From my perspective, pushing out a new SSL build to a bunch of load balancers in a highly automated network like AWS is probably, by this point, a trivial task.
These responses I always see on HN when there is an AWS issue always show me how disconnected many of the commenters are from reality, or from ever being involved in a huge infrastructure.
Sure the AWS status page doesn't have a hip web 2.0 AJAX backed d3.js powered cool looking status page. Yes they don't update it every 3 minutes with new info, but many (most) of the problems that one off customers see do not reach a threshold that would ever effect enough customers to make it into a dashboard post. I do think they need to speed up their status updates, but these posts need to get OK'd by a decent number of people before they get thrown up.
There are usually multiple ELB instances living on every rack of every datacenter in every AZ in every region of AWS. Relaunching / patching hundreds of thousands of instances in 48 hours with minimial disruption to customers, is a lot harder than you think.
I'm not disconnected from reality. I actually understand the problem at hand and understand it is a lot of work for some engineers. However, it's still likely it's old hat techniques by now, hence the 'trivial' remark. Also, the context of the comment I was responding to was correlating 'fixing in 48 hours' to not being marketing amateurs.
My primary point agrees with your second paragraph, which is that they could do better on the status updates. Unfortunately this has been going on for YEARS at AWS, so it's worth ratcheting up the tone when talking about it. It's important, and they need to fix it.
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These responses I always see on HN when there is an AWS issue always show me how disconnected many of the commenters are from reality, or from ever being involved in a huge infrastructure.
Sure the AWS status page doesn't have a hip web 2.0 AJAX backed d3.js powered cool looking status page. Yes they don't update it every 3 minutes with new info, but many (most) of the problems that one off customers see do not reach a threshold that would ever effect enough customers to make it into a dashboard post. I do think they need to speed up their status updates, but these posts need to get OK'd by a decent number of people before they get thrown up.
There are usually multiple ELB instances living on every rack of every datacenter in every AZ in every region of AWS. Relaunching / patching hundreds of thousands of instances in 48 hours with minimial disruption to customers, is a lot harder than you think.
I'm not disconnected from reality. I actually understand the problem at hand and understand it is a lot of work for some engineers. However, it's still likely it's old hat techniques by now, hence the 'trivial' remark. Also, the context of the comment I was responding to was correlating 'fixing in 48 hours' to not being marketing amateurs.
My primary point agrees with your second paragraph, which is that they could do better on the status updates. Unfortunately this has been going on for YEARS at AWS, so it's worth ratcheting up the tone when talking about it. It's important, and they need to fix it.