Experts said the outage underlined the dangers of the internet’s reliance on a small number of tech companies, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google playing a key role in the cloud market.
Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation Article 19, said: “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
Cori Crider, the executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, a thinktank that supports a sovereign technology framework for Europe, said: “The UK can’t keep leaving its critical infrastructure at the mercy of US tech giants. With Amazon Web Services down, we’ve seen the lights go out across the modern economy – from banking to communications.”
It wasn’t, I fear, really necessary to ask these birds for a quote. AI, cut and paste, just run the last one in fact, would have worked just as well. Big Septic Tech is bad, see?
You can imagine an EU sponsored cloud service.
It’d only run 0830-1500 weekdays and not on Ascension Day or Mary’s Assumption.
Indeed. We had yet another holiday here last week. FK’s what that one was about. And businesses & council departments were closing at mid-day for a week because feria..
Nearly 30 years ago, I and my head of telecoms were visiting our HQ in Paris. They proudly showed us the control centre for France with a wall filled with huge flat screens (v expensive in those days), looking like NASA’s Houston Mission Control.
This was about 4:30pm on a Friday, when suddenly there was a major France Telecon outage and all the screens went red. None of the several thousand French offices could communicate. And at 5pm everyone packed up and went home for le weekend.
“Is nobody staying to sort it out?” we asked. “No-one will be working over the weekend, we’ll sort it first thing Monday” was the reply.
I can. Project Andromède was a French government-initiated effort to develop a “sovereign cloud” infrastructure, emphasizing data security, national control, and independence from foreign providers like AWS and Microsoft.
It was announced in 2009 and implemented as two providers. Uptake was very poor. By 2014 Cloudwatt had a revenue of €2 million and Numergy €6 million (vs. €500 million annual target). They later merged and the plug was finally pulled in 2020.
The Franco-German Gaia-X project whilst specifically not a cloud project despite people believing that was the hidden aim is rapidly going the same way.
The argument is essentially that instead of three large US tech companies providing cloud we should have one government-run/-sponsored in the UK/EU. They really claim that having one is more resilient / provides more redundancy than three.
(Not forgetting that there is a range of challengers including Oracle, IBM, OVHCloud, Alibaba + various national alternatives in most countries)
Ah yes OVH. If you are going to build flammable data centres I guess building them in flood planes makes sense …
I thought the disruption of such an outage was pretty minimal but this is an area where economies of scale bite hard. If anything the ever increasing regulations are creating a regulatory moat that further pushes consolidation. At least the UK is looking at competition law approaches in this space not the EU regulate everything approach and being perpetually surprised at the consequences.
That. My company was largely prostrate as the AWS issue knocked out Jira for much of the day (esp in UK time), I think they depended on that AWS service for authentication.
But what Infrastructure/platform provider is going to want to submit themselves to the EUs tender regulatory embrace, with the risk of being responsible for every bit that passes through your services. Can’t imagine the UK looking much more attractive, either.
And anyone who doesn’t yet realize that diversity undermines regulation isn’t paying attention.
Jira is great. Normally used for issue tracking, so if it’s broken not one can issue a service ticket to get “anything” fixed ……including Jira.
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud control 63% of the global cloud market. AWS has 29%, Azure 22%, and GCP 12% market share. That seems ‘diverse’ to me.
“We urgently need diversification in cloud computing”
Oh dear. Someone at the Guardian needed to knock out a story and rapidly rang around until they found Article 19 (who) to deliver on it. Who are clearly *experts* in cloud computing (cough).
We used to have diversification. Lots of little cloud hosting companies or what we called “On premise hosting”. Companies having a server room. Still happens for things like traders etc. People decided that Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure works better.
The thing is, those things used to go down a lot. AWS and Azure are more stable. But when they fail (which is extremely rare), lots of things get knocked out. It gets noticed. It’s like a plane crash making the news, but various people dying on country roads every single day doesn’t.
Total non-story.
When it comes down to it, “The Cloud” seems to be not much more than a reinvention of the “time-shared mainframe”… Just that there were a lot more mainframes than there are Cloud suppliers.
it’s not far off, but the difference is that there are lots and lots of machines and you don’t say “give me a slice of a machine” but “give me X” and Amazon manage it across their warehouses of machines. So you can be running a piddly little server and ramp it up fast. Black Friday comes and you need 10 times the power, just click a few buttons and you get it about 15 minutes later.
We had to do things where we just needed a ton of power for a few hours and it’s amazing. Think Glastonbury tickets, Black Friday sales. You can take your 4 vCore SQL Server and go 32 vCore for just a day. You just pay for the time. That’s a lot cheaper than running a load of hardware just for a peak, and it’s far easier than moving between boxes.
It’s not cheaper than doing your own hosting, until you factor in sys admins and SQL admins. We don’t bother hiring specialists now. It’s just developers doing it all.
The Internet is supposed to be built to work around breaks in it. This was a DNS fault, in my experience every system I’ve set up has settings for two DNS servers. I expect so that if one is inaccessible it uses the other. So, again, built to work around breaks. So, how some so many people had their systems set up to only use one DNS server, or both at the same source?
reliable suppliers make people lazy …
It’s not so much your own services, as the services you rent from the cloud provider that have the vulnerability.
And many companies who rent from AWS use the US East zone (the one that fell over), even if they’re elsewhere. Why? Well, that was the first zone created, and I suspect it’s the default.
If you started renting back when there was one zone, then moving to another zone is work, which doesn’t pay off (until it does).
If you started recently, you likely have to explicitly select a different zone, which many don’t know to do.
“I do not agree with or accept the idea there has to be competition in mail delivery. After all, we all have one letterbox, and it is much more efficient to have one postal delivery person coming down the street rather than three or four from different or competing companies.”
J Corbyn
“human rights organisation”, “Future of Technology Institute” …
Jobs for the useless, I suppose. Do you think we could settle such people on the Chagos Islands?
Or maybe some kind of space ship. Like a sort of Ark perhaps?
The market has already fixed this: AWS customers will be demanding audits from expensive tech consultancies to look for other points single points of failure as will the customers of their competitors. There will also be new talk about loss of business compensation and huge discounts.
If this had been a government run monopoly platform there would have been nowhere to go and the response to customer complaints would be “lessons have been learned, let’s move on”.
That’s right. It needs to be at the mercy of half-assed Euro tech companies, so EU can control the internet.
Poll question: would you prefer for the internet to be controlled by American corporations, or by the EU government?