Re:Tell HN: AWS us-east-1 services are down
by shermantanktop on Monday October 20, 2025 @10:58AM
(#45644686)
A slightly less cynical view: execs have a hard filter for “things I can do something about” and “things I can’t influence at all.” The bad ones are constantly pushing problems into the second bucket, but there are legitimately gray area cases. When an exec smells the possibility that their team could have somehow avoided a problem, that’s category 1 and the hammer comes down hard.
After that process comes the BS and PR step, where reality is spun into a cotton candy that makes the leader look good no matter what.
Re:Tell HN: AWS us-east-1 services are down
by balls187 on Monday October 20, 2025 @12:46PM
(#45646007)
> It took me so long to realise this is what's important in enterprise. Uptime isn't important, being able to blame someone else is what's important.
Yes.
What is important is having a Contractual SLA that is defensible. Acts of God are defensible. And now major cloud infrastructure outtages are too.
Re:Tell HN: AWS us-east-1 services are down
by arvindh-manian on Monday October 20, 2025 @03:48PM
(#45648373)
“No one ever got fired for hiring IBM”
If you're down for 5 minutes a year because one of your employees broke something, that's your fault, and the blame passes down through the CTO.
If you're down for 5 hours a year but this affected other companies too, it's not your fault
From AWS to Crowdstrike - system resilience and uptime isn't the goal. Risk mitigation isn't the goal. Affordability isn't the goal.
When the CEO's buddies all suffer at the same time as he does, it's just an "act of god" and nothing can be done, it's such a complex outcome that even the amazing boffins at aws/google/microsoft/cloudflare/etc can't cope.
If the CEO is down at a different time than the CEO's buddies then it's that Dave/Charlie/Bertie/Alice can't cope and it's the CTO's fault for not outsourcing it.
As someone who likes to see things working, it pisses me off no end, but it's the way of the world, and likely has been whenever the owner and CTO are separate.