Signal president Meredith Whittaker says they had no choice but to use AWS, and that's a problem
Signal's Meredith Whitaker decries dependence on AWS
No they didn't. There are plenty of companies that run multi-regional services, outside of AWS. This is just an excuse for making poor choices.
There are plenty of companies that run multi-regional services, outside of AWS.
Mind listing some?
Some of these might have changed in the meantime, but the last I heard:
Hell, if you go to most hosting-service company websites, you'll find that they usually list some of their biggest customers in their marketing materials.
Suuuure, and they can only hire developers in the US because talent doesn't exist anywhere else on the planet.
Give me a break. Ilike the product but don't sell us this bullshit excuse. AWS is the most expensive cloud provider out there. There are now alternatives you can use, be it in Europe or Asia.
If you looked closer you'd see they're talking about scale, not functionality. Anybody can build the functionality, few others have infrastructure that will keep latency low for users across the planet.
And yes they could use many local providers, except that significantly increase engineering costs
Would it really increase engineering costs? Who knows what they are doing now. is everything running in containers on Fargate? Is it EKS? Is it a bunch of EC2 instances in one zone behind load balancers? Are they exclusively using CloudWatch? Do they have DataDog collecting logs everywhere?
Without specifics, I wouldn't immediately claim it's impossible to pick providers across the globe or find some kind of other solution that doesn't involve a high dependence on a single provider.
I'm skeptical of this claim. Signal doesn't seem like it'd be very compute-heavy, doesn't seem like text and voice would be very network-heavy, and I don't think video is used very much. If us-east-1 going down took out most their services, it doesn't seem like they're leveraging AWSs multi-region features very well anyways. It wouldn't be too hard to just rent or co-locate hardware in multiple non-hyperscalar data-centers around the world, and run a multi-zone, highly available k8s cluster. Would probably be cheaper and more robust too. I don't have experience with multi-zone k8s, but I was the sole person responsible for deploying and maintaining a highly-available single-datacenter k8s cluster on rented hardware, and it wasn't even my primary job (was a full-stack engineer and team-lead), If I could do it, I don't think they'd need to try to hire world's top experts or anything. Coincidentally, the provider was UpCloud, which is a European company, and in 8 years of using them, I don't recall seeing a single node we had become unresponsive for more than 5 minutes, and I'm not even sure those times were on UpCloud's end.
It's routing heavy. That's latency sensitive and really needs distributed components when users are distributed. And it gets more complicated when you're using many different local providers
'No choice' like how they have no choice but to collect phone numbers. Have to keep the honey flowing from the pot after all.
I love this woman and I believe everything she says
The only solution for this is strong government regulation. Monopolies are the natural result from capitalism.
The final form of unregulated capitalism is a single company.
Like China.
Is this even the solution in this case? These are truly global companies which begs the obvious question: Which government?
Which single government is incorruptible? Two or more you say? All governments maybe? What happens when regulatory rules are dissimilar? Lowest common denominator then perhaps? Would the Taliban-led Afghan government be able to weigh in and block resources showing women working if that was their want?
Yes, that’s the solution.
There’s a reason why every rich piece of shit is 100% against government regulation. They want absolute power to exploit, pollute, abuse, bribe and every other anti-social activity we can imagine.
Do you have a solution?
Good point. Laws are useless. Case closed.
The most practical solution is something similar to particular features of GDPR - where greater scale / marketshare increase the responsibilities the company has, like increased requirements to support competitors (API compatibility, infrastructure access, etc) and prohibition against anticompetitive behaviors.