RE: EOS: What's Your BEST Bang-for-the-Buck Cloud Provider?
and of course geographically dispersed as well, especially for a blockchain!
and as STEEMIT also experienced a few months back right after switching to AMAZON's "premium" cloud earlier this year, even the "creme de la creme" of cloud services can get "dinged" as well.
From @mrosenquist's post earlier this year:
The greater lesson for us all is that when hugely sophisticated systems interconnect with each other, there is an exponential increase in complexity. Due to reliance, authority, and trust, these structures can fail in spectacular fashion. The AWS example show how such a situation allows a series of cascading unintended effects, that cannot easily have been predicted, to occur and cause widespread impacts. As bad as it may have appeared, it was not too severe. If it were an intentional attack from a capable, motivated, and sophisticated attacker, I believe the results would have been catastrophic.
Link: The Real Lesson from the AWS Outage
And more on the failure itself:
“Removing a significant portion of the capacity caused each of these systems to require a full restart,” the post read. “While these subsystems were being restarted, S3 was unable to service requests. Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable.”
While massive decentralization helps, it doesn't solve everything, and also brings on its own set of potential issues, which @Dan acknowledges up-front with EOS and plans to address by means of various clever and ingenious design features. That's why 99.99999% uptime and SLAs will always be an illusion. Murphy's Law works hard to make sure of it!
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.