from Hacker News

Tolerating full cloud outages with Monzo Stand-in

by abritishguy on 2/13/25, 6:23 PM with 41 comments

  • by QuinnyPig on 2/13/25, 8:27 PM

    What I wonder is “have they isolated third party dependencies?” If AWS is hard down, those may well be impacted—in some cases, by their own third party dependencies. You can test turning off your AWS environment, but you can’t really test turning off S3 for everyone…

  • by Koffiepoeder on 2/13/25, 8:35 PM

    Unrelated tangent: I was reading the article and suddenly realised that I could not identify the font. After a quick search:

    > Our functional typeface is Monzo Sans, a custom cut of Universal Sans, meaning it’s unique to Monzo. We chose it for maximum readability, with generous dots and curled ends.

    Intersting choice, but I dig it :)

  • by noodlesUK on 2/13/25, 8:18 PM

    This seems especially relevant given the massive outage that Barclays, another major UK bank just suffered. Barclays was down for around two days with customers unable to spend money at all.

    I suppose had they implemented a similar system, they would have degraded into a minimum viable banking system rather than the total outage that impacted so many brits.

  • by tikkabhuna on 2/13/25, 8:59 PM

    These blog posts are why I continue to support Monzo. Their openness is really appreciated.

  • by theginger on 2/13/25, 8:28 PM

    A decent setup which allows you to prove you are not dependent on 1 cloud provider will probably pay for itself when it's time to negotiate discounts.

  • by paulbjensen on 2/13/25, 10:46 PM

    My only conclusion is that Monzo would rather embrace the apocalypse than rely on Microsoft Azure to provide a tertiary fallback.

  • by 4ndrewl on 2/13/25, 10:17 PM

    Really interesting. Would love to understand how they came to the decision to build this,and whether there's any precedent for it.

  • by joshstrange on 2/13/25, 9:19 PM

    Completely unrelated to this blog post but I really dislike Fintech saying "Get paid early" in their promos.

    It's clearly marketing at someone too stupid to be able to see right through how utterly useless that is. If you are celebrating getting your paycheck 1 day earlier (every time) then your financial literally and financial health are probably in the toilet. They _must_ know they are preying on people with statements like that.

    Then again, 90% of Fintech seems to be just a heavy layer of lipstick over an archaic system. Often with very little care of if any of the tools actually help people and more of a focus on how flashy or how much people think they are being helped.