alt Hacker NewsI meant failure blast radius. Having isolated regions is a core part of the AWS reliability design. AWS has had entire regions fail but these failure have always been isolated to a single region. Global VPCs must rely on globally connected routers that can all fail in ways AWS regional VPCs can't.
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I believe you’re likely misunderstanding Google’s architecture.
The routing isn’t centralized, it’s distributed. The VPCs are a logical abstraction, not a centralized dependency.
If you have a region/AZ going down in your global VPC, the other ones are still available.
I think it’s also not that much of an advantage for AWS to be able to say its outages are confined to a region. That doesn’t help you very much if their architecture makes architecting global services more difficult in the first place. You’re just playing region roulette hoping that your region isn’t affected. Outages frequently impact all/multiple AZs.
If you need global HA to the extent that you're worried about global VPC failure modes, you're going to have to spend a lot of effort to squeeze uptime to the max regardless of where you deploy.
Undersea cable failures are probably more likely than a google core networking failure.
In AWS a lot of "global" things are actually just hosted in us-east-1.