![Meredith Whittaker (@meredithmeredith.bsky.social) — 📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms).
<p>It’s also concerning. 1/</p>
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Great justification for using the cloud. The infrastructure requirement for signal to be such a great app would be massive for a small team with low budget. The cloud is fantastic at unknown scaling, bursts beyond reasonable capacity to run yourself, getting compute everywhere in the world, and offloading huge infrastructure management costs.
DHH is 100% right that we have gone too far, too many things come out cloud first for services that can be ran locally cough such as your bed cough cough. One week ago when the world came to a hault, I did not bat an eye at these small teams with complex requirements going down with AWS.
Their own products seem quite damning to me. It signals that they cannot themselves become resilient to themselves. It shows how hard this problem is, how much cost in complexity and resources it requires. I’m sure there are fail overs that happened successfully that we will never hear about, critical products with large engineering overhead.