In this Web News, Matt and Mike discusses the recent AWS outage and what it says about our overreliance on centralized services. From fragile cloud infrastructure to “move fast and break things” culture, this episode explores how we built systems that can take entire industries offline — and what developers can do to make technology more resilient, including offline-first features and smarter UX design.
The recent AWS outage should be a wake-up call and the beginning of a critical discussion for how our tech works and also why it doesn’t. The rise of cloud computing has lead us to offload the server infrastructure part of most projects to large datacenters that are not foolproof. Nothing is foolproof. It doesn’t matter how many backups you have, one day something is going to go wrong. When that happens our tech should be ready and it isn’t.
This isn’t a jab at Amazon, it’s a jab at the core of how our technology works. Every year we rely on technology more and more… and yet a simple outage can bring out devices to a screeching halt. No amount of RAM upgrades, extremely fast CPU cores, or super HD screens is enough to solve it. We carry super powerful devices in our pockets, and even more powerful ones in our backpacks… but yet these devices are nothing without an anonymous datacenter out there somewhere. How did we let this happen?
