this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025

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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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The aws outage is so funny, I can see which companies are amazon scums. (piefed.social)

submitted 11 months ago by a_person@piefed.social to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world

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My schools entire assignment system is out today.

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[–] Triumph@fedia.io 202 points 11 months ago (35 children)

You'd be hard pressed to find an online service that isn't associated with AWS in some way.

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[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 115 points 11 months ago (10 children)

Sadly, there are some who don't even know it, because they're buying services from someone else that buys them from someone else that buys them from Amazon. So they're currently wondering what the fuck is even going on, since they thought they weren't using AWS.

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[+] darvocet@infosec.pub -40 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Well those people are fucking idiots.

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[–] Flatfire@lemmy.ca 35 points 11 months ago (8 children)

That's not really fair, I think. Smaller organizations are especially dispositioned here. Think small businesses, charities, local municipal services, etc. Small IT budgets, low staff (if any) and just enough to pad out a subscription cost to a service provider that fits their needs.

AWS is an incredibly low cost solution, and it's probably where most of these low cost services point themselves at when building platforms at scale. Not everyone can build and maintain a datacentre or home server for their every need.

This isn't to say that there are definitely idiots who pad their resume by chanting a prayer to SaaS and boasting about having moved their company to the "cloud" via a cheap and unreliable AWS rehoster, before failing upwards though.

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[+] darvocet@infosec.pub -22 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Fine, most of them are fucking idiots. Know where your infrastructure is people! Whois your IP.

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[–] itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works 19 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Do you know what power stations feed your electrical circuit? Do you know which transformers are most critical to keep you in service? Do you know who manufactured them?

Do you know where your water comes from? Which facilities treat it? How it's treated?

Can you name your senators, house rep, state senators, state rep, and local officials?

Everyone can't know everything. I doubt you do, but I wouldn't call you a fucking idiot for that. I would call you a fucking idiot for being such a small-minded asshole though. You're not the smartest person in the room, and even if you were, you still wouldn't understand how 99% of human technology works. We're in this together and we lean on each other. That's the beauty and curse of being human

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[+] darvocet@infosec.pub -16 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Sounds like you've taken offense. Don't know who your host is huh? If you work in IT doing websites you gotta know same basics. Sorry if my statements don't align with your world view.

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[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Think small businesses, charities, local municipal services, etc. Small IT budgets, low staff (if any) and just enough to pad out a subscription cost to a service provider that fits their needs.

Did we not read the same comment? Not every service that was taken down was a website, like OP's school. Plenty of small businesses, charities or local municipal services don't have IT staff, commissioned their sites (including initialisation) and don't necessarily know that 𝑥 company they pay, pays Amazon. Or how to do a whois search. You clearly don't have a firm grasp on the realities of the world, nor work in IT "doing websites".

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[+] darvocet@infosec.pub -11 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Holy fuck. Look people if you don't like it then fuck off. My point isnt that OP or rando schools with down services are fucking idiots. it's the people responsible to secure hosting for services - if they dont know what the fuck they are doing then they shouldnt be doing it.

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[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 11 months ago

Very clever and smart, clearly you have good takes on the world.

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[–] SereneSadie@lemmy.myserv.one 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

Deflecting harder than a politician.

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[–] darvocet@infosec.pub 0 points 11 months ago

You need to look up the word deflection. I work in cloud. None of my stuff was affected because I'm not an idiot and properly multi cloud and utilize availability zones for redundancy.

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[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 22 points 11 months ago (11 children)

I'm pretty sure most of Azure (Microsoft), OCI (Oracle), and GCP (Google) have all been fine.

Bezos is a craven beast but I don't see many companies above with CEOs that I'd feel comfortable babysitting my teenage daughter

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[–] Nighed@feddit.uk 17 points 11 months ago*

The company I work for is an Azure shop. However, our provider for customer 2fa tokens uses AWS.... So still in trouble.

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[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 14 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Once Larry Ellison owns TikTok he's going to be babysitting all the teenagers and a whole bunch of other people!

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[+] Marshezezz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

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[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

I don’t think his son is any better.

