Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

371–380 of 463 posts

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

#371
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SLA excludes force majeure.

Excluding war as force majeure in the Middle East is the same as excluding high tide as force majeure building a sandcastle at low tide.

This is very on point. While I am not legally trained in US law, and especially not in any Middle Eastern law, I have a enough knowledge on the law in my country here where I live…

Invoking force majeure requires the entity to prove all three following to be true:

A. That the event was unexpected and therefore unavoidable.

B. That the event was outside the control of the entity.

C. That the event made it impossible for the company to resolve the issue.

War in the region is as you say rather common unfortunately. The fact that AWS is used by the IDF (https://www.972mag.com/cloud-israeli-army-gaza-amazon-google...) should be considered a factor whether or not their data centre became a more likely target or not. What remains is the ability or not for AWS to do multi-location reduncancy.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something reassuring in this for me. There's a lot of magic & handwaving from hyperscalers like AWS about redundancy. I always wondered about some of the engineering to make this absolutely (and literally) bullet proof. At the end of the day most of their answers when you push hard enough involved paying 2-3x to run everything across multiple zones/regions, and lots of awareness in your application to handle…

They should have asked AI to implement the redundancy.

[dead]

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

#374
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Especially with Amazon, who are well known for squeezing every last bit of profit from their employees, contractors etc., it doesn't really sound surprising. "Offsite backups?! Sure, you could have had that if you had found the right page in the AWS console and if you would have paid 50% extra!"

Oh sorry, you picked "AWS Backup" but you actually needed to use "Backup AWS" to solve that problem. Perhaps hop on a call with our sales engineering and cost magnification teams to guide you to a better, more solutioned, tomorrow?

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS promises to keep data safe without requiring cross region redundancy. If you choose not to trust them that's valid but then why use them at all?

>> AWS promises to keep data safe without requiring cross region redundancy. A perfect example of a claim they never made.

You'd be surprised how many customers are lead to believe this by a combination of opaque marketing, aggressive sales, and willful ignorance.

I worked at a 2000 person shop where the CTO moved us from 1 on-prem dc (we were begging to add a secondary site for years due to outage risk) to 1 AWS region.

It's not exactly straightforward to run multi-region across an alphabet soup of AWS services without decent configuration / application awareness, paying at least double.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something reassuring in this for me. There's a lot of magic & handwaving from hyperscalers like AWS about redundancy. I always wondered about some of the engineering to make this absolutely (and literally) bullet proof. At the end of the day most of their answers when you push hard enough involved paying 2-3x to run everything across multiple zones/regions, and lots of awareness in your application to handle…

They should have asked AI to implement the redundancy.

How would have that changed anything?

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

#377
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!…

Unless you have a synchronous like setup where you don’t acknowledge data writes unless the remote has aconowledged them first, you will lose data in case your datacenter is hit by a warhead. Now, there are a few things to consider: - AWS best practices recommend multiple AZs for workloads and cross-region backups for things like databases and other “stateful” data - You have to read the fine-print on what AWS offers…

All the AZs flooded simultaneously?!

How big was this flood?

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

#378
I think people are overthinking this. I'm the first one to criticize AWS (I run a competitor, carolinacloud.io) but I don't think we should hold it against them when they lost data due to their hard drives being physically bombed.

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

#380

I think people are overthinking this. I'm the first one to criticize AWS (I run a competitor, carolinacloud.io) but I don't think we should hold it against them when they lost data due to their hard drives being physically bombed.

Of course not.

The surprising thing is that multiple availability zones were bombed simultaneously.

And to my knowledge, they haven’t even yet said 2+ AZs were compromised.

Post reply on HN