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Signal president Meredith Whittaker says they had no choice but to use AWS

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/signal_ceo_meredith_whittaker_aws_dependency/
14•pyeri•2h ago

Comments

ggm•1h ago
People get very reductionist about language in these things. I think she is right that the most logical choice was to partner with an existing hyperscale backend, they had choices of which and went with AWS for reasons which made sense to them. "no choice" isn't a literal statement of fact, its a choice they made, sure. There may be price, or jurisdictional, or complexity, or understanding, or willingness to sign a specific kind of contract, all kinds of reasons. The alternates all come with their burdens too.

They had choices beyond just other hyperscalers. Rolling their own probably would have meant both capex and opex, which reduced to opex in AWS and so made both logical and financial sense. In risk terms you might have said (before the incident) it was also the best way to lay off risk, but it turns out "too big to fail" actually doesn't mean what it says on the label.

I still back signal over all the other choices. I wasn't looking for an excuse to leave, and as a strawman if you leave signal because chosing AWS as a backend "was unwise" or "was the wrong choice" I think you're reading the signal wrong (sorry)

I would add that "the register" has a house style, and it's not tending to damp down. It likes to be inflammatory, it's tagline "biting the hand which feeds IT" rings true. I enjoy reading it, and I've had work repeated in it, but I also read it with a jaundiced eye. I don't like the comments section it's a minefield of in-group language, memes, bad behaviour.

elevation•1h ago
I always assumed Signal favored AWS because AWS is valuable to a lot of foreign entities that might just as well block all signal.org and any IP network advertised by its ASN.

The advantage of bundling your service in a hyper scaler is in persuading censors that they’d rather tolerate Signal than lose AWS. This doesn’t work in China which has sophisticated alternatives, but it can help Signal hold on in other countries.

andrewstuart•1h ago
Anyone can choose to not use AWS.

It’s ok, the world won’t end.

You might get systems that are reliable and cost a great deal less if you exit AWS.

Lose your fear, have courage, find a better cheaper faster more reliable alternative…. well pretty much anywhere.

andrewstuart•1h ago
Putting it another way…. AWS is slow, complex, VERY expensive, unreliable and underpowered.

They have convinced you this is your only choice. It is not.

Nevermark•9m ago
So do it?

You are making the claim you see a clear massive global untapped market, for lower price and higher quality cloud/global compute, that you know how to provision and serve.

Apparently Signal will be happy to hear from you.

pyeri•57s ago
All true except it being expensive though. I'm yet to find a major cloud service provider who can beat AWS on pricing. In fact, most either use or resell AWS under the hood themselves, even Vercel does as it turned out recently; and they're supposed to be one of the most competitive in the industry.

There are some rare exceptions who have their own large scale infrastructure and don't depend on AWS like Hetzner in EU, Alibaba Cloud in China or Ananta Cloud in India, but this market is still emerging.

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