Comment by Esophagus4
15 hours ago
Bizarre way of making decisions.
us-east-2 is objectively a better region to pick if you want US east, yet you feel safer picking use1 because “I’m safer making a worse decision that everyone understands is worse, as long as everyone else does it as well.”
It's about risk profile. The question isn't "which region goes down the least" but "how often will I be blamed for an outage."
If you never get blamed for a US east outage, that's better than us-east-2 if that could get you blamed 0.5% of the time when it goes down and us1 isn't down or etc
But ise1 is down 4x more than use2 (AWS closely guards the numbers and won’t release them, but that is what I’ve seen from 3rd party analysis). Don’t you want your customers to say, “wow, half the internet was down today but XYZ service was up with no issues! I love them.”
I can’t tell if it’s you thinking this way, or if your company is setup to incentivize this. But either way, I think it’s suboptimal.
That’s not about “risk profile” of the business or making the right decision for the customer, that’s about risk profile of saving your own tail in the organizational gamesmanship sense. Which is a shame, tbh. For both the customer and for people making tech decisions.
I fully appreciate that some companies may encourage this behavior, and we all need a job so we have to work somewhere, but this type of thinking objectively leads to worse technology decisions and I hope I never have to work for a company that encourages this.
Edit: addressing blame when things go wrong… don’t you think it would be a better story to tell your boss that you did the right thing for the customer, rather than “I did this because everyone else does it, even though most of us agree it’s worse for the customer in general”. I would assume I’d get more blame for the 2nd decision than the 1st.
> Don’t you want your customers to say, “wow, half the internet was down today but XYZ service was up with no issues! I love them.”
See any companies getting credit for it in the last AWS outage? I didn't. My employers didn't reward vendors who stayed up during it.
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If my cloud provider goes down and my site is offline, my customers and my boss will be upset with me and demand I fix it as fast as possible. They will not care what caused it.
If my cloud provider goes down and also takes down Spotify, Snapchat, Venmo, Reddit, and a ton of other major services that my customers and my boss use daily, they will be much more understanding that there is a third party issue that we can more or less wait out.
Every provider has outages. US-east-2 will sometimes go down. If I'm not going to make a system that can fail over from one provider to another (which is a lot of work and can be expensive, and really won't be actively used often), it might be better to just use the popular one and go with the group.
us-east-2 goes down far, far less frequently than us-east-1. AWS doesn’t publicly release the outage numbers (they hold them very close to the chest) but some people have compiled the stats on their own if you poke around.
The regions provide the same functionality, so I see genuinely no downside or additional work to picking the 2 regions over the 2 regions.
It seems like one of those no brainer decisions to me. I take pride in being up when everyone else is down. 5 9s or bust, baby!
I also don’t understand this.
US-East-2 staying up isn’t my responsibility. If I need my own failover, I’m going to select a different region anyway.
And it’s not like US-East-2 isn’t already huge and growing. It’s effectively becoming another US-East-1.
> US-East-2 staying up isn’t my responsibility.
No, but you can be blamed if other things are up and yours is not. If everyone's stuff is down, it is just a natural disaster.