We need more cloud services.
We need to democratize the internet again, every generation there’s a ma bell pretending they own the internet. Current Gen is Google, AWS, Azure and the like, with ISPs just making sure they get their cut.
I don’t have an issue with these services existing, but in such a way that everything depends on a couple companies? Dangerous for everyone.
“There’s a monopoly” — proceeds to list 3 separate providers. Don’t forget there’s also Akami, now we’re up to 4. Oh, and Cloud Flare… so that’s 5.
The issue is more so with companies that choose to use cloud providers. They’re the ones attempting to cheap out because they don’t want to pay infrastructure costs. You also have a lack of knowledge by engineers on how to create redundant/reliable systems.
Not everything on the internet went down. There’s plenty that was just fine. So I don’t really don’t know what “democratizing” it would gain, or how.
Edit: For anyone downvoting, I’d love to hear what “democratizing” the internet means, how it would work, or be functional. Because right now it just strikes me as salty people who’s favorite site went down.
“There’s a monopoly” — proceeds to list 3 separate providers. Don’t forget there’s also Akami, now we’re up to 4. Oh, and Cloud Flare… so that’s 5.
Thats called a Cartel. and a cartel can fucking monopolize shit, dumbass.
With your personal attack your handle suits you.
Yes, yes. Go for the low hanging bait, that certainly makes you look more righter.
Democratizing the internet would mean half the known internet not hosting their infrastructure in us-east-2.
It would work and be functional exactly as the internet was designed to be, and worked and functioned for years, by hosting their own servers.
So that goes to my point that it’s on the companies that use the cloud providers. Not the cloud providers themselves.
It’s not the responsibility of the cloud providers to democratize the internet, I don’t know why you thought anyone was making that argument.
Cloud providers however are responsible for their negligence given their role in the current internet.
Fair enough there. But how do you “democratize” individual business decisions? Or are you suggesting socializing all entities?
Monopolies exist exactly like this. With them not competing fairly and coordinating with one another so as to not encroach on the others territory.
Ever wonder why despite there being dozens of ISPs in the country, you’ve only ever got an option for like a main one, and an intentionally shitty one to make the main one look better?
It’s all a rigged game.
My main point, which may have been buried in my quickness to type things, is that it is on the individual companies to choose how they design and architect their systems. This was only a problem in us-east-1. They could have used other AWS regions, they could have used Azure or GCP. They could have used a multi-cloud or hybrid solution, and none of this would be an impact.
AWS is offering infrastructure, but it’s still on the companies to decide how they’ll use it. The ire should be placed on them, just as much, if not more, for taking the easy way out.
Even if you were to have a co-op owned style cloud solution (democratized as it were). If companies choose to only host in one Datacenter/region it’s squarely on them.
A lot of these big names that went down have very poor infrastructure practices if a single region of a single provider took them out. It’s definitely not for lack of money on their part.
proceeds to list 3 separate providers
Just don’t look to hard at the market share or the client composition, sure.
The issue is more so with companies that choose to use cloud providers. They’re the ones attempting to cheap out because they don’t want to pay infrastructure costs.
I mean, do you tell people they’re cheaping out because they hire a plumber rather than spending eighteen months learning to DIY every pipe in their house? There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with outsourcing to cloud services on its face. A couple big warehouses at strategic points in town specifically designed to operate as central hubs for digital traffic makes far more sense than every single office building having a dozen different floors with two IT guys of dubious quality in a badly ventilated closet manning cobbled together rack space.
For anyone downvoting, I’d love to hear what “democratizing” the internet means, how it would work, or be functional.
One of the more successful American models for publicly owned and operated data infrastructure:
For starters: thank you for a thought out response. It feels like most people are missing the core point and just blaming the provider.
Even if there were a “public” public cloud, the underlying issue I’m getting at is with the companies that are using it. AWS has multiple regions. There are multiple cloud providers such as GCP and Azure too. Yet the companies are the ones defaulting to a single region, single provider configuration, which as we all know is still a SPOF, no matter what redundancy is built in.
To that point nowhere im saying that you can’t democratize things.
Sounds like it comes down to money and man power, something the world is trying to do away with. As in employing actual people with skills and knowledge and investing money without seeing immediate returns. The whole world has become a cash and dash scheme and they are all just seeing how long they can get away with it before we revolt. I know where my vote lies, do you?
It’s funny, because I’ve heard a variety of reasons why the outage happened, why it wasn’t caught in time, why it signaled a problem with hardware versus software or human error versus automation.
