On complexity and failure
▼From a comment on Hacker News: (link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705387) --- quoted comment --- Full disclosure: I work for an AWS competitor. While none of the specific AWS systemic failures may themselves be foreseeable, it is not true that issues of this nature cannot be anticipated: the architecture of their system (and in particular, their insistence on network storage for local data) allows for cascading failure modes in which single failures blossom to systemic ones. AWS is not the only entity to have made this mistake with respect to network storage in the cloud; I, too, was fooled.[1]