The reality is that there’s a handful of people in the world that can operate systems at this sheer scale and complexity and I have mad respect for those in that camp.
Some of us are in that camp and are looking at this outage and also pointing out that they continuously fail to accurately update their status dashboard in this and prior outages. Yes, doing what AWS does is hard, and yes outages /will/ happen, it is no knock on them that this outage occurred, what is a knock is that they haven't communicated honestly while the outage was ongoing.
They address that in the post, and between Twitter, HN and other places there wasn’t anyone legit questioning if something was actually broken. Contacts at AWS also all were very clear that yes something was going on and being investigated. This narrative that AWS was pretending nothing was wrong just wasn’t true based on what we saw.
Isn't this the equivalent of "complaining about your meal in a restaurant, I'd like to see you do better."
The point of eating at a restaurant is that I can't/don't want to cook. Likewise, I use AWS because I want them to do the hard work and I'm willing to pay for it.
How does that abrogate my right to complain if it goes badly (regardless of whether I could/couldn't do it myself)?
I think the distinction is you can say "I pay good money for you to do it properly and how dare you go down on me" but you become an "armchair infrastructure engineer" when you try and explain how you would have avoided the outage because you don't have the whole picture (especially based on a very carefully worded PR approved blog post).
The reality is that there’s a handful of people in the world that can operate systems at this sheer scale and complexity and I have mad respect for those in that camp.