Of those "correctly" architected apps, most are not properly tested for the failovers and won't actually work as architected (because of your own bugs or because aws failover stuff has bugs and you can't even test it).

Eg, falls over due to steep traffic spikes caused by outages when autoscaling mechanisms get previously unseen levels of load increases and enter some yoyo oscillation pattern, whole AZ is overloaded because all the failovers from the other failing AZ triggering at once, hit circuit breakers, spin up too slowly to ever pass health checks etc. Or can't detect something becoming glacially slow but not outright failing.

See eg https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/22/22849780/amazon-aws-is-d... & https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21719396/amazon-web-serv... etc (many more examples are out there)

And then where do we discuss these extreme outages?

Better to discuss the next day when it's over than seeing bunch of upset comments realtime posted.

If the AWS status wasn’t a static HTML page, I would agree.

HAM Radio

People joke but from the top of a decent mountain I can reach 45 miles into the bay area from me on a $150 2m radio in my truck with rooftop antenna.

That is so cool. If I had that (truck+radio) I'd be very tempted to scatter a few cheap relay nodes at good locations in the bay area. Monkeybrains+comcast is quite reliable.

The problem with that is the only people you have to talk to is hams.

(Ex ham)

Well same for computers & the internet :)

Fair point!

If there's an extreme AWS outage, you're pretty much stuck to in-person or POTS.

where did you discuss outages of HN's previous provider?

Less people are interested in outages of HN's previous provider.

reddit.... shudders

maybe not...

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/reddit-aurora-...