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Putting aside outages..

I'd counter that past a certain scale, certainly the scale of a firm that used to & could run its own datacenter.. it's probably your responsibility to not use those services.

Sure it's easier, but if you decide feature X requires AWS service Y that has no GCP/Azure/ORCL equivalent.. it seems unwise.

Just from a business perspective, you are making yourself hostage to a vendor on pricing.

If you're some startup trying to find traction, or a small shop with an IT department of 5.. then by all means, use whatever cloud and get locked in for now.

But if you are a big bank, car maker, whatever.. it seems grossly irresponsible.

On the east coast we are already approaching an entire business day being down today. Gonna need a decade without an outage to get all those 9s back. And not to be catastrophic but.. what if AWS had an outage like this that lasted.. 3 days? A week?

The fact that the industry collectively shrugs our shoulders and allows increasing amounts of our tech stacks to be single-vendor hostage is crazy.



> I'd counter that past a certain scale, certainly the scale of a firm that used to & could run its own datacenter.. it's probably your responsibility to not use those services.

It's actually probably not your responsibility, it's the responsibility of some leader 5 levels up who has his head in the clouds (literally).

It's a hard problem to connect practical experience and perspectives with high-level decision-making past a certain scale.


This is the correct answer


> The fact that the industry collectively shrugs our shoulders and allows increasing amounts of our tech stacks to be single-vendor hostage is crazy.

Well, nobody is going to get blamed for this one except people at Amazon. Socially, this is treated as as a tornado. You have to be certain that you can beat AWS in terms of reliability for doing anything about this to be good for your career.


In 20+ years in the industry, all my biggest outages have been AWS... and they seem to be happening annually.

Most of my on-prem days, you had more frequent but smaller failures of a database, caching service, task runner, storage, message bus, DNS, whatever.. but not all at once. Depending on how entrenched your organization is, some of these AWS outages are like having a full datacenter power down.

Might as well just log off for the day and hope for better in the morning. That assumes you could login, which some of my ex-US colleagues could not for half the day, despite our desktops being on-prem. Someone forgot about the AWS 2FA dependency..




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