I don’t use AWS or any other cloud provider. I use bare metal since 2012. See, in 2012 (IIRC), one fateful day, we turned off our bare metal machines and went full AWS. That afternoon, AWS had its first major outage. Prior to that day, the owner could walk in and ask what we were doing about it. That day, all we could do was twiddle our thumbs or turn on a now outdated database replica. Surely AWS won’t be out for hours, right? Right? With bare metal, you might be out for hours, but you can quickly get back to a degraded state, no matter what happens. With AWS, you’re stuck with whatever they happen to fix first.
Meanwhile I've had bare metal be a complete outage for over a day because a backhoe decided it wanted to eat the fiber line into our building. All I could do was twiddle my thumbs because we were stuck waiting on another company to fix that.
Could we have had an offsite location to fail over to? From a technical perspective, sure. Same as you could go multi-region or multi-cloud or turn on some servers at hetzner or whatever. There's nothing better or worse about the cloud here - you always have the ability to design with resilience for whatever happens short of the internet on the whole breaking somehow.
I don’t use AWS or any other cloud provider. I use bare metal since 2012. See, in 2012 (IIRC), one fateful day, we turned off our bare metal machines and went full AWS. That afternoon, AWS had its first major outage. Prior to that day, the owner could walk in and ask what we were doing about it. That day, all we could do was twiddle our thumbs or turn on a now outdated database replica. Surely AWS won’t be out for hours, right? Right? With bare metal, you might be out for hours, but you can quickly get back to a degraded state, no matter what happens. With AWS, you’re stuck with whatever they happen to fix first.
Meanwhile I've had bare metal be a complete outage for over a day because a backhoe decided it wanted to eat the fiber line into our building. All I could do was twiddle my thumbs because we were stuck waiting on another company to fix that.
Could we have had an offsite location to fail over to? From a technical perspective, sure. Same as you could go multi-region or multi-cloud or turn on some servers at hetzner or whatever. There's nothing better or worse about the cloud here - you always have the ability to design with resilience for whatever happens short of the internet on the whole breaking somehow.