For those who are affected by the recent Microsoft and Amazon outages – and who wasn’t in some way? – you might expect both corporate giants would be trying to move heaven and earth to get the outages solved.
If you know anything about how these companies operate, you’ll know better than to have such luck.
The truth is, both of these companies are complete garbage when it comes to outages, and that’s because there is no economic incentive for them to care.
Microsoft and Amazon save money through multitenancy and oversubscribing. Multitenancy is when a single application serves multiple customers, or “tenants,” so each tenant’s data is supposedly kept private, but all the tenants have to share the available bandwidth.
Everyone accesses the same resources. It’s cost-efficient in theory, but it puts everyone at risk of an outage in the event of a single point of failure.
To top it off, they make it worse by oversubscribing, which is to say they allocate resources to more clients than they could actually accommodate if everyone tried to use the resources all at once.
It works out great for Microsoft and Amazon because they sell way more capacity than they could actually provide – and way more than they actually have to pay to maintain.
Have you ever bought tickets for a flight and were later told they were “oversold”? You sit there and wonder why they would sell more seats than they have, and they end up having to ask people to give up their seats. It sounds insane because it is, but it’s the same theory. They don’t think everyone will actually show up and they can just keep the money for the unused tickets.
If this theory holds and they never really get more users than they can handle, they’re fine. But when you have an outage, lots more people are affected.
You could probably get a 10 percent credit from Amazon or Microsoft if you work yourself to the bone, but it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort. No one expects you can get ahold of anyone at either company about the outage, so people just shrug it off and figure it’s a fact of life.
As a private company, if we did this poor a job providing service to our clients – and took this cavalier an attitude toward outages – our clients would leave us.
And we would deserve it.
We know that, of course, and we actually care about our clients, so we do everything to make sure their service is reliable. But Microsoft and Amazon don’t. Because they don’t have to. And because it’s not in their nature to.
Solution? Let UBX handle your cloud storage and data management needs. We actually care. Email me today at steven.panovski@ubxcloud.com. I’ll respond and everything.