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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

#461

Post by IAmBroom »

dotancohen wrote: post #323
wand3r wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are describing the US regulatory landscape, up until Trump's SCROTUS revoked the Chevron deference in 2024.

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

#462

Post by cyberax »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #278
cyberax wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some systems in AWS do, but they typically need a quorum of at least two copies to work. Other systems only have 2 copies.

And in this case, it looks like all three DCs were damaged.

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

#463

Post by shimman »

_fat_santa wrote: post #449
shimman wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Why shouldn't we hold it against Amazon when they are making business deals with deeply unequal societies that rely on slave labor? This is what happens when you make deals with authoritarians. Expecting the blowback to not effect you is a child's mindset.

I think that's past the point OP was making. Amazon makes some pretty impressive guarantees of data durability but those guarantees only hold up if you take their advice and replicate data to other regions. It's like saying "Oh this car manufacturer claimed that their cars were the safest in the industry but couldn't prevent this driver from flying through the windshield" and omitting the fact the person wasn't weari…

No, it's more like willing to work with dictatorships across the world brings inherit risk.

No one was forcing Amazon to make deals with oligopolies and monarchies in the middle east.

No one was forcing Amazon to engage with US imperialism.

Like these things have extremely large threads connecting to one another. Now AWS, along with other American big tech companies, are legitimate military targets. This is what happens when you engage in these practices. You don't get to serve the interests of US imperialism and claim you're innocent. They deliberately signed up for this, there is a long history of this in US imperialism. It's nothing new.

Next time you don't want missiles raining down upon your data center, don't engage yourself in imperial politics. You won't be shocked next time when someone punches you in a face.

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

#464

Post by IAmBroom »

jval43 wrote: post #318
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.

No. If you're the leader you should know what you're leading. It's literally the job. But the problem is right there: "non-technical" leaders. Never work for one if you can avoid it.

All Tesla employees reading this are fervently agreeing, between their tears.

"We should build vacuum delivery tubes for passengers!"

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

#465

Post by IAmBroom »

mitxela wrote: post #332
Brigand wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really Amazon-caused

Yes it is, they didn't have adequate redundancy for this extremely foreseeable event (military site getting hit by missiles).

Negligence is not malicious action.

Both are bad, but having a missile hit your shop is never going to mean you are causing violence.

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

#466

Post by [deleted] »

Game_Ender wrote: post #429
paulddraper wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with separate and redundant power infrastructure, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. Availability Zones in a Region are meaningfully distant from each other, up to 60 miles (~100 km) to prevent correlated failures, but close enough to use synchronous replication with single-digit millisecond latency. > https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/late…

10s of miles is close enough that they are functionally in the same place in a military context though. The latest cheap massive wave attack drones fly hundreds of miles and hour which puts the DCs less than a minute apart by flight time. This means if you want protection against those risks you have to use multiple regions instead of, or in addition to multiple AZs.

[deleted]

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

#467

Post by cyberax »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #322
dotancohen wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minimu…

Yes, normal S3 is at least triply-redundant. But it's possible for S3 to lose some data if two DCs are down and a disk dies in the single remaining DC.

AWS doesn't use parity for S3, they actually mirror the data.

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

#469

Post by sporkland »

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!…

Since S3 supports regionally and zonally locked buckets it seems like any promise around this would have to except those buckets where that was configured.

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

#470

Post by throwaway173738 »

egorfine wrote: post #414
rishikeshs wrote: post #41

I think this is due to the data residency requirements in UAE. I'm working with a client in the health space and the government requirements requires me to store data only in UAE! Tried with AWS but they were not allowing any new instances and I had to go with Azure.

> data residency requirements in UAE Is it a real law? I mean I would largely ignore those kinds of regulations on the basis of sheers stupidity. After all, lawmakers of the world tried to ban math for multiple times in the last few decades. Why would anyone consider conforming to laws like that? Especially since its not possible to enforce this law.

I live in the real world where we follow the law because otherwise some of us might end up in jail and all of us will be out of a job. We pick and choose through our elected officials here.
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