Then the status page would be almost entirely useless ...

There's most likely a reason for this.

Like, maybe in the past AWS customers have tried claiming for SLA credits for incidents that didn't impact them, in order to reduce their bill.

> You'd think they would have learned from that.

They did.

The page has been updated numerous times since the start of this incident.

You imply that Amazon/AWS doesn't employ any staff in the UK, which is wrong.

> Amazon will not pay any tax within the UK

Amazon must certainly pay taxes in the UK, or at least the tax ends up being paid on Amazon share price increases from employees share vesting.

Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem, unless your objective is to (dishonestly) show that on-prem is cheaper?

Lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud is known to be more expensive, because you aren't taking advantage of the features available to you which would allow you to reduce your costs.

Your results (e.g. that z1d.xlarge with 4 vCPUs is only 10% slower than z1d.2xlarge with 8 vCPUs) shows that the "performance" you were testing was disk IO throughput (probably dominated by disk latency), not vCPUs.

> My takeaways were that many cloud provider offerings make no sense whatsoever, and that Xeon processors are mostly great if you are a cloud provider and want to offer overbooked "vCPUs".

> I haven't tested those specific setups, but I strongly suspect a dedicated server from OVH is much faster than a 4.16xlarge from AWS.

You seem to be implying that AWS/EC2 does CPU over-provisioning on all instance types; this is incorrect, only T-family instance types use CPU over-provisioning.

Not necessarily.

It could very easily be done via IP address matching (think BGP communities that advertise specific subnets between one part of a network and another, as are typically used for optimal CDN routing etc.).

In my country, our anti-ISP media claims that we have the most expensive internet in the world, but 10/5Mbps FTTH (in most cases with free upgrades to 20/2Mbps for the duration of COVID-19 WFH guidance mandated by the government) is quite commonly available at < $20-$25/month, and where it isn't, 10/1Mbps ADSL is available for $25-$30/month (including POTS voice service).

Thus, it is impossible that you, in the country of ~$20 1Gbps service, have worse and more expensive service.

> We need more choices for our ISPs

If you fix this, e.g. by requiring all last-mile owners to offer the last-mile access at or below their (audited, sufficiently-profitable) input cost to their retail products, most of the remaining problems would sort themselves out, without having micro-managing of ISP features.

Unless you are going to start regulating OTTs in what features/value they can provide, I think it's unfair on (non-monopoly) ISPs to prevent them from providing innovative features because of "net neutrality should trump all" opinions.

> If you are using Bash and you have the option of using ZSH, you should switch to it. ZSH has additional auto-complete and history features that Bash doesn’t have (but don't worry - those features will not be relevant to this tutorial.)

oh-my-zsh seems to be recommended by a lot of developers in this company, even though: * the default mechanism to install is curl|sh (there is no Homebrew package) on developer machines which have privileged access to a lot of resources * installing it via its recommended installation procedure on dev machines would violate company policies, whereas installing bash-completion wouldn't

I have noticed that a lot of the features listed in https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Major-Dif... aren't present in zsh, but I am not sure of all the ones that aren't in zsh.

Ones that I have used in bash that aren't in zsh (there may be many more, I stopped using zsh in many scenarios because of some of these):

* Some of https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Shell-Par... (e.g at least ${LOGNAME^^}, `(FOO=BAR;echo ${FOO,,})`)

* -p option to read for the prompt, e.g. `read -s -p "Enter the DB password: " PW`

As does bash-completion, which is available in many (but not all :-/) Linux distros and via Homebrew on MacOS and [pre-dates](https://github.com/scop/bash-completion/tree/09b07d57a7031d9...) [oh-my-zsh](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/tree/5da20b9dddb1f7a91106...) by about 6 years.

But, zsh users and oh-my-zsh fan-boys seem to be entirely ignorant of bash-completion.

Or just use zim ( https://zim-wiki.org/ ) which allows you to embed graphviz diagrams in any 'page', and many other features.

The "massive enterprise company" I work for doesn't use Oracle IdM ...

It was used at the previous company I worked for, but it had endless problems and I think it was only bought as part of a very badly-run "buy an expensive 'enterprise content management platform and then not use it properly' initiative".

It's main feature seemed to be to import identities from LDAP servers into an Oracle database fronted by a very poorly performing non-compliant LDAP server (or, you could say, selling Oracle Database licenses).

So they don't seem to be very serious about multi-tenancy?

(Spectre and Meltdown are more or less considered the nails in the coffin of Xen para-virtualisation for multi-tenant environments).

Was this some time ago?

The FAQ for ACM (https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/faqs/ ) says:

> Q: When does ACM renew certificates? > > ACM begins the renewal process up to 60 days prior to the certificate’s expiration date. The validity period for ACM certificates is currently 13 months. Refer to the ACM User Guide for more information about managed renewal.

> We switched TLS termination from the load balancer to Envoy + cert-manager and the results were much better. You also get HTTP/2 out of the deal. We also wrote a thing that fetches every https host and makes sure the certificate works, and fed the expiration times in prometheus to actually be alerted when rotation is broken. Both are features Amazon should support out of the box for the $20/month + $$/gigabyte you pay them for a TLS-terminating load balancer.

You're implying that AWS doesn't support HTTP/2 on any load-balancers they offer, but ALB has supported HTTP/2 since launch ( https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-application-load-ba... ) 3 years ago.

I don't see any current load-balancer priced at $20/month (ALB, NLB and Classic ELB are all ~ $8/month), so I can't guess which one you were using here ...

> Instead, I'd compare e2-std-2 to m5.large like you started to do so.

Yes, a "baseline performance" of 100% would more or less be an M-family instance, but with additional overhead to manage noisy neighbors etc. (and thus T-family is slightly more expensive for the same constant performance than M-family). T-family is specifically for non-constant workloads where CPU over-commit provides value, but without memory over-commit, which can result in highly-variable performance.

Neither T-family or M-family do "memory stealing" aka memory overcommit, like GCP's E2 seemingly does (but the pricing page doesn't explicitly state this, and your detailed comparisons omit this crucial difference).

So, apples and oranges; you shouldn't really "compare" without benchmarking ...

What is the "baseline" memory GCP E2 instances get?

And has been possible on KVM (e.g. VirtManager, RHV/RHEV/Ovirt) for years too.

Xen 3 also supported online memory increases (but I don't think CPU).