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AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

seuros.com

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Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#131

Post by supriyo-biswas »

adastra22 wrote: post #105
cnst wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD jail predates Amazon Web Services, and so does SWsoft's Virtuozzo that was subsequently open-sourced as OpenVZ. For Amazon SES, DJB's qmail made it possible to send a ridiculous amount of subscription emails very efficiently, too. I've been using a VPS powered by Virtuozzo since like 2002 or 2003, how is EC2 all that different? Just the API? Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company) , SWsoft was f…

EC2 services aren't tied to a machine, just a region. The details of what machine to instantiate a VM on, or the details of moving a VM between hosts, attaching remote drives over IP, or handling the networking that makes this all possible, that was worked out by Amazon to host Amazon.com, which they then resold as a service under the banner AWS. The pieces were there, but not a unified "cloud" architecture. This is…

This is such a blatant rewrite of history; as an example live migrations were a thing in Xen: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_....

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#132

Post by seuros »

akerl_ wrote: post #11

They’ve really buried the lede here: this reads like the person paying for the account was not the post author, and AWS asked the payer (who from their perspective is the owner of the account) for information. That person wasn’t around to respond.

The person paying the account is not the author, i'm.

What happen is that the person paying for the account had to settle an invoice of many thousand of dollars. They offered me AWS gift cards,to send me electronics and they will pay for it in parts.

They lost lot of money because of crypto collapse. So i accepted their solution to pay for my OSS usage for few months.

That like if i was going to pay for your rent for 1 year. You don't pay, while i don't have to pay 3-4 years of your rent at once.

What happen, is that AWS dropped a nuclear bomb in your house, in the middle of the month .. then tell you later that it was about payment.

If they told me in the first email it was about the payer, i will have unlinked and backuped.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#133

Post by SanjayMehta »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #62
gerdesj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest your CTO needs some gentle reminders about risk management and how the cloud really works. If your boss is that daft, its probably a sign to bail out. Remember to do your own personal due diligence. Due dill is not something that you just do for someone else: do your own! Do your own personal risk assessment. If code was lost, who would be found accountable? You or them? EDIT: PS - I am a CTO ...

But it's github ...... it can't be lost. Unless github closes the account, or a hacker gets access, or a rogue employee gets mad and deletes all, or some development accident results in repo deletion, or etc etc.

Or if the one employee who created the account and was paying for it on his personal credit card and then got laid off.

And no one else in the company knew what GitHub was.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#134

Post by mcv »

seuros wrote: post #120
mcv wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, at some point the article says: > I’d done everything right. Vault encryption keys stored separately from my main infrastructure. Defense in depth. Zero trust architecture. The works. Did you? Is putting all your eggs in one basket "defense in depth"? Is total trust in AWS "zero trust architecture"? I'm not defending AWS here; they fully deserve all the fallout they can get from this, and I do feel for the dev…

I dont disagree with your broader point—centralizing everything in one provider is a systemic risk. The architecture was built assuming infrastructure within AWS might fail. What I didn’t plan for was the provider itself turning hostile, skipping their own retention policy, and treating verification as a deletion trigger.

It probably wasn't even hostility; it's just that accounts is also an infrastructure component. And when that fails, everything fails. Tying everything to a single account creates a single point of failure.

It's one of the reasons I don't use my Google account for everything (another is that I don't want them to know everything about me), and I strongly dislike Google's and Microsoft's attempts to force their accounts on me for everything.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#135

Post by whstl »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #44
whstl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the quote: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it . A lot of people in this industry have near-zero operations knowledge that doesn't involve AWS, and it's frightening.

True. I get that you can blame someone for having no backups and yoloing their thing. But OP did so much right if the threat model doesn't involve "corporate behemoth anti-user automation nukes everything including backups". Everyone saying "you should've had offsite backups" certainly has a point but 99% of the blame lies with AWS here. This entire process must've crossed so many highly paid "experts" and no one con…

It is worth saying that AWS educates people to behave like this.

