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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

#451
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.

As someone who ran a tech company in Northern Ireland at a time when violence was much more common than it is today, I can tell you that our force majeure clauses always disclaimed liability for "riot, violent disorder, civil commotion, and acts of unlawful civil unrest and terrorism".

How could it be otherwise - do you expect AWS to have its own army and missile defence system?

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

#452
Ex AWS. AWS had one zone specific products. If those were in the affected AZ that data is lost. AWS has multiple multi-AZ products. S3 and EFS are good examples. If you loose an AZ for an extended periodic of time, the dataplane of those services will migrate shards around until you get back to your durability goals.

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

#453
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just gave the crazy man a lot of money knowing he wants to start a holy war. I did not want him to fund this particular holy war that turned out to be disadvantageous to me!

Kind of like building your house on a floodplain and claiming insurance for a flood. They'd still say it was an act of god.

Unless you have flood insurance in the US which is what those policies are specifically meant to cover and are backed by FEMA (for now)

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

#454
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me-south-1 (Bahrain), all 3 data centres providing the redundancy were blown up by Iran.[1] The redundancy was localised to small geographic area and a single government--something customers of AWS were hopefully aware of when they entrusted AWS with their data. It's always buyer beware for any claims of availability. Engineers completing a FMECA[2] will (or should) always state upfront what type of failure modes…

As far as I know, the attacks happened at different times. If Amazon knew that they had lost some data redundancy, shouldn’t they have been quickly mirroring that out of the region?

I believe regional DR is the customer's responsibility per their Shared Responsibility Model.

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's beyond the reasonable control of Jeff Bezos. Even though he supports trump with billions of dollars, he didn't ask for this particular war.

Not true. Bezos could have purchase air defense munitions for his data centers. There is also the argument that this strike is the result of Bezos financially supporting Trump's second term and that without his support Trump's war would never have started

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

#456
post #3

They guaranteed 11 9's durability, didn't they? e: Yep https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/

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

Wild berries has missle defence now, why not Amazon?

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

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

S3 is advertised as having 11 9's. That means in the entire history of S3 they've only lost a handful of objects, and will continue to lose objects at this same rate.

Eleven nines covers ordinary infrastructure failures, not acts of war that physically destroy the underlying facilities.

It's similar to any engineered artifact, like a skyscraper. They have a structural safety factor that defines their resilience to failures that the system is designed to tolerate, it doesn't make them immune to missile strikes.

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

#458
post #369

Ahhh the downside of “data sovereignty” rules and the de-globalization meme strikes again. I’d bet a bajillion dollars the reason this happened is due to government thinking it’s a good idea to make it illegal to store data outside their country. Hey EU, take note of this next time you create silly data residency requirements that don’t allow data to travel outside your region. Encryption is an easy solution to multi…

This is a valid point if you're not so confrontational about it.

The only valid tone to take with people who are on a crusade to ban encryption is disdain and mockery.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who ran a tech company in Northern Ireland at a time when violence was much more common than it is today, I can tell you that our force majeure clauses always disclaimed liability for "riot, violent disorder, civil commotion, and acts of unlawful civil unrest and terrorism". How could it be otherwise - do you expect AWS to have its own army and missile defence system?

The difference between you and Amazon is hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations and lobbying. Amazon certainly has the political connections to make defense of its datacenters a national security priority of the strongest military on earth if it made it a priority.
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