Why is reddit relying on only one cloud provider? AWS can/should do better but service providers of the size of reddit should be using mult-vendor set-ups for sure.

They did say in their original post-mortem that spreading the load among multiple availability zones has been on their todo list for a while. It has just taken longer than they expected with their limited engineering staff.

It probably has something to do with the group being very small. Sure they turn a lot of traffic, but there's only so much you can do with a group of their size on what I imagine is still a limited budget.

Sounds like a case of similar to safety systems at a nuclear plant. Not pressing until it is REALLY PRESSING! Its the usual dilemma, investing time/moey on something that most likely wont be needed versus adding that cool feature all the users will immediately see the benefit of. In a competitive environment, it isn't difficult to understand how they ended up on one vendor.

If a nuclear plant has problems, it can kill a lot of people, and wreck the lives of many others.

If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.

So the tradeoffs they've made, in saving some money, are probably sensible.

> If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.

Actually, that's what happens when reddit is working :)

Well, depending on prevailing conditions, they might be more widely dispersed rather than contained within the special "echo chamber" that reddit has built for that purpose.

Is a multi-provider setup common? I certainly think Reddit should be on multiple availability zones within AWS, but spanning multiple providers seems hugely more difficult.

Worth mentioning, another strategy for customers is to use an abstraction layer. Good ones include jclouds and libcloud. Still take the point about focus/quality.

Yes this is definitely possible and a multi-vendor approach in the cloud is achievable at quite a low bar in terms of customer size. You only need to look at outages at Reddit and many others to see the benefit of that approach.

What would be great is an auth and billing abstraction layer so that a customer could buy services from multiple providers on the same account.

Yes, all cloud brokerage attempts have so far stuck to the resources and avoided trying to do any unified billing. Its really tough to accomplish.

Can you think of other areas where competing services have common open billing? Great for sure but difficult commercially. Especially when you start bringing in credit risk and other non-technical factors.

I agree that this is difficult. I wasn't really thinking about competing providers though; more like complementary. Like getting IaaS from one company, CDN from another, DNS from another, etc. One could imagine a federation of pure-play service providers that might be able to compete against the more integrated cloud juggernauts while each company focused on one thing.

That would be excellent not just for IaaS but also PaaS services.

Just discovered these guys. Nice interface actually. Investigating a bit more but so far so good.