Google Nest… Powered by Amazon

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Amazon Web Services had a really bad Sunday AM. Specifically, resources in my ‘hood were sucking wind…

Amongst the large number of websites and cloud services inaccessible this AM, was Google’s Nest. Despite being a Google company, and for quite some time, their infrastructure rides Amazon. Which I find deliciously ironic.

7 thoughts on “Google Nest… Powered by Amazon”

  1. That explains why Alexa in the Amazon Echo was complaining this morning that my internet connection was down, when it wasn’t.

  2. Yeah, tons of things were down… Netflix, Medium, couldn’t buy postage thru my Amazon Seller account, etc. Some were partial outages depending upon where you live or which hosting environment whichever piece of the product relies on.

  3. “Yeah, tons of things were down”

    Given how damn much of the internet runs on AWS, one would assume that this is pretty rare, no? Otherwise, we’d be familiar with the previous stories, rather than being kinda surprised.

    Even 99.9% uptime isn’t 100%…

    “Despite being a Google company, and for quite some time, their infrastructure rides Amazon. Which I find deliciously ironic.”

    Not really that ironic, to my way of thinking. As best as I understand, AWS is cheaper and more reliable than anyone else by a decent margin. So pretty much everyone uses it for rational reasons.

    Hell, if Cupertino used it, they wouldn’t have their regular downtime episodes, no?

  4. I could actually write a reverse headline. Amazon Fire tablets… powered by Google. So I do get what you’re saying. But, yeah, the last major AWS blip was months ago to my recollection. It does seem highly reliable. But I still find it amusing that Google outsources to Amazon. By the by, been skimming job postings lately – lots of cos are using them for all sorts of things. Sounds like there could even be certifications or something in AWS. Probably all helps keep Prime afloat. ;)

  5. “By the by, been skimming job postings lately – lots of cos are using them for all sorts of things.”

    Yeah. Like I say, seems to me that using AWS is the rational course for almost anyone, even other major tech companies. If Cupertino were less psychotic about their perennial inability to handle online services, they’d jump on the bandwagon too.

    “Probably all helps keep Prime afloat.”

    To the best of my knowledge, AWS is the one consistent profit center for Amazon. Pretty much everything else breaks even or loses money.

    —–

    As a side note, Amazon Cloud Drive is proving a major disappointment. They recently imposed draconian file size limits on browser uploads/downloads, pretty much forcing folks into using their proprietary client, which is a major turnoff for me. Plus, the proprietary client, if my understanding is correct, only allows you to download everything, not selected uploads. Finally, the fantastic Arq cloud backup/storage software tool that works with multiple cloud service providers seems to hitting bugs with Amazon Cloud Drive.

    So, the upshot is that Amazon seems to have severely backed away from what seemed like their original plan to let Amazon Cloud Drive cannibalize S3 for non-commercial usage. I’m pretty sure at this point that I’ll cancel before my 3 month trial turns into a paying subscription. Back to more minimal S3 backups, with TiVo and such backups on my own physical hard drives. If it looks too good to be true…

  7. “I was wondering why all my Echos and my Nest were having issues this morning.”

    Could’ve been the AWS downtime.

    Could’ve been David Cameron’s polymorphic perversity.

    Hard to tell.

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