> The takeaway I always have from these events is that you should engineer your business to be resilient
An enduring image that stays with me was when I was a child and the local supermarket lost electricity. Within seconds the people working the tills had pulled out hand cranks by which the tills could be operated.
I'm getting old, but this was the 1980's, not the 1800's.
In other words, to agree with your point about resilience:
A lot of the time even some really janky fallbacks will be enough.
But to somewhat disagree with your apparent support for AWS: While it is true this attitude means you can deal with AWS falling over now and again, it also strips away one of the main reasons people tend to give me for why they're in AWS in the first place - namely a belief in buying peace of mind and less devops complexity (a belief I'd argue is pure fiction, but that's a separate issue). If you accept that you in fact can survive just fine without absurd levels of uptime, you also gain a lot more flexibility in which options are viable to you.
The cost of maintaining a flawless eject button is indeed high, but so is the cost of picking a provider based on the notion that you don't need one if you're with them out of a misplaced belief in the availability they can provide, rather than based on how cost effectively they can deliver what you actually need.
An enduring image that stays with me was when I was a child and the local supermarket lost electricity. Within seconds the people working the tills had pulled out hand cranks by which the tills could be operated.
I'm getting old, but this was the 1980's, not the 1800's.
In other words, to agree with your point about resilience:
A lot of the time even some really janky fallbacks will be enough.
But to somewhat disagree with your apparent support for AWS: While it is true this attitude means you can deal with AWS falling over now and again, it also strips away one of the main reasons people tend to give me for why they're in AWS in the first place - namely a belief in buying peace of mind and less devops complexity (a belief I'd argue is pure fiction, but that's a separate issue). If you accept that you in fact can survive just fine without absurd levels of uptime, you also gain a lot more flexibility in which options are viable to you.
The cost of maintaining a flawless eject button is indeed high, but so is the cost of picking a provider based on the notion that you don't need one if you're with them out of a misplaced belief in the availability they can provide, rather than based on how cost effectively they can deliver what you actually need.