The right analogy is to imagine if businesses that used electricity took that stance, and they basically all do. If you're a hospital or some other business where a power outage is life or death, you plan by having backup generators. But if you're the overwhelming majority of businesses, you do absolutely nothing to ensure that you have power during a power outage, and it's fine.
it is fine because the electricity supplier is so good today that people don't see it going down as a risk.
Look at south africa's electricity supplier for a different scenario.
Not really? Most of the infrastructure is quite resilient and the rare outage is usually limited to a street or two, with restoration time mainly determined by the time it takes the electricians to reach the incident site. For any given address that's maybe a few hours per decade - with the most likely cause being planned maintenance. That's not a "spares are too expensive" issue, that's a "giving every home two fully independent power feeds is silly" issue.
Anything on a metro-sized level is pretty much unheard of, and will be treated as serious as a plane crash. They can essentially only be caused by systemic failure on multiple levels, as the grid is configured to survive multiple independent failures at the same time.
Comparing that to the AWS world: individual servers going down is inevitable and shouldn't come as a surprise. Everyone has redundancies, and an engineer accidentally yanking the power cables of an entire rack shouldn't even be noticeable to any customers. But an entire service going down across an entire availability zone? That should be virtually impossible, and having it happen regularly is a bit of a red flag.
(Of course that's still not the same as a big boy grid failure (Texas ice storm-sized) which are the things that utilities are meant to actively prevent ever happening.)
Catastrophic data loss or lack of disaster recovery kills companies. AWS outages do not.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
It's like if you ran you cloud on an old dell box in your closet while your parent company is offering to directly host it in AWS for free.
And regardless, electric service all over the world goes down for minutes or hours all the time.
Texas has had statewide power outages. Spain and Portugal suffered near-nationwide power outages last year. Many US states are heavily reliant on the same single source for water. And remember the discussions on here about Europe's reliance on Russian gas?
Then you have the XKCD sketch about how most software products are reliant on at least one piece of open source software that is maintained by a single person as a hobby.
Nobody likes a single point of failure but often the costs associated with mitigating that are much greater than the risks of having that point of failure.
This is why "risk assessments" are a thing.
Not all utility companies have the same policies, but all have a resiliency plan to avoid blackout that is a bit more serious than "Just run it on AWS".
You're arguing as if "run it on AWS" was a decision that didn't undergo the same kinds of risk assessment. As someone who's had to complete such processes (and in some companies, even define them), I can assure you that nobody of any competency runs stuff on AWS complacently.
In fact running stuff with resilience in AWS isn't even as simple as "just running it in AWS". There's a whole plethora of things to consider, and each with its own costs attached. As the meme goes "one does not simply just run something on AWS"
I agree with this. My point is simply that we, as an industry, are not a very competent bunch when it comes to risk management ; and that's especially true when compared to TSOs.
That doesn't mean nobody knows what they do in our industry or that shit never hits the fan elsewhere, but I would argue that it's an outlier behaviour, whereas it's the norm in more secure industries.
> As the meme goes "one does not simply just run something on AWS"
The meme has currency for a reason, unfortunately.
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That being said, my original point was that utilities losing clients after a storm isn't the consequence of bad (or no) risk assessment ; it's the consequence of them setting up acceptable loss thresholds depending on the likelihood of an event happening, and making sure that the network as a whole can respect these SLOs while strictly respecting safety criteria.
Imagine if the cloud supplier was actually as important as the electricity supplier.
But since you mention it, there are instances of this and provisions for getting back up and running:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, I got hit by the 2003 grid outage, which is once in >20 years. Seems like a fairly good uptime to me.
(Each electrical grid can perhaps be considered analogous to a separate cloud provider. Or perhaps, in US/CA, regions:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Electric_Reliab...
)
