Only half-joking. When something grossly underperforms, I do often legitimately just pull up calc.exe and compare the throughput to the number of employees we have × 8 kbit/sec [0], see who would win. It is uniquely depressing yet entertaining to see this outperform some applications.
[0] spherical cow type back of the envelope estimate, don't take it too seriously; assumes a very fast 200 wpm speech, 5 bytes per word, and everyone being able to independently progress
That said, I don't hear about GCP outages all that often. I do think AWS might be leading in outages, but that's a gut feeling, I didn't look up numbers.
This isn't GCP's fault, but the outage ended up taking down Cloudflare too, so in total impact I think that takes the cake.
Common Cause Failures and false redundancy are just all over the place.
IIRC the wisdom of the time cloud started becoming popular was to always be on-prem and use cloud to scale up when demand spiked. But over time temporarily scaling up became permanent, and devs became reliant on instantly spawning new machines for things other than spikes in demand and now everyone defaults to cloud and treats it as the baseline. In the process we lost the grounding needed to assess the real cost of things and predictably the cost difference between cloud and on-prem has only widened.
I've heard that before but was never able to make sense of it. Overflowing into the cloud seems like a nightmare to manage, wouldn't overbuilding on-prem be cheaper than paying your infra team to straddle two environments?
But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.