This article reads like nonsense - but this is not a criticism of AWS.
The real problem is there is no good mathematical model of distributed behaviour, from which statistical guarantees can be made.
I think we're at the limit of what the smartest people can achieve with hand crafted code.
Most likely new math will give rise to new tools and languages, in which the next generation of reliable distributed systems will be written.
Without this advance we will have storage networks that aren't reliable, an internet that can be taken down by one organization, botnets that are unkillable and patchy network security.
All of it, the general approach is wrong - so the nonsense is the part where you believe your current set of abstractions about distributed networks are adequate.
Also the part where you reapply those same abstractions to fix the hole, without realizing that the problem is you simply don't yet have tools that are capable of writing a robust system - despite the evidence to the contrary.
If a day long outage of this scale is not enough to make us rethink distributed systems, what is?
The real problem is there is no good mathematical model of distributed behaviour, from which statistical guarantees can be made.
I think we're at the limit of what the smartest people can achieve with hand crafted code.
Most likely new math will give rise to new tools and languages, in which the next generation of reliable distributed systems will be written.
Without this advance we will have storage networks that aren't reliable, an internet that can be taken down by one organization, botnets that are unkillable and patchy network security.