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0 pointsfaizshah3y ago0 comments

AWS invested a ton into limiting the blast radius of failures by isolating AZs, regions and using a cellular (service level isolated shards) architecture. I am surprised these ideas have not propagated to newer companies trying to build clouds: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=swQbA4zub20

AWS isn’t perfect but these lessons were learned by fire because these sorts of global outages can seriously harm reputations.

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HyperSane3y ago

I feel that this is one of the biggest advantages AWS has over Azure. AWS has never had truly global outages the way that Azure has had with Azure AD

olivermuty3y ago

Azures global outages have all been DNS more or less.

And AWS has had a few of those in my 13-14 years I have used them :D

Azure reliability sucks more for sure though. Especiallly networking.

Edit: us-east-1 going down disrupts most of global AWS pretty severely fwiw.

faizshahOP3y ago

That actually brings up another aspect of AWS architecture, even for global services that depend on us-east-1, AWS separates the control plane (configuration of resources) from the data plane (usage of resources). These global services like IAM have regionalized data planes: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-fault-iso...

In a disaster scenario, the data plane operations can continue so customer workloads can still run while the control plane might experience downtime. This is another lesson where in the case of fly isolating the control plane (deployment of services) from the data plane (executing customer code) could have limited the blast radius of this fault instead of using a global cluster manager.

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