cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/51866711
Signal was just one of many services brought down by the AWS outage.
Her real comment was that there are only 3 major cloud providers they can consider: AWS, GCP, and Azure. They chose AWS and AWS only. So there are a few options for them going forward — 1) keep doing what they’re doing and hope a single cloud provider can improve reliability, 2) modify their architecture to a multi-cloud architecture given the odds of more than one major provider going down simultaneously is much rarer, or 3) build their own datacenters/use colos which have a learning curve yet are still viable alternatives. Those that are serious about software own their own hardware, after all.
Each choice has its strengths and drawbacks. The economics are tough with any choice. Comes down to priorities, ability to differentiate, and value in differentiation :)
What reason do they give for only wanting to use those three cloud providers? There are many others.
Scale, they need worldwide coverage.
And yet a single availability zone in AWS going down caused an outage?
Yes, because scale is not the same as redundancy.
Signal would need to pay for multi region redundancy and build a programmatic way of swapping regions when their primary region is down.
They are serving 1on1 chats and group chats. That practically partitions itself. There are many server lease options all over the world. My assumption is that they use some AWS service and now can’t migrate off. But you need an oncall team anyway so you aren’t buying that much convenience.
Just read through the bluesky thread and it’s obvious that she’s a CEO and has no idea how to code or design infrastructure
It’s leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin.
Yeah then why was Signal completely down when a single datacenter (us-east-1) fails and all others are working perfectly?
Did it ever come to your brilliant mind that your system design might be the problem?
Jump over your shadow, say that you screwed up and tell the people that you are no longer going to rely on a single S3 bucket in us-east-1 and stop your fingerpointing.
But you don’t even manage to host a proper working status page or technically explain your outages, so guess this train is long gone…
Matrix solved this with decentralization and federation. Don’t tell me its not possible.
I’m going to call bullshit in that there are several networks that might be capable of doing this such as several blockchain networks or IPFS.
I’m going to call bullshit on the underlying assertion that Signal is using Amazon services for the sake of lining Jeff’s pocket instead of considering the “several” alternatives. As if they don’t have staff to consider such a thing and just hit buy now on the Amazon smile.
In any monopoly, there are going to be smaller, less versatile, less reliable options. Fine and dandy for Mr Joe Technology to hop on the niche wagon and save a few bucks, but that’s not going to work for anyone casting a net encompassing the world.
