From a business perspective, this clearly helps us understand risk of a single point of failure. Basic ORM tell us What is the Damage if it occurs, how likely is it to occur and then accept, mitigate or transfer.
For example in another life, I was responsible for the 'last mile' for a private city which included fiber in the road. We started to look at pop diversity (small private city that was near 2 pops, rare but happens). Instead we went with a pre negotiated contract with our fiber provider and accepted a 24 hour outage knowing that our Fiber provider was on emergency stand by if needed. They'd roll a truck and would have us back up within 24 hours (likely faster). The risk process included "How often do we have an actual fiber cut in the road." It had happened in the past, but the private city owned the roads and road crew, so new communications procedures were put in place and it had not happened since. I agree with Bill. This is a business problem. On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 11:39 AM William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 5:43 AM Mike Bolitho <mikebolitho@gmail.com> wrote:
Can we please not go down this rabbit hole on here? List admins?
Hi Mike,
While there's certainly an opportunity to get political, there are some obviously apolitical issues worth discussing here as well.
First, this would appear to be an illustration of the single-vendor problem. You don't have a credible continuity of operations plan if a termination by a single vendor can take you and keep you offline. It's the single point of failure that otherwise intelligent system architects fail to consider and address. But more than that, cloud providers like Amazon tend to make it inconvenient approaching impossible to build cross-platform services. I kinda wonder what a cloud services product would look like that was actively trying to facilitate cross-platform construction?
Second, Amazon strongly encourages customers to build use of its proprietary services and APIs into the core of the customer's product. That's quite devastating when there's a need to change vendors. Parler's CEO described Amazon's action as requiring them to "rebuild from scratch," so I wonder just how tightly tied to such Amazon APIs they actually are. And if there isn't a lesson there for the rest of us.
These two issues, at least, are technical in nature and on topic for this forum. You may choose not to discuss them if they don't interest you, of course.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- Hire me! https://bill.herrin.us/resume/