There’s a related concept of blame laundering: by making our party dependent on a third party for reliability, we can then wash our hands clean of any blame when things go wrong.
If you host your website on-prem then it’s always your fault that websites down and your customers can’t track the foobars. But if you host on AWS, and AWS goes down, well then obviously it’s not your fault—it’s AWS’s fault!
Of course this is nonsense. Your customers contracted with you, not AWS. They don’t care about your infra, all they care about is tracking foobars, and if it’s down, it’s your fault, whether it’s down because of a fire in us-east-1 or you tripped on the power cable for your workstation. You contracted with AWS, and can and should complain to them, but that doesn’t in any way exonerate you for your duty towards your customers.
Yes but to add an epicycle: if AWS is down, my customers might have so many other problems to deal with that they don’t notice that I specifically am down, and they wouldn’t have any use for me if I wasn’t.
There’s a related concept of blame laundering: by making our party dependent on a third party for reliability, we can then wash our hands clean of any blame when things go wrong.
If you host your website on-prem then it’s always your fault that websites down and your customers can’t track the foobars. But if you host on AWS, and AWS goes down, well then obviously it’s not your fault—it’s AWS’s fault!
Of course this is nonsense. Your customers contracted with you, not AWS. They don’t care about your infra, all they care about is tracking foobars, and if it’s down, it’s your fault, whether it’s down because of a fire in us-east-1 or you tripped on the power cable for your workstation. You contracted with AWS, and can and should complain to them, but that doesn’t in any way exonerate you for your duty towards your customers.
Yes but to add an epicycle: if AWS is down, my customers might have so many other problems to deal with that they don’t notice that I specifically am down, and they wouldn’t have any use for me if I wasn’t.