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baronvonspyesterday at 9:55 PM1 replyview on HN

> AWS makes it annoying to be resilient as AZs aren't transparent to their users

What does transparent mean here? AWS is super clear what resources are zonal and provides tons of guidance around making things multi-AZ. AZ outages aren't exactly frequent but they're reasonably likely.

Being susceptible to AZ (or region) outages is very much an architectural decision. Or a bug that needs to be fixed (I'm sure Coinbase didn't YOLO single-AZ, they've undoubtedly learned about some edge case that needs to be fixed). Sure it may not be worth the cost/complexity for some systems but resiliency is like job one for anything in the cloud that costs money when it's down.


Replies

dietr1chyesterday at 10:06 PM

> What does transparent mean here?

Transparent as a system/box can be, meaning that you can't see / know about it. (Yeah, I guess you can read that not transparent as obscure in disclosure of how their system works, but it shouldn't make much sense)

> AWS is super clear what resources are zonal and provides tons of guidance around making things multi-AZ.

Yeah, they allow people cheaping out for zonal resources and then going down with their zone.