Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 2 months agoIt was a DNS issue with DynamoDB, the load balancer issue was a knock-on effect after the DNS issue was resolved. But the problem is it was a ~15 hour outage, and a big reason behind that was the fact that the load in that region is massive. Signal could very well have had their infrastructure in more than one availability zone but since the outage affected the entire region they are screwed.
You’re right that this can be mitigated by having infrastructure in multiple regions, but if they don’t, the reason is cost. You can accomplish that same redundancy via Colo DCs for a fraction of the cost.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Yes, if you buy an off the shelf solution, it’ll be expensive.
I’m suggesting treating VPS instances like you would a colo setup. Let cloud providers manage the hardware, and keep the load balancing in house. For Signal, this can be as simple as client-side latency/load checks. You can still colo in locations with heavier load; that’s how some Linux distros handle repo mirrors, and it works well. Signal’s data needs should be so low that simple DB replicas should be sufficient.