‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS
Signal was just one of many services brought down by the AWS outage.
Signal was just one of many services brought down by the AWS outage.
“The question isn’t ‘why does Signal use AWS?’” Whittaker writes. “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.”
To me, this reads as sophistry.
What happened here is a predictable result of Signal's design. They chose to build a centralized messaging system. This made things significantly easier for them than a distributed design would have been, but it comes with drawbacks. Having single point of failure is one of them. (In this case, that single point is Amazon.)
Trying to direct the public's focus onto cloud providers instead of acknowledging this fundamental shortcoming in their design is, frankly, disingenuous. Especially coming from someone in Whittaker's position.
While we're at it, let's acknowledge that centralized design in messaging systems is problematic not just because of (un)reliability, as seen here. It also creates a single point of attack for any entity seeking to restrict, shut down, or track people's communications. End-to-end encryption cannot solve those problems.
Signal is user friendly and reliable
While I don't agree with some of their choices they do have a point here.
Yeah. I'm the nerdiest person I know—I'm not gonna try to convince people to use something I struggle to understand myself. Signal is good because it does not feel like a compromise, and the advantages are easy to explain. Matrix I wouldn't even know how to sign up for myself, as much as I would love to see the entire internet run on decentralized technology.
I am sure it's not so difficult and that I could find a good instance and figure it out if I sank some time into it, but that's really not the point here. The point is that me doing that would be worthless as I still couldn't convince anyone else to join, and nobody I am interested in talking to is currently on there. (In other words: this post is not me asking for help to sign up for Matrix)
I get your point, but that comes with a whole host of other problems. Take a look at Lemmy for instance, decentralized, yes. But also prone to problems stemming from that same decentralization.
Now scale that to the size of signal.. Oof
It also creates a single point of attack for any entity seeking to restrict, shut down, or track people's communications.
That's what relays are for.
It is true that there really isn't another cloud provider that they could choose. All of the other cloud providers (major and minor players) are prone to the same sort of systemic failure. But it isn't true that they didn't have another choice.
The solution to service failure is redundancy. Making the redundancy as different as possible makes it even more resilient. In this case, that would be having redundant servers on other cloud providers which can be used in the event that the main one fails. Even better if they can use all of them simultaneously to share the load and let failover happen more gracefully.
Right, OK, but Signal sustains itself on charity.
I don't think that's necessarily incompatible with what I suggested. They could just leave the backup servers offline until they're actually needed which shouldn't cost them anything (or at least not much; some cloud providers charge for a VM's storage usage regardless).
Assuming that Signal's servers were designed by competent engineers, the engineering cost to make a change like this shouldn't be that bad. Though judging by Whittaker's comments, that may be a bad assumption.
That is very pricey
Yes, but you can have redundancy though. Obviously it comes with a cost, and I don't know if Signal can afford it.
That was... enlightening. I can't imagine the scaling they had to do from day 1 to now.
Signal was down? Didn't even noticed
Signal users have no choice but to rely on Centric Untelligene Bureau's Amazon. And an American company registered in the US being allowed to provide unbreakable comms without being served a letter of national security? X to doubt.
While a ton of alternatives could be self-hosted or use VPS-hostable beacon servers for direct connection. I run my Briar hub mailbox on an old android for goodness sake.
Signal is centralized by design. It has it's pros and cons, but it's not an alternative to decentralized comms that require self-hosting or networking knowledge. Different userbase.