Comment by ragall
9 hours ago
All 3 hyperscalers have vulnerabilities in their control planes: they're either single point of failure like AWS with us-east-1, or global meaning that a faulty release can take it down entirely; and take AZ resilience to mean that existing compute will continue to work as before, but allocation of new resources might fail in multi-AZ or multi-region ways.
It means that any service designed to survive a control plane outage must statically allocate its compute resources and have enough slack that it never relies on auto scaling. True for AWS/GCP/Azure.
> It means that any service designed to survive a control plane outage must statically allocate its compute resources and have enough slack that it never relies on auto scaling. True for AWS/GCP/Azure.
That sounds oddly similar to owning hardware.
In a way. It means that you can get new capacity most often, but the transition windows where a service gets resized (or mutated in general) has to be minimised and carefully controlled by ops.
This outage talks about what appears to be a VM control plane failure (it mentions stop not working) across multiple regions.
AWS has never had this type of outage in 20 years. Yet Azure constantly had them.
This is a total failure of engineering and has nothing to do with capacity. Azure is a joke of a cloud.
AWS had an outage that blocked all EC2 operations just a few months ago: https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/
This was the largest AWS outage in a long long time and was still constrained to a single AWS region.
Which is my point.
The same fault on Azure would be a global (all-regions) fault.
I do agree that Azure seems to be a lot worse: its control plane(s) seems to be much more centralized than the other two.