Meredith Whittaker
📣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).
It’s also concerning. 1/
morph
@jwildeboer @Mer__edith
... and here 150km away I didn't notice it at all.
¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@Mer__edith (For me this unexpected outage was quite dramatic, as it happened at exactly the time my son was going into surgery and we communicate a lot via Signal, so my "best wishes!" didn't go through and his "All went well" arrived with a significant delay. Murphy, I know. Things go wrong when you least expect it. He is fine and all is good :)
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@Mer__edith What was surprising to me was that a problem in one AWS availability zone caused a persistent outage for my Signal connection that lasted at least 3 hours. I expected there would be some sort of automated failover to another zone or cloud provider happening in the background, limiting the downtime to, say, maximum 15 minutes. I hope your internal post-mortem is taking a look at how to be better prepared next time.
Meredith Whittaker
To conclude: my silver lining hope is that AWS going down can be a learning moment, in which the risks of concentrating the nervous system of our world in the hands of a few players become very clear. And that this can help us craft ways of undoing this concentration and creating real choice ❤️ 13/
Meredith Whittaker
So, Signal does what we can to provide a service w integrity in the concentrated ecosystem we're working in. We protect your comms w end-to-end encryption, so that we can use AWS and others as a highway across which to send Signal data in ways that don’t let AWS, or anyone else, gain access. 12/
Meredith Whittaker
In short, the problem here is not that Signal ‘chose’ to run on AWS. The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players. 11/
Meredith Whittaker
o, yes, Signal runs on AWS. It also runs on your phone, which runs on iOS (Apple) or Android (Google). And on Dekstop, via Windows (Microsoft). Each of these presents similar dependencies on large entrenched tech companies, and concomitant barriers and risks. 10/
Meredith Whittaker
But even if Signal had the billions needed to recreate AWS, it’s not just about money. The talent to run these systems is rare & concentrated. The expertise, the tooling, the playbooks, the very language of modern SRE came out of these hyperscalers, and is now synonymous with 'the cloud.' 9/
Meredith Whittaker
Meaning that infrastructure like AWS is not something that Signal, or almost anyone else, could afford to just “spin up.” Which is why nearly everyone that manages a real-time service–from Signal, to X, to Palantir, to Mastodon–rely at least in part on services provisioned by these companies. 8/
Meredith Whittaker
Such infrastructure costs billions and billions of dollars to provision and maintain, and it’s highly depreciable. In the case of the hyperscalers, the staggering cost is cross-subsidized by other businesses–themselves also massive platforms with significant lockin. 7/
Meredith Whittaker
This isn't ‘'renting a server.' It's leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin. Particularly given the high stakes use cases of many who rely on Signal. 6/
Meredith Whittaker
Instant messaging demands near-zero latency. Voice and video in particular require complex global signaling & regional relays to manage jitter and packet loss. These are things that AWS, Azure, and GCP provide at global scale that, practically speaking, others (in the western context) don’t. 5/
Meredith Whittaker
Running a low-latency platform for instant comms capable of carrying millions of concurrent audio/video calls requires a pre-built, planet-spanning network of compute, storage and edge presence that requires constant maintenance, significant electricity and persistent attention and monitoring. 4/
Meredith Whittaker
The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/
Meredith Whittaker
Concerning, bc it indicates that the extent of the concentration of power in the hands of a few hyperscalers is way less widely understood than I’d assumed. Which bodes poorly for our ability to craft reality-based strategies capable of contesting this concentration & solving the real problem. 2/
fiery
Troed Sångberg
@Mer__edith Thanks for your condescending reply. I used to manage global SaaS within fintech with nodes in GCP, AWS and Azure and on multiple different continents.
Meredith Whittaker
@troed I don't think you have a clear understanding of this space, but I hope you have a good time digging in and learning more.
Troed Sångberg
@Mer__edith Agree - if you want to run your service centralized. Neither my Mastodon nor my Matrix-server need anything but my own self-hosting. Of course they won't handle billions of concurrent customers - but a few tens of thousands similar to mine will. Together.
I simply don't think Signal being centralized is a good thing. It's your choice, but alternatives do exist and those do not need hyperscalers.
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