Signal was just one of many services brought down by the AWS outage.
It is true that there really isn’t another cloud provider that they could choose. All of the other cloud providers (major and minor players) are prone to the same sort of systemic failure. But it isn’t true that they didn’t have another choice.
The solution to service failure is redundancy. Making the redundancy as different as possible makes it even more resilient. In this case, that would be having redundant servers on other cloud providers which can be used in the event that the main one fails. Even better if they can use all of them simultaneously to share the load and let failover happen more gracefully.
That is very pricey
Right, OK, but Signal sustains itself on charity.
I don’t think that’s necessarily incompatible with what I suggested. They could just leave the backup servers offline until they’re actually needed which shouldn’t cost them anything (or at least not much; some cloud providers charge for a VM’s storage usage regardless).
Assuming that Signal’s servers were designed by competent engineers, the engineering cost to make a change like this shouldn’t be that bad. Though judging by Whittaker’s comments, that may be a bad assumption.
Yes, but you can have redundancy though. Obviously it comes with a cost, and I don’t know if Signal can afford it.
That was… enlightening. I can’t imagine the scaling they had to do from day 1 to now.
Signal users have no choice but to rely on Centric Untelligene Bureau’s Amazon. And an American company registered in the US being allowed to provide unbreakable comms without being served a letter of national security? X to doubt.
While a ton of alternatives could be self-hosted or use VPS-hostable beacon servers for direct connection. I run my Briar hub mailbox on an old android for goodness sake.
Signal is centralized by design. It has it’s pros and cons, but it’s not an alternative to decentralized comms that require self-hosting or networking knowledge. Different userbase.
Signal was down? Didn’t even noticed
