500 billions events. Always blows my mind how many people use aws

I know nothing. But I'd imagine the number of 'events' generated during this period of downtime will eclipse that number every minute.

"I felt a great disturbance in us-east-1, as if millions of outage events suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced"

(Be interesting to see how many events currently going to DynamoDB are actually outage information.)

I wonder how many companies have properly designed their clients. So that the timing before re-attempt is randomised and the re-attempt timing cycle is logarithmic.

nowadays i think a single immediate retry is preferred over exponential backoff with jitter.

if you ran into a problem that an instant retry cant fix, chances are you will be waiting so long that your own customer doesnt care anymore.

Most companies will use the AWS SDK client's default retry policy.

Why randomized?

It’s the Thundering Herd Problem.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

In short, if it’s all at the same schedule you’ll end up with surges of requests followed by lulls. You want that evened out to reduce stress on the server end.

Thank you. Bonsai and adzm as well. :)

It's just a safe pattern that's easy to implement. If your services back-off attempts happen to be synced, for whatever reason, even if they are backing off and not slamming AWS with retries, when it comes online they might slam your backend.

It's also polite to external services but at the scale of something like AWS that's not a concern for most.

> they might slam your backend

Heh

Helps distribute retries rather than having millions synchronize

I have access to one for work stuff. It is just too heavy and uncomfortable for more than 30 min of using it.

I had to try several different straps and configurations before I found one that worked well for me. I forget what it's called now, but there's one made by a company that makes CPAP machines. That's the one to get. Makes a huge difference.

Just be careful because one component of it on each side is glued to the fabric and comes apart spontaneously.

A bit off topic. But I never understood these country staggered releases that some companies, like Anthropic, does. The country list seems completely random.

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-ai-locations

Those are just the countries where you can release an AI product without worrying that you'll get sued into oblivion by the state.

See e.g. EU AI regulation

There is one common factor: No EU countries.

Similarly I can not use Gemini AI Studio from within EU. https://ai.google.dev/available_regions -

Think data collection policies.

He claims to not have any bias whatsoever and be an absolute centrist, which leads to him being a pawn on whatever his guests want to promote while also asking the most awful, bland questions he can possible think of

Although you could say that the outcome could be considered the same, the motivations behind it are completely different, as the parent comment mentions

I tend to watch a lot of MIT open courseware, most of the times not really paying that much attention. But this professor (Andrew Lo) is the best one by far. Makes the syllabus really engaging and easy to understand