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AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
261–270 of 468 posts
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#262[flagged]
What's you point? That if you had run your own DC in that region (because that was your business requirement) then you'd have better missile defense than AWS? Or maybe AWS or DIY, you are always responsible for geographic diversity? Anyone losing data over this lost it because they'd literally told AWS to only store it in one place.
I read that as a statement that says something along the (nowadays very tired) line that the cloud is not magical, it's just other people's computers.
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
They had nine years and more money than god to build redundancy in an unstable region.
If it's an unstable region, then it might not result in a good return, especially since a blown up data center is 100% loss.
This is focusing in too close.
Bezos has been working with Trump. The instability has been hugely exacerbated by Trump. The issue lies at home.
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
War did not randomly came. America intentionally caused it. And has lawless goverment and unaccountable tech industry making it bad place for data.
I wonder if Amazon can sue the US govt bc they basically caused this material loss to their business. I'm sure they cannot. Maybe a lawyer can explain why?
I'm not a lawyer, but this seems like a difficult case.
For one thing, regardless of what the US did, they did not launch the attack that damaged the datacenters. That attack was provoked by US actions, but the attack was an intentional and voluntary act by Iran/IRGC. I don't think any of the usual settings for liability for the acts of others really apply here, but I'm not a lawyer.
You'd also need to find a court of competent jurisdiction. The US is out because of soveriegn immunity. The Military Claims Act prohibits claims that "arise from action by an enemy or result directly or indirectly from an act of the armed forces of the United States in combat" [1]. The Federal Tort Claims Act bars "any claim arising in a foreign country" as well as "any claim arising out of the combatant activities of the military or naval forces, or the Coast Guard, during time of war" [2] and precedent recognize a state of war without a declaration.
The courts in the country where the data centers were attacked might not be interested in addressing conduct of the US that didn't happen in their country. The courts in Iran are likely to consider the attack on the data center a legitimate act of war and not a tort; anyway good luck collecting against the US with a judgement from an Iranian court.
Amazon might have a better time making a claim against Iran, in the court where the attacks took place, but good luck collecting a judgement. Maybe a case in the International Court of Justice, but those have to be submitted by a country and involved countries must consent.
[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title10/sub... chapter section 2734 (b) (3)
[2] see page 28 and 29 of https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R45732/...
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#265Earlier 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 AWS data center is going to look like a bright shining beacon on the CARVER matrix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARVER_matrix
What CARVER score would you give an AWS data center? I would probably put it around the 40 to 50s. Where would you put your own individual company by itself on the CARVER matrix as it relates to enemy forces? Pretty damn low.
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems unreasonable to blame Amazon here. The AZ was destroyed. Are they supposed to have missile/drone defense? I'm not going to complain to DoorDash if my order is delayed due to a car crash
If a senior leader at Doordash swore to God that your sandwich would 100% guaranteed make it to you, regardless of whether or not there was a car crash, then yeah, maybe you should complain
Yeah I agree with you. If they made a specific promise to some unlikely case out of their control, then I would expect compensation.
Did Amazon make such a promise? They didn't as far as I know. My understanding is they provide specific guarantees like given an AZ outage, your data is still safe (provided you architect correctly).
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-wat…
> The amount of data S3 stores "automatically replicating" to other geographical locations would make things prohibitively expensive It did work like this! And it was! My recollection is that the first S3 was out of SEA and had no user concept of region. Then “VDC” was added in virginia. That provided API endpoints in what became us-east-1. A bucket could be accessed from either location, and the original intent was…
Long time no see.
2013-2014 would be about right, they were still in SEA when I joined in 2013 but were actively working on decommissioning it.
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#268This 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!…
Isn’t the problem that multiple datacenters in one zone were blown up?
Yes, this, and the article seems pretty clear that only "some data stored exclusively in Bahrain" is affected. Add to that the option to store data with reduced redundancy (in S3, for example), and I don't really see what the drama is about.
Amazon only claims "99.999999999% durability" per year, even for the properly replicated stuff.[0]
[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#269me (Middle East) ├── me-south-1 (Bahrain) DOWN since 2026-04 │ ├── mes1-az1 me (Middle East) ├── me-south-1 (Bahrain) DOWN since 2026-04 │ ├── mes1-az1 DOWN │ │ └── mes1-mct1-az1 (Oman, Muscat) │ ├── mes1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01 │ └── mes1-az3 DOWN ├── me-central-1 (United Arab Emirates) │ ├── mec1-az1 │ ├── mec1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01 │ └── mec1-az3 DOWN since 2026-03-01 └── il-central-1 (Israel, Tel Aviv) ├──…
Ok claude, now format that in a way humans can read
Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are pointing the fingers at the wrong people. Cloud providers pushed this idea onto executives via their marketing and conferencing channels. Not disimilar to how AI naratives are pushed on executives these last two years.
But alongside the marketing blitz they also offer certifications for people who are supposed to execute these projects. Even the most foundational certification exam -- which simply tests your recall on what AWS service is for compute versus networking -- teaches and tests you about "Shared Responsibility Model" that draws the line at what the customer is still responsible for when they use cloud bases IaaS / PaaS /…
Who is a CEO going to believe? Amazon, Microsoft and the entire IT infra division or that lone SRE who disagrees with them?
I mean, every time cloud comes up on HN we see legions of techies posting strowman arguments about why you should offload everything onto AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.