while their status page shows all green, so I feel you probably have a small amount of resources in use with them or something, because what you're saying doesn't jive with what we see daily. I see you've also copy-pasted your response to other comments too, so I'll do the same with my response.

I don't feel like copy/pasting all of our comments to each other, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't do that, thanks.

Then don't do it yourself. You're dead set on ignoring people whose experience is different than yours, wrapping yourself in an echo chamber of sorts and telling others they are wrong.

I'm not dead set on anything, I'm trying to have conversations with multiple people, not create an immutable record.

And I don't think you know what an echo chamber is if you think one person can create one alone...

This is not about outages. There are many more things that can go wrong besides outages.

How long have you been working in tech? Just curious.

You sound like someone who hasn't had much real world experience and thinks AWS or whatever is the best thing because it's the only thing you know.

You may want to ask the OP how much time she/he has been working at Amazon instead.

Long enough to know that some dinosaurs refuse to learn anything new (read: AWS) and will bend over backwards to try and keep themselves relevant.

I guess it can't be proved that this guy is a shill for AWS.

But this kind of toxic fanatism(yet trying to sound logical) is just harmful for the HN community.

dang: Can this kind of behavior be punished?

Bro, what're you so upset about in this thread? That people had different experiences than you with AWS..?

I'm not upset, I'm simply pointing out that AWS isn't the problem in any of these examples, it's the various commenter's lack of understanding about how to work in AWS that's caused these problems.

I don't think anyone is actually upset, do you? I certainly hope I haven't upset anyone... :/

When your hammer snaps in half, you don't blame yourself for not using two hammers.

When the tool breaks under correct use, criticize the tool. Maybe the user should also have redundancy. The tool is still failing!

This analogy is what snapped in half, not the hammer. It's more like if your hammer says right on it, "YOU NEED A SECOND HAMMER" and this is true of all hammers, it's still not the hammer's fault you didn't bring a second hammer.

And you're in other threads complaining that the people that had five hammers were still doing it wrong, that all the outages they report are fake somehow...

Even when you're supposed to have redundancy, there are still certain failure rates that are acceptable and some that are not. And redundancy doesn't solve every problem either.

What? No I'm not. Literally no where has anyone said they've built a system with redundancies as recommended by AWS and still had problems.

Of course there are unacceptable failure rates. AWS doesn't have them, and pretending like they do is simply lying to yourself to protect your own ego.

> The point is with a managed service, none of your problems will be with the service. That's what the managed service is selling.

Until the managed service simply goes away, of course, taking your data with it.