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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

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They could offer controlled "failure of service" service where they randomly take stuff offline and you have to pay to get it back if you don't have a backup/recovery strategy.

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

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. _You_ are supposed to have three copies of everything - and two of those should be off AWS.

Yeah yeah I know about 3-2-1.

But when I put data on normal S3, isn't my money supposedly paying for triple redundancy?

Look, here's the documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...

"S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive redundantly store objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones in an AWS Region. An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region."

As far as I've heard before that's not with parity and three zones means three copies. But when I search now I see things about 5+4 parity, any insight here?

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

#323
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of national policies, as opposed to a weird authoritarian thing that only China and Russia imposed on their citizens, we[1] spent a bunch of time explaining to their lawmakers that having geographical redundancy was a good thing, actually, and that you should stop in…

This is a very engineer-centric view. I studied economics in school, so an analogy in that realm is ironically how all countries should specialize and raise the PPC curve. The reality of the situation was that in 2010 not many people understood how powerful big data actually was. Data sovereignty is actually quite logical when you consider the scale and power of not only the company, but the US as a whole. I can assu…

  > I can assure you that lawmakers were not thinking about efficient disaster recovery plans or back ups when they made the laws.
That's why the input of actual specialists in a field should be the one drafting the policies. I'm glad that professional lawmakers exist, I personally couldn't draw up a proper par if I had to, but they are not and can not be specialists in every field.

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

#324
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 devil is always in the details. Somehow I feel that when we offload the responsibility to some one else we get this feeling that the other person/entity would be doing full diligence and whatever else is required to carry out the job perfectly. However in reality most of the times they just do the bare minimum to pass your evaluation criteria to get the job.

It's funny because this applies to children cleaning home bathrooms as a Saturday chore as well.

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

#325

me (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

Sorry, I accidentally posted it twice while fixing it and on a slow connection.

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

#326
My personal bet is there's an 80% chance this is caused by some internal bootstrapping problem that they've messed up. AIUI all the main cloud vendors are in trouble here. The automation project I work on is expressly designed to help folks solve this DR/bootstrapping problem. Soo many people get this wrong. Of course missiles don't help things, but I'd bet AWS is primarily to blame here. I'd love an actual technical report of why they can't recover things.

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

#330

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…

> including acts of God

Serious question: how do we know something is or isn't an act of god?

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