Item — HN Reader

Big cloud systems, the ones we all regularly use, get much closer scrutiny than government systems normally (because we all know when Azure, GCP, AWS, Linode, DO, CloudFlare or OVH have a major outage, misconfiguration, or A/C fire). As a "single" provider I'm sure Microsoft is much better at this than the (likely shoestring budget) government group of admins was before they moved. There's more burst capacity (if needed) without paying for redundant equipment most of the year, and ultimately it's probably at a lower cost.

Meanwhile Azure is the only cloud with two Canada regions (Canada "Central", Canada East)[0], AWS has one (Canada "Central")[1], GCP has one (Montreal same city as AWS)[2].. there's really only one player if you want to use managed cloud services.

[0]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/geog... [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio... [2]: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/

2 comments

I think the point was that a national emergency system should redundantly use two cloud providers, not that they made the wrong choice of single cloud provider.

The national emergency system doesn't rely on one provider[0] or one cloud, while Pelmorex Corp (The Weather Network) is part of the chain (and a curious one) it isn't the entire system, nor is their choice of provider/hardware a government choice (but it doesn't seem poor). The network isn't down, an aspect may have endured an outage. For significant (but not total) coverage of the country the "Alert Distributors" could be covered with contacting 15 corporations (huzzah anti competitive Canada)... or less if you pick a specific channel (eg Wireless=4), which I imagine is part of alerting protocol (your cable, mobile, radio, TV, and web applications don't all send the same alert)

[0]: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/mrgnc-mngmnt/mrgnc-prprdn...

It's an emergency alerting system. Low bandwidth, broadcast. Perfect for blasting a few kilowatts of RF via digipeters each with their own generators and lead acid battery banks.