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AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

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Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#9
post #2

Does this mean that even with 3 availability zones for Amazon S3 storage, that some data is lost?

For me-south-1 (Bahrain), all 3 data centres providing the redundancy were blown up by Iran.[1] The redundancy was localised to small geographic area and a single government--something customers of AWS were hopefully aware of when they entrusted AWS with their data.

It's always buyer beware for any claims of availability. Engineers completing a FMECA[2] will (or should) always state upfront what type of failure modes they've deliberately excluded (such as meteor strike) or else every FMECA would be full of failure modes that have never been measured, and are not worth anyone's time worrying about. These exclusions vary by application--a time capsule, seed vault, etc are intended to outlast wars and collapses of empires. Typically a bunch of data centres aren't designed to withstand such failures.

I do think however it'd be reasonable to include the prospect of war for calculating data centre / cloud service availability. Especially in a place such as Bahrain where the country is obviously concerned enough about the prospect of war to have built very permanent and expensive air/missile defence sites. New Zealand on the other hand--maybe not so important to consider.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033240

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_Mode,_Effects,_and_Cri...

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#10
This is the flipside of data residency requirements that countries are now starting to require. If the EU wants to keep data in the EU, then great, but when the war comes and energy and infrastructure are hit, people would have wished for backups in North America, Asia, and the middle east.
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