Topic: Reliability
Amazon cloud issues send Web publishers scrambling – Axios (Feb 28, 2017)
I might update this or post a follow-up later, since the outage is still underway and there isn’t yet an official explanation. But it’s already clear that this outage is having very widespread impacts, not just on a couple of big tech companies but on a variety of news sites and other businesses too. This is a great illustration of the enormous power a single player can have when it takes a dominant market share position, and conversely the danger customers put themselves in by failing to secure adequate redundancy. One of the changes between Snap’s original S-1 and its S-1/A filing was the inclusion of a deal with Amazon (ironically) to provide redundancy for its Google Cloud services, and I think it’s very unlikely the timing was a coincidence: I suspect the investors Snap talked to first were wary of its massive dependence on a single cloud provider. But of course that kind of redundancy can cost an awful lot, especially at scale – Snap’s contractual commitment to Amazon five years out is almost the same as its commitment to Google in the same year, which is not to say it will actually end up spending the same, but it’s indicative of the problem here. Of course, the Snapchat app hasn’t gone down today while many other services and sites have – if it had single-sourced based on Amazon, perhaps it would have done, which would have been disastrous the week of its IPO.
via Axios