I'm working with another team of people who haven't yet tried working with cloud servers, and one of the things they're struggling with the most is that cloud servers need to be thought of as disposable. They can't easily digest the idea that servers can and will go down randomly for no known reason.
I think Amazon needs to put a lot more effort into educating people about the best practices involved here - creating immutable and disposable servers, make it easier (console access) to create availability groups, etc.
> They can't easily digest the idea that servers can and will go down randomly for no known reason.
Then you should educate them. This isn't something unique to the cloud, physical servers absolutely can do this too. I work with thousands of (physical) servers in the day job, we have all kinds of failures that take out individual hosts on a regular basis.
The problem for a lot of people is that on a small scale physical hosts can appear to be extremely stable.
With a few dozen servers total, I have servers at work that have not had a failure in 8+ years, and we have some hardware that is 12+ years, and until office and data centre moves recently we had hardware that had not been rebooted for 5 years.
We have moved everything to VMs that we take hourly copies of, and can redeploy most of our VMs in minutes because we do know we need to be prepared for hardware failures, and occasionally face them, but they are rare events at our scale.
For people with even smaller setups, with only a handful of servers, they cane easily have periods of years without any failures. Then it's easy for people to get complacent.
I think Amazon needs to put a lot more effort into educating people about the best practices involved here - creating immutable and disposable servers, make it easier (console access) to create availability groups, etc.