Amazon Web Services

who else is on-call? let's goooo More on reddit.com

When a website has to handle people (users) going to the website and making use of the services on it that requires computers actually processing those decisions and actions by the users. In the past businesses would do this themselves by having dedicated computers (servers) handle that processing. They would have these computers on-premises and have their own IT handle expansion and maintenance of those servers. Nowadays most of the businesses and websites on the internet no longer have their own computers because of the time and investment needed to manage it and just rent the usage of computers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or whatever hosting they choose to use. AWS normally has a 99.999% availability meaning that it normally has like a 5 minute total downtime for the entire year and for the most part they're very consistent about maintaining that availability. When it goes down that means the businesses that rent the usage from Amazon don't have any way to actually process incoming requests to their website and don't have a backup in place (because this usually does not happen) meaning that the websites go down. Huge amounts of the internet including the sites you mentioned use Amazon to host their sites and so when it goes down they also do. More on reddit.com

Think about every moment of your life when you _aren't_ aware that AWS is working - effectively always. You only think about this when something goes wrong, which creates a survivor bias in your mind about how this is 'always happening'. Go look up the uptimes of AWS - it's well above 99%. I guarentee you that the alternative - self-hosting - would result in a far higher downtime, with added security issues, maintainance, cost, etc. That stuff only really starts making sense if you're a really large company who is willing to pay for sysops to run all that stuff for you. And even then - what happens if your building looses power? I promise it'll take you longer to get your servers up and running again than it will the largest cloud company in the world, with effectively limitless resources. (In the interst of a learning culture - it's 'foolproof' as in, 'it's safe from fools' not 'full proof' which is a whisky term) More on reddit.com

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