The point of AWS is to promise you the nines and make you feel good about it. Your typical "growth & engagement" startup CEO can feel good and make his own customers feel good about how his startup will survive a nuclear war.
Delivery of those nines is not a priority. Not for the cloud provider - because they can just lie their way out of it by not updating their status page - and even when they don't, they merely have to forego some of their insane profit margin for a couple hours in compensation. No provider will actually put their ass on the line and offer you anything beyond their own profit margin.
This is not an issue for most cloud clients either because they keep putting up with it (lying on the status page wouldn't be a thing if clients cared) - the unspoken truth is that nobody cares that your "growth & engagement" thing is down for an hour or so, so nobody makes anything more than a ceremonial stink about it (chances are, the thing goes down/misbehaves regularly anyway every time the new JS vibecoder or "AI employee" deploys something, regardless of cloud reliability).
Things where nines actually matter will generally invest in self-managed disaster recovery plans that are regularly tested. This also means it will generally be built differently and far away from your typical "cloud native" dumpster fire. Depending on how many nines you actually need (aka what's the cost of not meeting that target - which directly controls how much budget you have to ensure you always meet it), you might be building something closer to aircraft avionics with the same development practices, testing and rigor.
I can tell you from personal experience that improving/maintaining uptime (by doing root cause analysis, writing correction of error reports, going through application security reviews, writing/reviewing design docs for safely deploying changes, working on operational improvements to services) probably takes up a majority of most AWS engineers' time. I'm genuinely curious what you are basing the opinion "Delivery of those nines is not a priority" off of.
> what you are basing the opinion "Delivery of those nines is not a priority" off of.
Because I don't see the business pressure to do? If problems happen they can 1) lie on the status page and hope nothing happens and 2) if they can't get away with lying, their downside is limited to a few hours of profit margin.
(which is not really a dig at AWS because no hosting provider will put their business on the line for you... it's more of a dig at people who claim AWS is some uptime unicorn while in reality they're nowhere near better than your usual hosting provider to justify their 1000x markup)
It's great if they're doing their best anyway, but I don't see it as anything more than "best effort", because nothing bad would happen even if they didn't do a good job at it.
Delivery of those nines is not a priority. Not for the cloud provider - because they can just lie their way out of it by not updating their status page - and even when they don't, they merely have to forego some of their insane profit margin for a couple hours in compensation. No provider will actually put their ass on the line and offer you anything beyond their own profit margin.
This is not an issue for most cloud clients either because they keep putting up with it (lying on the status page wouldn't be a thing if clients cared) - the unspoken truth is that nobody cares that your "growth & engagement" thing is down for an hour or so, so nobody makes anything more than a ceremonial stink about it (chances are, the thing goes down/misbehaves regularly anyway every time the new JS vibecoder or "AI employee" deploys something, regardless of cloud reliability).
Things where nines actually matter will generally invest in self-managed disaster recovery plans that are regularly tested. This also means it will generally be built differently and far away from your typical "cloud native" dumpster fire. Depending on how many nines you actually need (aka what's the cost of not meeting that target - which directly controls how much budget you have to ensure you always meet it), you might be building something closer to aircraft avionics with the same development practices, testing and rigor.