Originally Posted by
nevansm
Let's get this straight... cloud services like FB, Twitter, and instagram are way more transactional than airlines. Yet their outages are more rare and less impactful because they've architected or re-architected apps better ways.
Airlines (and other large orgs to some extent) have resisted this change because they don't think it's worth the investment in moving away from their legacy systems. It won't happen overnight, but it truly has to eventually. SABRE and travelport/worldpan already offer cloud versions of their apps that have a lot of these benefits. So it's not like it's impossible.
It's simply an issue of spending money.
Well maybe, but of course it's not that simple. The airlines have legacy systems, business logic, etc dating back something like 50 years at this point. Facebook is 12 years old, Twitter is 10, and Instagram is 6. That alone makes everything much, much more complicated for the airlines.
The airlines actually sell products in a meaningful fashion. There are compliance obligations and contractual obligations (meaning tickets sold to passengers) that must be carefully maintained. That makes things much more complicated than the other examples, where generally speaking
you are the product.
And frankly, if fb, twitter, or instagram go down it's not nearly as big of a deal, meaning those companies can generally be less risk averse. When an airline system goes down, people get stranded, cargo gets delayed, unaccompanied minors need to be taken care of, equipment gets out of position, and so on. The other companies generally just need to get the servers operational again and issue an apology.
I'm obviously simplifying things a bit, and I would agree that the airlines have probably underinvested/moved too slowly to update, but social media companies have very little in common with airlines when it comes to technical requirements.