From my experience benchmarking S3 express, it is is faster, but not fast enough yet for many use cases.
An obvious disclaimer is that the word "enough" here is carrying quite the weight: I expect it to get better, and each has their own requirements. Do benchmark yourself and don't make expensive decision based on an HN comment.
If you there's no SLAs to engineer for, just set the target at zero, and drive your cost to zero as well. So you have to design for _some_ defined value of reliability.
Backblaze's famous reports put HD failure rate is ~1.39%, so for the 11 9s you get as a guarantee from S3. Assuming nothing else fails, you'd need at least 6 independent copies to get that, plus all the effort to engineer recovery, and constant upkeep.
Suddenly, S3, even when considering bandwidth costs, seems like a steal.
The usual SLA is not expressed numerically but as a feeling. And a normal server suffices to deliver that feeling. I'd bet 99% of apps are used by under a hundred people and if they have to take a day off due to a head crash, it's annoying but not catastrophic.
If you have two sets of hardware the server can run on (cold standby), and RAID, and are competent at physical IT work, you can have faulty hardware replaced in an hour. Drive fails - replace it. Anything else fails - swap the drives to the other machine, boot it up and then troubleshoot the original.
Most likely you don't even need that. If the app server runs on a standard platform like Windows you can shuffle it over to some spare tower PC. You hear horror stories of dusty towers that nobody knows what they're doing - the horror there isn't from running server software on a tower, but from unmaintained servers no matter the form factor
It makes perfect sense: it's a extremely reliable, infinitely-scalable, strongly consistent (in some implementation), cheap, and extremely simple to use key-value store. As such, it transparently solves a lot of the problems distributed systems have to be engineered around.
As long as you can run on a CSP, and can engineer around the high-ish latency (most business cases can), it's extremely expensive to try engineer around it.
Apple promises all customers 5 years of hardware support past the last day the model was available for sale, and at least two years of limited hardware support thereafter.
In the UK, for iPhone 15 and later, Apple promises at least 5 years of software updates from the time that model was first offered for sale.
I would assume similar schedule outside the UK as well, but afaik it is only explicitly promised in the UK, due to regulatory requirements there.
For enterprise customers, Apple guarantee a minimum period of software security updates for macOS, but the exact period is kept confidential in the specific agreements.
Like the UK iPhone commitment, I assume the enterprise macOS schedule apply to all customers, and Apple just avoids publicly publishing it, I would guess to avoid some legal-induced headaches (which I personally think is the worst excuse, but I digress).
They did. Probably broke contract law (contract needn’t be a signed piece of paper saying “contract” at the top), and depending on the region, multiple consumer protection laws.
It isn’t criminal, but it is illegal mostly everywhere.
In the current telling of this story, the billionaire is also giving his hired army copies of your notes he copied without permission.
But the worst part in your analogy ain’t omitting the suspected spying and the intimidation that followed, but that your hypothetical mathematical philanthropist won’t be able to hire his army: unlike some OAI employees, no self-respecting mathematician would agree to such unethical task.
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