Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 463 posts

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

#171

Post by mpyne »

the8472 wrote: post #127
mpyne wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that most data loss happens because your data center gets blown up in a shooting war? Like, AWS is the first digital service provider to lose data in decades?

I'm saying that if you have eliminated more mundane failures like dying harddrives, cosmic rays and so on from your systems and your calculation ends up with 11 nines then actually those "force majeure" events are probable enough that they dominate whatever other residuals are supposedly hiding in those last 0.0000000001%. The region has seen a bunch of wars in the last 100 years, so the annual war-rate is > 1%. Even…

Cosmic rays and dying hard drives are not force majeure though.

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

#172

Post by deathanatos »

advisedwang wrote: post #40
Art9681 wrote: 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…

> EBS data data (sic) is unrecoverable, and that's what's reported.

I don't see where this is reported? TFA does not mention EBS. In fact, TFA seems to be nigh content-free, beyond "AWS (allegedly, and is uncited) says they cannot restore some data."

> The article does not tell us what products were impacted.

… right … which conflicts with EBS being what's reported …

(I would agree with your point that if EBS, or some AZ-level data was lost, then, yeah, that's the contract.)

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

#173

Post by Twirrim »

dzonga wrote: post #169
bdangubic wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

multi-AZ doesn’t help against multi-AZ drones :)

black swan events. this is one of one of those things - were in the current era either a cloud provider should provide automatic backups in another geographic zone. if you're in us-east, then your back-ups should ideally be in eu-west + africa for redundancy.

That's absolutely something you can configure your S3 bucket to do if you want (I have one of mine replicating elsewhere).

The amount of data S3 stores "automatically replicating" to other geographical locations would make things prohibitively expensive, especially when you consider the daily delta, and how much of that is ephemeral or frequently mutated data that is stored. The bandwidth costs alone would be eye-watering, let alone the storage costs.

S3 cannot make any automated decision about whether data is, or isn't important, and if they did they'd only open themselves up to lawsuits if they guessed wrong. That's why it's made an option for the end user to enable replication if they want to, or choose to replicate their own data.

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

#175

Post by niij »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #120
XorNot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a Gulf State 300 miles is still within ballistic missile range and any belligerent is going to target both places if at all. Strictly speaking from a missile defense perspective there's an argument 2 sites are a waste of valuable interceptors.

They're likely going to target two datacenters, not the datacenters + your medium sized company's office NAS and the safe in the office manager's home. (Encryption handles confidentiality concerns.)

> (Encryption handles confidentiality concerns.)

Which is why data residency is such a stupid concept.

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

#176

Post by wmf »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #129
echoangle wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the problem that multiple datacenters in one zone were blown up?

They had nine years and more money than god to build redundancy in an unstable region.

They did build redundancy but most of it was bombed.

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

#178

Post by ern »

dzonga wrote: post #169
bdangubic wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

multi-AZ doesn’t help against multi-AZ drones :)

black swan events. this is one of one of those things - were in the current era either a cloud provider should provide automatic backups in another geographic zone. if you're in us-east, then your back-ups should ideally be in eu-west + africa for redundancy.

The minute you cross borders you run into data sovereignty concerns. No idea if it applies at the subnational level (US states, Emirates in the UAE etc) but it wouldn't surprise me if it did in some cases.

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

#179

Post by krick »

noir_lord wrote: post #55
NegativeLatency wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups in a different region?

Works unless local laws specifically block you doing that which they do for some classes of data in some countries. Multi-cloud in the same country (if that exists in the country and is far enough apart) maybe .

I wonder what exactly these laws prohibit. Like, does it apply to a fully encrypted cold-copy on Amazon Glacier? If you don't store the encryption key outside of UAE, I'd say this isn't even the same data that gets transferred to the third party, it's just some random blob. But I have no idea if the authorities of that country would agree and if it's even actually enforced for that matter, or if it's one of those laws that actually cause problems only if you follow them.

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

#180

Post by recursivegirth »

wmf wrote: post #176
nobodyandproud wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had nine years and more money than god to build redundancy in an unstable region.

They did build redundancy but most of it was bombed.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN