Not dogfooding is the software and hardware equivalent of the electricity network "black start" -you never want to be there, but somewhere in the system you need a honda petrol generator, which is enough to excite the electromagnets on a bigger generator, which you spin up to start the turbine spinning until the steam takes up load and the real generator is able to get volts onto the wire.

Pumped Hydro is inside the machine. It's often held out as the black-start mechanism because it's gravity, there's less to go wrong, but if we are in 'line up the holes in the cheese grater' space, you can always have 'want of a nail' issues with any mechanism. The honda generator can have a hole in the petrol tank, the turbine at the pumped hydro can be out for maintenance.

The fact that there was an outage is not unexpected… it happens… but all the stumbling and length to get things under control was concerning.

A faster, better-tested "restart all the droplet managers from a known reasonable state" process is probably more important than finding all the Dynamo race conditions.

I think when there is an extended outage it exposes the shortcuts. If you have 100 systems, and one or two can't start fast from zero, and they're required to get back to running smoothly, well you're going to have a longer outage. How would you deal with that, you'd uniformly across your teams subject them to start from zero testing. I suspect though that many teams are staring down a scaling bottleneck, or at least were for much of Amazon's life and so scaling issues (how do we handle 10x usage growth in the next year and half, which are the soft spots that will break) trump cold start testing. Then you get a cold start event with that last one being 5 years ago and 1 or 2 out of your 100 teams falls over and it takes multiple hours all hands on deck to get it to start.

us-east-1 feels like a single point of failure for half the internet. People really need to look into multi-region, maybe even use AI like Zast.ai for intelligent failover so we're not all dead in the water when N. Virginia sneezes.