Core AWS services use it too. Even if you are hosted in another region, you can still be affected by a US-East 1 outage

The idea would be to actually load distribute between different cloud providers.

But even then , the load balancer needs to run somewhere. Which becomes a new single point of failure.

I’m sure someone smarter than me has figured this out.

yes, they have. It just costs a shit ton of money and is extremely difficult to get the suits to sign off on TWO full 'cloud services' bills. It generally doubles your cost and workload and increases your uptime by a couple hours/year, assuming you don't have bugs that affect one or the other cloud in your deployment stack.

It's basically a wash for almost all organizations for twice the cost and effort.

Ok...

But where does the load balancer actually run. Does load balancer main run on AWS, and load balancer backup on Oracle?

Short TTL DNS or BGP anycast.

also these things don't go down THAT often... well aws, not some others. More uptime that you probably had before. even the stock market takes a few days off every decade. Just ask W.

> not some others.

Looking at Azure and GitHub in particular. ;)

DNS

Not really. Your clients can random robin to connection points across providers and move write heads upon connection. If you worry about hard coding you can reduce the surface to a per-context first minimum contact point.

Bingo. This is the one most people don't know about.

I was surprised recently when setting up cloudfront with aws certs that it forced me to use us-east-1 to provision the certs.

STS is only on us-east-1 I believe

Yep. All of the identity and access management services for the non-China public cloud are in us-east-1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071472

All the control plane. Data plane is distributed and roles using iam to access resources can still do so during a control plane outage.

Yes, you're right, but in my experience the boundary between the data plane and the control plane is not always clear, and especially unclear on these foundational and basic services.

There were enough "surprisingly control-plane" IAM operations in the AWS services that I dealt with, so we had to exercise extreme caution during outages.

It's literally documented. Try reading it and educating yourself.

I worked there.

Even if I were the stupidest and least curious engineer around (and I was far from it), that's basically irrelevant to what you're scolding me for here…

As part of a team with both software development and operational responsibilities, like most teams at AWS, I had to deal not only with the consequences of my own imperfect knowledge, but also with the imperfect knowledge of my coworkers past and present.

> It worked out with my first girlfriend. The twins are fluent in English and Korean.

You were dating twins as a form of redundancy?!

Dual writes. You'd need to have the same conversation with both to keep them in sync.