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[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 3 points 11 months ago

If daddy croaks now we will see how much is actually David's doing vs Larry

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[–] Triumph@fedia.io 7 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Sure, but online services can certainly leverage multiple modules, from multiple companies, hosted in multiple places. So maybe your site mostly works fine, but a key aspect of it is broken.

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[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

from multiple companies

See the above post from the Azure shop ... that uses AWS for 2FA tokens

You want to add multiple companies in parallel as alternates/failovers, not in serial where any one failure blocks the whole flow

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[–] Triumph@fedia.io 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

But that would cost more money, that's anticapitalist.

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[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 6 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Yes, it's much more expensive to have two providers. Both in terms of outright costs but even more so in terms of ongoing engineering/technical overhead.

The calculus is how much the expectation downtime is, versus that cost. It's a reasonable calculation and TBH if outages are a few hours once every few years for most cases it's acceptable.

OFC if your hospitals or emergency services depend on a cloud service, you happily fork over the extra money same as you do for any other insurance.

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[–] Triumph@fedia.io 4 points 11 months ago

If there's anything I know, it's that "businesspeople" are never proactive.

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[–] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 1 point 11 months ago

Also allow things fail gracefully, independent of each other.

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[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Lemmy seemed fine, Reddit did not.

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[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 23 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Lemmy seemed fine

Federated, open source

Reddit did not

Centralized, corporate

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[–] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

That doesnt really have anything to do with this issue. Lemmy can absolutly be hosted in AWS via ECS (or EKS if you love Kubernetes). Hell, it could be hosted directly on EC2 if preferred.

Federation as a whole is more resilient because each operator can chose whatever hosting solution they prefer. But if your particular server happened to be hosted in AWS in the useast1 region; your shit was gonna be a bit busted.

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[–] vegals@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Amen to that, good thing though. Got me to learn what Lemmy was. Apparently I've been under a rock.

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[–] XiELEd@piefed.social 4 points 11 months ago

Welcome to the fediverse!!

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[–] higgsboson@piefed.social 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

Walmart.com would likely work fine, as they are rabidly anti-Amazon, especially AWS. They don't even want their SaaS vendors using AWS under the covers for them.

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[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Can confirm, about 10 years ago, the company I worked for migrated to AWS, and I managed the transition. We planned everything meticulously so that there would be no downtime, and used it as excuse to fix a lot of tech debt. No one was supposed to even notice the cutover, and when we did it, I expected the only feedback to be that things seemed faster and were working as expected. A few hours later, we get a complaint from an Account Manager for Walmart that they can't access the platform at all. There was a lot of confusion and back and forth, turns out their IT department had an allow list or something in the corporate DNS to not resolve to AWS owned IPs unless approved. We eventually got them to add our domain to their allowlist, but it seemed insane that they would spend the effort to implement and maintain that level of control.

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[–] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Amazon and walmart are competitors

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[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Totally, I understand that, but seemed to be an extreme measure they are inflicting on their employees that doesn't really change anything. It'd be like if ExxonMobil didn't allow their employees with company cars to fill up at a Chevron station.

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[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It'd be like if ExxonMobil didn't allow their employees with company cars to fill up at a Chevron station.

That is likely very much the case. When you drive a company vehicle, you have a fuel card for fill-ups that is for a particular chain and doesn't work anywhere else.

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[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Yeah I don't think this is the best analogy, but the point being is brand loyalty can only go so far. Like if you're going to run out of gas in the next 20 miles and there isn't an Exxon station within 100 miles, do you just pass all other gas stations and have your employees break down on the side of the road?

I just can't imagine any actual competitors to AWS would impose such restrictions on their employees that put them in a worse position to do their jobs, so it's a bit silly that it's coming from Walmart, when they don't compete in that space.

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[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 11 months ago*

Like if you're going to run out of gas in the next 20 miles and there isn't an Exxon station within 100 miles, do you just pass all other gas stations and have your employees break down on the side of the road?

Honestly? Yeah, pawbably. Or you pay for it yourself and go through getting a reimbursement which may or may not happen.

Edit: Just like, you're expecting companies to be intelligent and reasonable, and they just aren't.

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