In the last "mandatory education program" I participated, the AWS instructor laughed at the possibility of data loss.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#136

Post by whstl »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #131
adastra22 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EC2 services aren't tied to a machine, just a region. The details of what machine to instantiate a VM on, or the details of moving a VM between hosts, attaching remote drives over IP, or handling the networking that makes this all possible, that was worked out by Amazon to host Amazon.com, which they then resold as a service under the banner AWS. The pieces were there, but not a unified "cloud" architecture. This is…

This is such a blatant rewrite of history; as an example live migrations were a thing in Xen: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_... .

Quoting myself from another post:

A lot of people in this industry have near-zero operations knowledge that doesn't involve AWS, and it's frightening.

They also have near-zero knowledge on the history of the field.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#137

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

akerl_ wrote: post #32
blargey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lede buried under that lede is that (according to an insider?) some AWS employee accidentally wiped everything immediately (contrary to typical practice in such situations of retaining data while things get sorted out), leading to a chain of brushing-off / covering-up percolating through whatever support chain the OP was talking to.

That does seem to be a mistake on their part. And the comms we’re seeing look bad. But the overall post and the double buried ledes make me question the degree to which we’re getting the whole story.

If that's the case, then the mistake isn't that a support agent made the mistake, the mistake is that such a mistake was even possible.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#138

Post by akerl_ »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #137
akerl_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does seem to be a mistake on their part. And the comms we’re seeing look bad. But the overall post and the double buried ledes make me question the degree to which we’re getting the whole story.

If that's the case, then the mistake isn't that a support agent made the mistake, the mistake is that such a mistake was even possible.

I really love this game of debating the appropriate derivative of a mistake.

Maybe the mistake was inventing non-immutable data storage?

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#140

Post by cnst »

adastra22 wrote: post #105
cnst wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD jail predates Amazon Web Services, and so does SWsoft's Virtuozzo that was subsequently open-sourced as OpenVZ. For Amazon SES, DJB's qmail made it possible to send a ridiculous amount of subscription emails very efficiently, too. I've been using a VPS powered by Virtuozzo since like 2002 or 2003, how is EC2 all that different? Just the API? Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company) , SWsoft was f…

EC2 services aren't tied to a machine, just a region. The details of what machine to instantiate a VM on, or the details of moving a VM between hosts, attaching remote drives over IP, or handling the networking that makes this all possible, that was worked out by Amazon to host Amazon.com, which they then resold as a service under the banner AWS. The pieces were there, but not a unified "cloud" architecture. This is…

OK, so, you're saying migration and remote drives over IP is the secret sauce of AWS / EC2?

Per Wikipedia, live migration was added to OpenVZ in April 2006, one year after OpenVZ was open-sourced in 2005, five years after Virtuozzo was first released as a commercial product in 2000, 3 years after the company was started in 1997. Straight from Wikipedia. I would guess that prior to April 2006, live migration was already available as part of commercial Virtuozzo for quite a while, probably.

Not to mention Xen. Isn't it common knowledge that EC2 was powered first by Xen, then by Linux-KVM, switching in 2017? What exactly is their secret sauce, except for stealing OSS and not giving back?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ#Checkpointing_and_live_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_...

---

Dropbox is a little different, but, even then, doesn't everyone simply use Google Drive today? What's so special about Dropbox in 2025?

Just look at Virtuozzo. Why did SWsoft/Parallels open-source it into OpenVZ? The decision makes no sense, wasn't Virtuozzo their whole product they were selling to the hosting providers?

The answer lies in the complexities of the kernel code. By open-sourcing the underlying technology, they're ensuring immediate compatibility with all upcoming kernel changes. Had they kept it in-house, it'd be a nightmare to continue to integrate it with each upcoming Linux release, riddling the technology with preventable bugs, and eventually losing to competitors, including Xen and Linux-KVM at the time. OpenVZ was extremely popular in the VPS community until just a few years ago, before we had more RAM than we known what to do with, before Linux-KVM replaced both Xen and OpenVZ in the majority of the hosting environments in the last 10 years as of 2025.

I do agree with the other commenter that you're just rewriting the history here. All of these EC2 clouds are simply repackaged OSS (Xen and then Linux-KVM in the case of AWS EC2). If Amazon had actually developed some truly unique kernel stuff, we'd see it OSS by now, because of the difficulty with maintaining those kinds of kernel forks locally. But we don't. Because they haven't.

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