Just … stop. This is the first outage in 11 years.

You’re being unnecessarily arrogant and antagonistic up and down this thread

You’re not smarter than everyone else here, you don’t have better or more perfect knowledge, and you almost certainly wouldn’t have built a better or more reliable system.

I am in fact smarter than HN (a low bar) and would have built a more reliable system.

The hardware failure was on the server running the application code, so RDS replication wouldn’t have helped. You’re right of course that this failure points to a lack of redundancy – but that’s a separate issue from choosing S3 vs. RDS as the data layer.

By the way, S3 is insanely reliable and in fact more reliable than a replicated RDS setup. So switching from S3 to RDS would almost certainly reduce the basic reliability of the data layer, however many conveniences it might bring.

Once again, the problem is not S3, it is reinventing a database on top of S3, the logic of which runs on EC2.

Once again, no, that’s not the problem.

PostgreSQL and RDS are quite a bit more than just a log-structured data store, and are not prima facie the correct solution for this problem domain, regardless of how much arrogant ignorance you bring to bear on the debate.

Postgres is the correct solution. I am not ignorant. You are justifying bad engineering and I would not work with you.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines? You've been doing that repeatedly and badly in this thread. We end up having to ban such accounts, and I don't want to ban you.

Fortunately it doesn't look from your recent comments that you've been in the habit of posting this way, so it should be easy to fix.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

You broke the site guidelines badly in more than one place in this thread. I realize you're trying to defend someone's work against what you feel is unfair criticism, but breaking the site guidelines yourself, with swipes and name-calling and flamewar, is exactly the wrong way to do this.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

You’re not wrong, and thank you for holding me to account.

In retrospect, I’d delete and/or edit the comments if I could.

No need to delete - the only thing we care about is fixing things going forward. Thanks for the kind reply!