I think its safe to say the company is increasingly over-managed and under-staffed, no matter how you slice it. Maybe its time to just break the mega-corp up already and let some good old fashioned free market competition fix this mess.
some good old fashioned free market competition
This kills the billionare
Amazon just did more layoffs today.
We also need more individuals paying for “business” Internet connections at home. We need self-hosters to be able to feel comfortable running public services from their homes. And so we need a set of practices and recipes to follow, so a self-hoster can feel confident that, if one thing gets broken into, the other few dozen things they’re hosting will stay safe.
The “family nerd” hosting things for the family needs to be a thing again. Sorry, friends, I know family tech support sucks. It’ll suck so much more when it’s a web site down and nobody can reach their kid’s softball team page, and there’s a game next weekend, etc. But we’ve seen what happens when we abdicate our responsibilities and let for-profit companies handle it for us.
(I wish so hard that I had a solution ready, a corporate LAN in a box, that someone can just install and use. I’m working on something, but I’m pretty sure I over-complicated it. It doesn’t need to be Fort Knox, it just needs to be pretty good. And I suck at ops stuff.)
We need more places offering the same upload as download so people can do these things from home. Here I know spectrum only offers like 10mb upload even if you’ve got like 3gb download.
It’s not only upload (I’m so lucky living in France) but CORS, DNS and other stuff that de-decentralise things IMO.
It’s not just speed, CGNAT is a near complete “fuck you” to self-hosting. You can work around it with a VPN endpoint “in the cloud”, but that still means you are reliant on someone else’s computer.
At least where I’m at, Spectrum also blocks a lot of ports. Can’t even use FTP!
You need a new modem that supports the higher upload speed protocol. And having a DOCSIS 3.1 isn’t enough… it has to be a DOCSIS 3.1 that supports the new protocols. I had to switch to a Hitron CODA because my Netgear CM1000 wasn’t enough anymore
most consumers don’t need upload speeds. they aren’t uploading anything. most people’s internet traffic is like 99.9% streaming videos at this point.
Yes, so? So it’s fine to for literally no reason forcibly limit it? Just because old people don’t need 1tb phones doesn’t mean we should just make all iPhones 256mb phones.
Everyone with a cloud backup for anything needs a decent upload speed or it takes days to complete a backup
Maybe with symmetric fiber and if the electricity prices lower I’ll go back to that. Before the advent of convenient and cheap providers we had ou webservers, irc servers and some game servers at home… but the cost of that and the additional maintenance nightmare makes that less desirable than having OVH doing it all for me…
We need more places offering the same upload as download so people can do these things from home. Here I know spectrum only offers like 10mb upload even if you’ve got like 3gb download.
Tell me more about your thing!
I’m working on a decentralised sharing protocol, and I’d love getting likeminded people together.
The last time I looked at bus internet for my location, they wanted 3x the price for 2/3 the speed. At my actual job 20m away, I have the same provider and a business acct. Same downtime, same equipment, only unlock port 80 and 443.
You’re right to be frustrated. Mine is the same way. It’s ok to be passionate about that, and to value punishing greedy ISPs by not paying extra for a business account. (In many cases you could even need both, if you might worry about occasional denial of service attacks and need to be sure attackers can’t also knock out your ability to work from home, for example.)
I think there’s a compelling argument in favor of protecting diversity of hosting and preventing a monoculture or a monopoly. It’s not super compelling, but it’s out there.
Reminder to everyone, if you aren’t necessarily worried about uptime too much, and have a spare device at home, you can host personal websites and various services that might be useful for yourself or friends and family. To keep it simple, all you would really need is
- an up-to-date router that isn’t end-of-life
- a firewall that geo blocks traffic from outside your country and blocks all ports except 80 and 443
- port forwarding 80 and 443 to your device
- setup dynamic dns service (some routers can handle this)
- a domain name
Keep your device and router updated and reboot it every once in a while to load the updated kernel. Then just install some web server software or whatever on your device and point your domain to it.
Together, we can decentralize the web a little bit 🙂
You are likely to get away with this if your website gets little traffic.
But to much and your ISP is likely to tell you to knock it off, or just close your subscription.
this headline has mad ‘it was was in the last place i looked’ vibe.
A complicated system design with multiple loosely related systems dynamically handing off work to each other with a race condition, REALLY doesn’t fit the single point of failure concept.
But in any complex system, the single point of failure is so important!
