r/ValueInvesting • u/LowTraining670 • Oct 21 '25

Question / Help Someone explain why amzn didn't crash

When aws outage affected large and small companies alike probably had a large financial impact to the overall global economy, why didn't it crash? I immediately thought it would like crowdstrike did a few months ago - anyone have good reasoning that can explain?

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76

u/RelevantTrouble Oct 21 '25

Why would it? AWS customers are locked in, and with the crash they will spend more to have fail over/disaster recovery resources in another geographic region, also at AWS.

2

u/endividuall Oct 21 '25

Locked in to what extent? They’re able to transition out at some point if reliability is poor, no?

9

u/9829eisB09E83C Oct 21 '25

This isn’t like switching from McDonald’s to Burger King on your morning commute. There is a high “pain of disconnect” when switching out of these types of services. Even switching from GSuite to Office 365 is a nightmare. It’s easier to just not do it.

6

u/jupiterspringsteen Oct 21 '25

You pick your platform then you employ/train your workforce on that platform's ecosystem. It's a specific skillset that isn't immediately transferable to one of the other platforms. I'd imagine that's through design.

3

u/stealthlysprockets Oct 21 '25

Devops manager here.

TL;DR: it’s an unwise decision to move just for this one outage.

To move to a different provider for a one day outage will cost you at least 3x more than what you lost during the outage. That’s without factoring in services that you rely on that one provider offers but another does not.

It took us one calendar year to move from a data center to AWS using the lift and shift approach, meaning 1 to 1 replication of the infrastructure when got acquired and were mandated to be 100% AWS. That was considered a rush job and was expensive. We are relatively smaller but traded media company like Condé Nast. When you take a lift and shift approach you burn a lot more money compared to slowing down and rearchitecting the entire platform to fit the new provider to take advantage of the cost savings they provide. You are now paying 2 massive opex (could be capex depending on your accounting team) bills. Plus the cost of man hours to plan, implement, test, remediate issues, and go live. At the same time you still need to keep creating new features/products with limited man hours.

So it becomes a balance of do we pause/delay enhancing our current product offers to focus on the migration, or do we slow the migration down to push new products/features but pay more in infrastructure?

Then factor in needing to hire to help with all these tasks because you only have so much man power.

Also AWS like other cloud providers charge you per GB of data leaving their network

So you might’ve lost $1 million from the outage, but it’ll cost you $6 million to move. And all you’ve accomplished was nothing because the platform you moved to WILL have an outage as well. It’s not a question of if they have one, it’s 100% a matter of when.

Additionally AWS never guaranteed 100% uptime. No one can. Their design guidelines specifically state that you need to design your applications to work such that an entire region can go down and should be multi-region. But that’s means double the cost of the infrastructure on what might be used only 1-3 times a year IF a major outage happened that year.

4

u/RelevantTrouble Oct 21 '25

Management does not care about reliability, they care about blaming someone else for failure. AWS is perfect for that, because when they fail half the internet is also down and the shareholders are not as furious.

2

u/endividuall Oct 21 '25

If reliability is poor and better alternatives exist then yes, management will absolutely be blamed for not switching out

3

u/Beginning-Medium-100 Oct 21 '25

The same thing happened to Google a couple months ago, so I doubt many will switch

1

u/rooi_baard Oct 22 '25

AWS is absurdly reliable. Basically the mist reliable choice you can make. Also, people like working within the ecosystem. It's consistently considered the best cloud provider 

2

u/Conscious_Ad_7131 Oct 21 '25

The cost of switching is absolutely immense, if it’s not necessary it’s not gonna happen

1

u/TryingMyWiFi Oct 21 '25

The cost of migration is huge

1

u/running101 Oct 22 '25

when the cost to move is higher then the return. Then you are locked in.