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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

#141

Post by OutOfHere »

pintxo wrote: post #118
OutOfHere wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how the VC financiers got so rich while being so stupid as to hire such stupid people at the executive level, e.g. your CTO.

If only 10 out of 100 of your investments make it, does it matter if one of the 90 failed because of lacking backups? Their risk strategy is diversification of investments. Not making each investment itself bulletproof.

Yes, it is in effect a gamble. The issue is that this strategy doesn't really prove profitable for the majority of VCs. Less than 30% of VCs get to a unicorn or IPO deal. 46% of VCs don't profit at all. This is as per the recent post "(Only) half of senior VCs make at least one successful deal.". I am even ignoring the ones who drop out and don't contribute to the active statistics.

The strategy is about as silly as having ten babies and expecting that one of them will make it. It is what you would expect out of the worst poverty-ridden parts of Africa.

An alternative is to select and nurture your investments really well, so the rate of success is much higher. I'd like to see the script be flipped, whereby 90% of investments go on to becoming profit making, secondarily with their stable cash income being preferred to big exits.

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

#142

Post by nucleardog »

floating-io wrote: post #12

My fear of this sort of thing happening is why I don't use github or gitlab.com for primary hosting of my source code; only mirrors. I do primary source control in house, and keep backups on top of that. It's also why nothing in my AWS account is "canonical storage". If I need, say, a database in AWS, it is live-mirrored to somewhere within my control, on hardware I own, even if that thing never sees any production t…

> Granted, it gets harder and more expensive with increasing scale, but it's a necessary expense if you care at all about business continuity issues. On a personal level, it's much cheaper though, especially these days.

I don't go as far as "live mirror", but I've been advocating _for years_ on here and in meatspace that this is the most important thing you can be doing.

You can rebuild your infrastructure. You cannot rebuild your user's data.

An extended outage is bad but in many cases not existential. In many cases customers will stick around. (I work with one client that was down over a month without a single cancellation because their line-of-business application was that valuable to their customers.)

Once you've lost your users' data, they have little incentive to stick around. There's no longer any stickiness as far as "I would have to migrate my data out" and... you've completely lost their trust as far as leaving any new data in your hands. You've completely destroyed all the effort they've invested in your product, and they're going to be hesitant to invest it again. (And that's assuming you're not dealing with something like people's money where losing track of who owns what may result in some existence-threatening lawsuits all on its own.)

The barrier to keeping a copy of your data "off site" is often fairly small. What would it take you right now to set up a scheduled job to dump a database and sync it into B2 or something?

Even if that's too logistically difficult (convincing auditors about the encryption used or anything else), what would it take to set up a separate AWS account under a different legal entity with a different payment method that just synced your snapshots and backups to it?

Unless you're working on software where people will die when it's offline, you should prioritize durability over availability. Backups of backups is more important than your N-teir Web-3 enterprise scalable architecture that allows deployment over 18*π AZs with zero-downtime failover.

See, as a case study, Unisuper's incident on GCP: https://www.unisuper.com.au/about-us/media-centre/2024/a-joi...

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

#143

Post by adastra22 »

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_... .

I didn’t realize Xen migrations were made available from a uniform web API accessible from remote tools and fully abstracted/automated at the cluster level.

You are focused on the details and missing entirely the point of my post.

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

#144

Post by adastra22 »

cnst wrote: post #140
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…

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 alrea…

You are failing to understand that the product is not the technology. The product is the interface. One of the products you listed had the “cloud” interface we are familiar with today.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

spiralcoaster wrote: post #37

The amount of self-aggrandizing and lack of self awareness tells me this author is doing to do all of this again. This post could be summed up with "I should have had backups. Lesson learned", but instead they deflect to whining about how their local desktop is a mess and they NEED to store everything remotely to stay organized. They're going to dazzle you with all of their hardened bunker this, and multiple escape r…

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by ritzaco »

foundry27 wrote: post #61

Editorial comment: It’s a bit weird to see AI-written (at least partially; you can see the usual em-dashes, it’s-not-X-it’s-Y) blog posts like this detract from an author’s true writing style, which in this case I found significantly more pleasant to read. Read his first ever post, and compare it to this one and many of the other recent posts: https://www.seuros.com/blog/noflylist-how-noflylist-got-clea... I’m not mu…

Not sure why you're downvoted - this was exactly my thought reading it. I spend a significant portion of my time reading human-generated and AI-generated long-form writing and I can very easily see the AI stuff.

But maybe it doesn't matter any more? Most people can't.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #127
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure why you’re being downvoted If you're not sure why someone is being downvoted, there's a good chance there is a misunderstanding somewhere, and a good way for you to understand is to wait for people to comment, and then read those comments. Alternatively (and in a more general sense), if you want to take a more active role in your learning, a good way to learn is to ask questions, and then read the answers.

There is no misunderstanding involved. HN is often too emotional and will downvote and upvote whatever supports their beliefs or outrage du jour.

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