A Real-tech Lesson on the Importance of Diversifying Your Technology Stack & platform
One of my clients had their entire infrastructure on AWS for almost 4 years. Everything was running smoothly until one day, disaster struck. The business team notified me that the sites and associated applications were down. When we investigated further, we found that every checkpoint notification on the AWS console had failed.
Shockingly, the AWS account had been suspended without any prior notice—no emails, no warnings, nothing. We immediately opened a support ticket, but the first response came 24 hours later. The reason? Another AWS account had been opened with the same name (by someone else), and due to AWS policy, no further details could be shared.
This situation was beyond frustrating:
1. Lack of Transparency: AWS provided no actionable information, leaving us in the dark. It felt like booking a flight and being denied boarding because someone else booked a ticket under your name—but due to policy, the airline refuses to tell you who did it.
2. Worst Support: Despite opening multiple support tickets, each was put on hold. The only advice we received was to identify and resolve the issue with the other account, with no further guidance due to policy restrictions. How could someone else open an account with same business name? Also, the steps to verify this from AWS Side is still unknown.
Toppings to frustration:
1. No support over Email/Phone, the only option was using web support.
2. Although RM was already assigned, there was no option to connect with them. The AWS Support executive who was responding to the web tickets sent out a link to request call back from the RM, but less that he knew was that it was a sales call back form :|
3. Even the option to purchase priority support was disabled due to the account suspension. Imagine this: You log into the AWS console only to be greeted by a message that your account has been suspended. Following the advice to contact support, you find that general support offers no useful information. Frustrated, you try to upgrade to paid support, only to be blocked with a message that the page is inaccessible—because your account is suspended.
Key Takeaways:
No matter how robust and sophisticated your backup strategy is, it’s meaningless if everything is tied to a single vendor. This incident was a harsh reminder of the critical importance of decentralization and diversified backup policies, even for small to mid-sized organizations.
Solving business problems with technology
8moIt's all about tradeoffs. If 1password were down every week (and they aren't, to be clear!), then the time savings from your ability to offload "personal password management strategy" would not be worth it. Software engineering is knowing when to make those tradeoffs. When is the abstraction worth it and when is it not. These decisions are so contextual and change over time that it's hard to give any absolute advice.