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New The strange thing is that everything IS in the fricking "cloud" in the first place.
Did ALL the senior manglement who heaved those giant sighs of relief at the escape from centralised monopolist IBM back in the 1980s die out already? Did NONE of their successors, even if they weren't personally around for that, learn the lesson from them?
--

   Christian R. Conrad
The Man Who Apparently Still Knows Fucking Everything


Mail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
New One thing hasn't changed yet
Economies of scale are still real, so resources keep getting bigger, and (usually) shared by more people. Which means when there's a problem it affects more people.

And when it's a security issue, just identifying the potential scope requires searching a much larger surface.

Real question: What lesson *should* they have learned in the 80s that would have prevented this?
--

Drew
New data is not math
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
New And what would they have done differently if they'd learned that?
--

Drew
New quit using spreadsheets as a database
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
New How does that prevent an outage when your host shuts down to respond to an attack?
--

Drew
New it doesn't
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
New That not putting all your eggs in someone else's single basket beats economies of scale, IMO.
New In my experience that cloud basket is better than a company's single basket
Especially with availability zones and multiple regions. Most companies don't have the capital or expertise to set up a local equivalent that even remotely approaches the robustness of a big cloud provider. The enormous cost savings of not owning multiple physical plants (you need at least two, separated far enough geographically that they're on separate electrical grids and in different natural disaster regions) can be spent on hardening your cloud presence, with plenty of money left over for other things.

If you're truly concerned about a single provider, use Terraform or Serverless to spread your infrastructure across multiple providers. Complexity goes way up, however, and the incremental benefit over using multiple regions in a single provider probably isn't worth the investment.

As an example, Google's SRE discipline is aimed at hitting 99.99% reliability. Anything over that isn't going to be noticed by users and the incremental improvements are cost-scaled way out of proportion to the improvements.

Companies I've worked for have had issues from 3rd party SaaS vendors way more often than the IaaS cloud providers. In the past 8 years I can think of 2 times where we were directly affected by a cloud provider's issues, and maybe 2 or 3 times indirectly. Having said that, avoid AWS' us-east-1 as most of the issues seem to happen in that region.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New Pretty sure we're using us-east-1
Got anything you can point to showing why we shouldn't?
--

Drew
New Most of the big failures I've seen have been there
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New Thanks, got some people I'll forward this to
--

Drew
New There's a 3rd party vendor we recently rejected
Their availability averaged 96% over the past 6 months, and a number of the outages and degradations were either caused by or exacerbated by AWS issues, all in us-east-1.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New 2 weeks of downtime per year
That's really bad.
New I think us-east-1 is their original location.
So there must be some hardware build decisions left over from when it was first created.
New Yes, there are a number of oddities with that region.
They finally removed the weird "S3 buckets are global, but really they're just in us-east-1" problem, but there are still a number of global API endpoints that are hosted there. This can make locking down regions that can create new resources difficult if one of those regions isn't us-east-1.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New The first time I coded for the web it was 3270 all the way down
Handling the browser portion in forms that contained multiple fields and slinging information back and forth to the back end which I also programmed. I commented to the mainframers that this is just like a 3270 terminal working in a mainframe interface. Sure you got fonts and graphics but internally it's pretty much the same.
New MVC as a conceptual description hasn't changed much
It's still just UI, data (model), and the glue between. The only thing changing is where the code for the different pieces is running.

Maybe I'm officially one of the old farts who just doesn't think the new stuff is any good, but I really haven't seen much that's genuinely new. Machine learning and distributed parallel computing are huge, but that's not what most people are working on.
--

Drew
New Mine was kind of similar.
Twenty years ago, when I was a DW consultant at Oracle. A part of the reporting system for a client, kind of a "two-level recursive meta" thing: PL/SQL that generated HTML/JS that, when clicking a link or button to drill down, called other HTML/JS generated by other PL/SQL procedures. Having built similar stuff in Delphi at my previous job, it felt pretty damn stone-age. (And "Visual" Source Safe didn't make that better.)
--

   Christian R. Conrad
The Man Who Apparently Still Knows Fucking Everything


Mail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
     Strange goings on in the cloud - (Another Scott) - (28)
         The stack of case studies must be touching the ceiling by now - (scoenye)
         The strange thing is that everything IS in the fricking "cloud" in the first place. - (CRConrad) - (18)
             One thing hasn't changed yet - (drook) - (14)
                 data is not math -NT - (boxley) - (4)
                     And what would they have done differently if they'd learned that? -NT - (drook) - (3)
                         quit using spreadsheets as a database -NT - (boxley) - (2)
                             How does that prevent an outage when your host shuts down to respond to an attack? -NT - (drook) - (1)
                                 it doesn't -NT - (boxley)
                 That not putting all your eggs in someone else's single basket beats economies of scale, IMO. -NT - (CRConrad) - (8)
                     In my experience that cloud basket is better than a company's single basket - (malraux) - (7)
                         Pretty sure we're using us-east-1 - (drook) - (4)
                             Most of the big failures I've seen have been there - (malraux) - (3)
                                 Thanks, got some people I'll forward this to -NT - (drook) - (2)
                                     There's a 3rd party vendor we recently rejected - (malraux) - (1)
                                         2 weeks of downtime per year - (crazy)
                         I think us-east-1 is their original location. - (static) - (1)
                             Yes, there are a number of oddities with that region. - (malraux)
             The first time I coded for the web it was 3270 all the way down - (crazy) - (2)
                 MVC as a conceptual description hasn't changed much - (drook)
                 Mine was kind of similar. - (CRConrad)
         Cole brings out the flamethrower. - (Another Scott)
         Reddit thread claims that it's ransomware - (Another Scott) - (1)
             Scott’s probably already seen this - (rcareaga)
         The site is back, but no backups yet. - (Another Scott) - (4)
             "15-ish days, and still nothing useful from 3xxDC" -- so they're down to about 350DC by now? -NT - (CRConrad)
             Brutal! - (pwhysall) - (2)
                 Hold a host accountable for what they should be doing? What a concept. -NT - (drook) - (1)
                     It will never happen - (crazy)

I'm reconciled to the existence of idiots in the world, but I'm bitterly resentful of whoever it was who first thought to make computer technology available to them.
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