Yes, but those days are numbered. For many years AWS was in a league of its own. Now they’ve fallen badly behind in a growing number of areas and are struggling to catch up.

There’s a ton of momentum associated with the prior dominance, but between the big misses on AI, a general slow pace of innovation on core services, and a steady stream of top leadership and engineers moving elsewhere they’re looking quite vulnerable.

That is 100% true. You cant be fired for picking AWS... But I doubt its the best choice for most people. Sad but true

On the other side of that coin, I am excited to be up and running while everyone else is down!

On one hand it's allows to shift the blame but on other hand is shows a disadvantage of hyper centralization - if AWS is down too many important services are down at the same time which makes it worse. E. g. when AWS is down it's important to have communication/monitoring services UP so engineers can discuss / co-ordinate workarounds and have good visibility but Atlassian was (is) significantly degraded today too.

100%. When AWS was down, we'd say "AWS is down!", and our customers would get it. Saying "Hetzner is down!" raises all sorts of questions your customers aren't interested in.

To back up this point, currently BBC News have it as their most significant story, with "live" reporting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5y8k7k6v1rt

This is alongside "live" reporting on the Israel/Gaza conflict as well as news about Epstein and the Louvre heist.

This is mainstream news.

That depends on the service. Far from everyone is on their PC or smartphone all day, and even fewer care about these kinds of news.

Which eventually leads to the headline "AWS down indefinitely, society collapses".

Amazon is up, what are they doing?

And yet they still all activate their on call people (wait why do we have them if we are on the cloud?) to do .. nothing at all.

most people dont even know aws exists

> physical servers are way simpler than the extremely complex software and networking systems that AWS provides.

Or, rather, it's your fault when the complex software and networking systems you deployed on top of those physical servers go wrong (:

On the other hand, I had the misfortune of having a hardware failure on one of my Hetzner servers. They got a replacement harddrive in fairly quickly, but still complete data loss on that server, so I had to rebuild it from scratch.

This was extra painful, because I wasn't using one of the OS that is blessed by Hetzner, so it requires a remote install. Remote installs require a system that can run their Java web plugin, and that have a stable and fast enough connection to not time out. The only way I have reliably gotten them to work is by having an ancient Linux VM that was also running in Hetzner, and had the oldest Firefox version I could find that still supported Java in the browser.

My fault for trying to use what they provide in a way that is outside their intended use, and props to them for letting me do it anyway.

Cloud marketing and career incentives seems to have instilled in the average dev that MTBF for hardware is in days rather than years.

Do you monitor your product closely enough to know that there weren't other brief outages? E.g. something on the scale of unscheduled server restarts, and minute-long network outages?

7 years, 20 servers, same here.

For the price of AWS you could run Hetzner, a second provider for resiliancy and still make a large saving.

Your margin is my opportunity indeed.

> I'd rather go with Hetzner and cobble up together some failover than pay AWS extortion.

Comments like this are so exaggerated that they risk moving the goodwill needle back to where it was before. Hetzner offers no service that is similar to DynamoDB, IAM or Lambda. If you are going to praise Hetzner as a valid alternative during a DynamoDB outage caused by DNS configuration, you would need to a) argue that Hetzner is a better option regarding DNS outages, b) Hetzner is a preferable option for those who use serverless offers.

I say this as a long-time Hetzner user. Herzner is indeed cheaper, but don't pretend that Herzner let's you click your way into a highly-availale nosql data store. You need non-trivial levels of you're ow work to develop, deploy, and maintain such a service.

TBH, in my last 3 years with Hetzner, i never saw a downtime to my servers other than myself doing some routin maitenance for os updates. Location Falkenstein.

What is the Hetzner equivalent for those in Windows Server land? I looked around for some VPS/DS providers that specialize in Windows, and they all seem somewhat shady with websites that look like early 2000s e-commerce.

AWS has internal dependencies on US-EAST-1.

Admittedly they're getting fewer and fewer, but they exist.

The same is also true in GCP, so as much as I prefer GCP from a technical standpoint: the truth is, if you can't see it, it doesn't mean it goes away.

We have nothing deployed in us east 1, yet all of our CI was failing due to IAM errors this morning.

Btw I use Hertzner

Love, after your laptop's wifi antenna, it's Linux users all the way down.

When things go wrong, you can point at a news article and say its not just us that have been affected.

Well, we have a naming issue (Hetzner also has Hetzner Cloud, it looks people still equal cloud with the three biggest public cloud providers).

In any case, in order for this to happen, someone would have to collect reliable data (not all big cloud providers like to publish precise data, usually they downlplay the outages and use weasel words like "some customers... in some regions... might have experienced" just not to admit they had an outage) and present stats comparing the availability of Heztner Cloud vs the big three.

Looks fine for pointing an irony

> the opposite of enshitification.

Why do you expect American companies to follow it then? >:)

Nah you're definitely correct.

Unfortunately, HN is full of company people, you can't talk anything against Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft without being downvoted to death.