schizoidman‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS
Her real comment was that there are only 3 major cloud providers they can consider: AWS, GCP, and Azure. They chose AWS and AWS only. So there are a few options for them going forward — 1) keep doing what they’re doing and hope a single cloud provider can improve reliability, 2) modify their architecture to a multi-cloud architecture given the odds of more than one major provider going down simultaneously is much rarer, or 3) build their own datacenters/use colos which have a learning curve yet are still viable alternatives. Those that are serious about software own their own hardware, after all.
Each choice has its strengths and drawbacks. The economics are tough with any choice. Comes down to priorities, ability to differentiate, and value in differentiation :)
What reason do they give for only wanting to use those three cloud providers? There are many others.
Scale, they need worldwide coverage.
Meredith Whittaker (@[email protected])
This isn't ‘'renting a server.' It's leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin. Particularly given the high stakes use cases of many who rely on Signal. 6/
And yet a single availability zone in AWS going down caused an outage?
Signal would need to pay for multi region redundancy and build a programmatic way of swapping regions when their primary region is down.