This legislation has support from both major parties, it's set to pass either this week or next. I don't know why Google, Facebook, Tesla, Microsoft, Atlassian and other big tech companies with investments in Australia don't push back. Nothing pressures Australian politicians more than an advertising campaign. The mineral resources industry spent just $8m on advertising to prevent a new mining tax that would have cost them several billion dollars. Better yet, as the Government is currently being held together by a few minority seats just spend a few hundred thousand in the most at risk seats. That alone would be enough to completely abandon or water down this legislation.
That was not my intention at all. I didn't realise the HN title had to match the article title, I can certainly edit the title for clarity. Nonetheless, I thought it was a really interesting article.
You say that you want him to "take some time off" but then mention that he is "often absent". This to me signals a much greater issue. I think if you were to remove him from your team it would be a huge mistake. We are people, not machines. Sometimes we go through hard times. You need to build a company that supports it's people during these difficult times not abandon them in their time of need. Talk to him and let him know you are there to support him.
It's difficult to change when you have reserved instances. A business decision yesterday might not be the best decision today. That being said, I think overall AWS is very good but Google is definitely starting to create some real competition which is positive for everyone.
Our instances with ap-southeast-2 were out for around 12 hours. We used multiple availability zones and it didn't prevent downtime at all. It's very interesting the difference between AWS and Google outage responses. AWS is down for 12+ hours for some customers, force each customer to chase service level credits and sign off the postmortem with a nameless & faceless "-The AWS Team". Not one person at AWS was willing to take responsibility for this failure.
Whereas Google was recently down for less than 18 minutes. A VP at Google sent an email advising all affected customers, posted continuous updates to their status page, sent a further apology email at the conclusion, posted a service credit exceeding the SLA to all customers in the zone (without forcing customers to chase this themselves with billing) and lastly wrote one of the most well written post mortems I've ever seen. AWS has much to learn from Google about how to handle outages properly.