Cascading failures, the downside of “Eat your own dogfood”

You may have heard that there was a pretty substantial outage in Amazon AWS Cloud services November 25, 2020.  The summary of what happened can be found at: https://aws.amazon.com/message/11201/ and is emblematic of how a simple maintenance action can lead to layer upon layer of unanticipated effects.  Amazon is an amazing company, the AWS service …