Especially with Amazon, who are well known for squeezing every last bit of profit from their employees, contractors etc., it doesn't really sound surprising. "Offsite backups?! Sure, you could have had that if you had found the right page in the AWS console and if you would have paid 50% extra!"

It's funny because this applies to children cleaning home bathrooms as a Saturday chore as well.

its also the fact that a lot of fundamental systems work in trade offs.

Do you want performance, or correctness.

Well, if you want performance you use write through caching and in the case of distributed storage: more nodes confirming the block before returning. Huge performance cost.

Outsourcing this just means someone else makes these tradeoffs, they will prioritise the general case- and they’re even more incentivised to move the needle towards things that are most visible to the end user.

In this case, performance.

You won’t notice that theres a third commit server off-site (unless that site is bombed), but you will notice slower writes- and the general case says that people will express comparative dissatisfaction with weaker performance and use it as a justification to use another provider.

This is almost always the case. It's one of the frustrating things about the software industry; because everything is much more complicated than the customer is able to comprehend, a software company can promise anything and the customer can't actually verify.

So any software company/project which actually took the time and effort to fully handle the enormous complexity, they can't sell themselves based on that fact because every other company (who didn't invest the effort) is also claiming it and the customer has no mechanism to verify the claims until some major rare event occurs.

And most of the effort is required precisely to handle those 1% of rare situations.