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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

#271

Post by avereveard »

lelanthran wrote: post #270
albert_e wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aws cto is basically opening every presentation with a everything breaks all the time slide, idk where you get that idea they oversell the cloud resilience

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

#272

Post by 00deadbeef »

gilbetron wrote: post #208

11.3 Force Majeure. Except for payment obligations, neither party nor any of their affiliates will be liable for any delay or failure to perform any obligation under this Agreement where the delay or failure results from any cause beyond its reasonable control, including acts of God, labor disputes or other industrial disturbances, electrical or power outages, utilities or other telecommunications failures, earthquak…

It's not terrorism because it's self-defence and it's not war because Donald Trump says so

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

#273

Post by zxilly »

jaggederest wrote: post #197
jacquesm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that lots of people seem to be under the impression that they are doing it right because they are using AWS. They don't realize that AWS is a toolbox, not a 'ready made solution for redundancy against all catastrophes you are possibly exposed to'. They use that to their advantage by pricing such solutions at a level that people will either pay through the nose or will be left without recourse when AWS…

If I were a bit more bloody-minded I would launch a service for vibe-coded apps that, under the hood, did everything "the right way" and just charged a flat fee + percent on the underlying. I feel like if this was done correctly it would eat a bunch of the market, but I question how many people are actually willing to pay for "the right way". The last time I had that experience it was with Heroku which was quite a le…

And the LLM say: "You're absolutely right! We didn't need jaggederest's service. We can build it easily."

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

#274

Post by thayne »

houssc wrote: post #119
krick wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually surprising to me. Claims like that are pretty common, they make sense and they should be true, so even though I don't really know AWS (/Backblaze/Azure/whatever) redundancy planning in enough detail, I used to trust them. It's really worrying when they outright say it will be ok, and then a week later it turns out to be not ok.

The caveat is always "if you're using the service correctly " which is not necessarily free. Meaning taking advantage of multiple geo zones, building in redundancy to your stack, etc. Like everything he said is possible if your technology stack living in AWS was designed to survive it. Everyone who has ever had the "we lost your data" email from AWS knows at the end of the day the cloud is just someone else's data ce…

> which is not necessarily free

Not just in terms of service costs, but in time and complexity. In many cases building out that complexity is complicated and difficult. And sometimes the functionality you need isn't supported in the regions you use.

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

#275

Post by Dban1 »

cmiles8 wrote: 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!…

But AI chatbot advised him that was the case!

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

#276

Post by mitxela »

houssc wrote: post #119
krick wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually surprising to me. Claims like that are pretty common, they make sense and they should be true, so even though I don't really know AWS (/Backblaze/Azure/whatever) redundancy planning in enough detail, I used to trust them. It's really worrying when they outright say it will be ok, and then a week later it turns out to be not ok.

The caveat is always "if you're using the service correctly " which is not necessarily free. Meaning taking advantage of multiple geo zones, building in redundancy to your stack, etc. Like everything he said is possible if your technology stack living in AWS was designed to survive it. Everyone who has ever had the "we lost your data" email from AWS knows at the end of the day the cloud is just someone else's data ce…

Amazon never said you had to mirror your data across multiple regions to prevent Amazon-caused data loss.

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

#277

Post by mitxela »

albert_e wrote: post #254
mhitza wrote: post #237

Earlier 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 /…

[dead]

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

#278

Post by Dylan16807 »

cyberax wrote: post #216
marcosdumay wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that quotation on the GP clearly states that AWS has enough redundancy within the same region that they will continue all services running on it if a datacenter is destroyed. It's very clearly not about you being able to set-up redundancy for yourself.

That's actually true. AWS is designed to survive one datacenter being offline (which happened more than once, btw). When the first DC in ME was hit, AWS continued working normally, with only a few services experiencing issues. But it's not designed to survive TWO datacenters going offline, and in a permanent fashion.

Aren't they supposed to have 3 copies of everything? If so, two datacenters going offline at the same time should mean almost zero data loss.

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

#279

Post by dannyobrien »

simoncion wrote: post #214
dannyobrien wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my other answers, but briefly: no, they were not thinking about this, which is why we were raising it. I guess the counterintuitive point we were trying to get across is that with most things, the best way to keep it safe from being lost is to put it in a known place, and lock it away. But for data, the strategy -- for that scenario -- is to keep it in a lot of places, with heterogenous defense strategies. This i…

> This is for data loss, of course, not access or surveillance or unlawful processing. This is why the minority of politicians who actually know about how this stuff works worry about where the data resides for jurisdictional purposes. If the government where the data resides can compel the folks who have physical and/or logical access to the physical machines that contain that data to give them access to that data,…

I mean, in those rooms I was arguing over the best policies to prevent access and surveillance and unlawful processing, and what the potential cost-benefit analysis was. And what I was arguing against was an assumption that physically compelling all companies -- or worse, all citizens -- to keep their data within the borders of the host country, would protect you from these problems.

We'd have to explain that if the data was physically in Brazil, but hosted by a U.S. company, that would not stop that company from accessing that data remotely -- unless you specified that. We'd have to also explain that if you were intended to defend against US mass surveillance of non-US persons by the US intelligence services, intelligence services and SIGINT are univerally almost defined by their broad remit to target foreign nations on their own territory in violation of local law. And, finally, if you intended to use the prohibiting the movement of of data as a sanction against companies to punish them for violating data protection standards, as pre-GDPR law in the EU had as an ultimate last resort, and the GDPR often ends up relying on as a last resort, you would find that multinationals are more capable of putting up servers in your home territory and continuing to serve your citizens than they are of substantially changing their practices regarding data processing.

I don't want to sound nihilistic about this -- regulations can exist in these areas. But it's those politics and policies of the institutions with control over the data that are the most important part of this: not where the bits are kept. Especially when those bits are encrypted, and the keys and access controls are elsewhere.

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