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Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

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Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#41

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

propagandist wrote: post #17
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes, I'm not so sure that the "rapid and increasing rise" is going to actually be a thing.

The Hague Invasion Act takes care of that.

That would require a future president to choose to use the authorization.

President Davis The First isn't going to lift a finger to stop the ICC prosecuting former Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and, I suspect, neither would quite a few other potential future presidents.

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#42

Post by electronsoup »

nostrademons wrote: post #35
xoa wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time…

Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and…

> worth their salt

That's a big assumption. Often there's no time to do things right, or no money, or lack of oversight, and so on.

Not every company is staffed by empowered and highly motivated staff

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#43

Post by x0xMaximus »

xoa wrote: post #7

This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst…

I recently wrote a little on this https://generalresearch.com/detail-oriented/how-to-seed-a-cl...

While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location).

The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#44

Post by kjellsbells »

xoa wrote: post #7

This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst…

Ironically,the classical target, Washington DC, is less than 25 miles down a very simple highway to Northern Virginia's massive datacenter alley. Our national defense is ultimately predicated on heavy ordnance not being able to show up undetected in this part of the world. Hence the path preferred by attackers of burrowing into Azure signing keys or ransomware attacks on the grid. Much less hardware to transport.

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#45

Post by roenxi »

georgemcbay wrote: post #29
edgyquant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies. It’s hilarious people think this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as designed.

> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we did isn't one.

Isn't that an improvement? It seems better to have people who are honest about what they're doing, even when committing war crimes. At least then people can have an honest conversation about whether the policy is working.

One of the most frustrating things about wars is people adopt policies that don't advance their objectives and then lie about what they're doing, what happened and why. This sets up an environment where militarys do things that aren't even in their own interests, let alone anyone else's, and the public discourse is busy arguing about some wild imaginary scenario that isn't related. Better to have people focused on the real world and accurately understanding both (1) what the policy was and (2) what the outcome of the policy was.

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#46

Post by quantified »

electronsoup wrote: post #42
nostrademons wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and…

> worth their salt That's a big assumption. Often there's no time to do things right, or no money, or lack of oversight, and so on. Not every company is staffed by empowered and highly motivated staff

To the parent poster's point.

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#47

Post by quantified »

georgemcbay wrote: post #10
xoa wrote: post #7

This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst…

> the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily wi…

xAI's data centers in space (should they happen) will push the frontier of war firmly overhead too.

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#48

Post by mullingitover »

edgyquant wrote: post #23
georgemcbay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.

War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies. It’s hilarious people think this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as designed.

> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies.

They're the way winners can punish their enemies.

If Germany and Japan had won WWII, US/British/Russian military and political leaders absolutely would've been on trial.

At the same time, agreements between peer countries to follow basic rules have generally held. Note that neither side in the current conflict is using dirty bombs, or dropping nerve gas or bioweapons on civilians, etc.

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#49

Post by bobmcnamara »

nostrademons wrote: post #20
xoa wrote: post #7

This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst…

In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's what has happened empirically in countries undergoing significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, there have been many centralized systems built on top of it (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essenti…

Some systems are anycast and available in many datacenters for bandwidth cost reasons. Netflix used to deploy content caches in ISP edges.

But any single central point of failure might break them. Things like, is this account paid? Dunno!

Re: Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

#50

Post by bobmcnamara »

quantified wrote: post #47
georgemcbay wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily wi…

xAI's data centers in space (should they happen) will push the frontier of war firmly overhead too.

Hey now, we had space stations with cannons in what, the 70s?
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