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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

#81
post #51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need better missile defense than AWS. You don't need missile defense at all because you won't be a target. 99.999999% of the land has no missile threat on it. You are actively increasing the threat to your business by running it on the same servers that military contractors run their software on.

In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted, anyone should consider themselves a valid target. It's true that you are less likely to be a target than a state-sponsored tech megacorp's data centers, but the risk is still present.

> In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted

Yes but that's clearly not this war. This is a missile war where high-value strategic military targets are the priority. The US and Israel hit some prisons, damaged some hospitals, and ofc killed 168 schoolchildren. They also targeted residential areas to assassinate important leaders. But Iran has not returned that. They've stuck pretty strictly to military targets with very few exceptions

If this was a war where bridges were a target, Iran would not be so successful. There's simply a too limited amount of missiles. Also only 20% of Saudi Arabia has citizenship while almost the whole rest is basically indentured servants. It's not like they could provoke a popular uprising or anything. There's no strategic value in hitting "bread lines"

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> You don't see the EU causing a war with Russia? Putin is launching and provoking wars, not the EU. > you will probably still blame America No, we would blame Putin, because he's the blameworthy party. As for Iran, Trump (and Trump voters by extension) is the blameworthy party. I don't even think any other R would have been dumb enough to go at Iran like this.

[flagged]

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

#83
post #43
post #3

They guaranteed 11 9's durability, didn't they? e: Yep https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/

The SLA excludes force majeure.

Making a probabilistic claim while excluding a factor that dominates those statistics is... is quite creative accounting.

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

#84
post #18

No disaster recovery plan? No offsite backups? Someone failed to applied the most basic principles that have existed for decades.

That depends on the data. If this is EBS or single-AZ S3, then from Amazon's perspective this was correct. Backup responsibly (for any data that does need to be backed up) lives with the customer, and Amazon has no way of knowing about that. EBS data data is unrecoverable, and that's what's reported. Now if this was multi-AZ S3 or whatever then this would be significant. The article does not tell us what products wer…

I was unaware that Amazon even sold single AZ S3. 20% discount. Doesn't seem worth it. By the time I commit to purchasing S3 space, it has to be important data.

I get that S3 is convenient and reasonably performant, but it is not cheap at all.

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

#85
post #74
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more dramatic contingency you have to plan for, the more expensive the plan gets. Earlier this week I mentioned that if we lose enough data centres to bring our operation down, the first items in the to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel.

> to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel. I toured a datacenter once back in the early 2000s and they showed me 30 days of generator fuel storage. When i asked them why 30 days and not 35 they replied "we're such a major customer of both electricity and fuel that if we don't get electricity or fuel for 30 days there's way bigger problems than your website not being online" hah.

That's probably already true for 7 days or less

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

#86
post #73

This interview with an AWS leader isn’t aging well, from CBS Sunday morning: Pogue asked, "I don't mean to give anyone ideas, but let's say I figured out that one of these unmarked buildings was an AWS data center, and I blew it up. Are you saying that it's so backed up and redundant that you probably wouldn't notice?" Wood replied, "Yeah, you wouldn't notice. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice!…

He forgot to add "if it's Multi-AZ" ;)

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

#87
post #51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need better missile defense than AWS. You don't need missile defense at all because you won't be a target. 99.999999% of the land has no missile threat on it. You are actively increasing the threat to your business by running it on the same servers that military contractors run their software on.

In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted, anyone should consider themselves a valid target. It's true that you are less likely to be a target than a state-sponsored tech megacorp's data centers, but the risk is still present.

An American-run data center is much more likely to be targeted than some locally-owned and run company that isn't obviously connected to a foriegn power or the state that hosts it.

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

#88
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AZs weren’t meant to be disaster resistant, eg, an earthquake or hurricane could take out a whole region. Regions were always the scale of disaster isolation on AWS.

Regions are really the scale of disaster isolation only in extreme cases - such as global catastrophe (meteor strike taking out a city) or in this case, when actively targeted in war. I don't really see the same thing happening to a US or European region.

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

#89
post #3

They guaranteed 11 9's durability, didn't they? e: Yep https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/

They say it's "designed for" 11 9s, not guaranteed.

But if they want to design for extreme probabilities you need to account for tail risks, so their design should have included a missile defense system. At some point you need to start worrying about asteroid defense too.

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

#90

I think this is due to the data residency requirements in UAE. I'm working with a client in the health space and the government requirements requires me to store data only in UAE! Tried with AWS but they were not allowing any new instances and I had to go with Azure.

Hi, I'm from the future. You might want to consider storing the data somewhere besides an Azure datacenter in the UAE.

Are you me from the future? I'm not talking to future strangers. Tell me to deliver the bad news myself from the future, in the future.
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