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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

#431

Post by rtkwe »

f6v wrote: post #330
gilbetron wrote: post #208

11.3 Force Majeure. Except for payment obligations, neither party nor any of their affiliates will be liable for any delay or failure to perform any obligation under this Agreement where the delay or failure results from any cause beyond its reasonable control, including acts of God, labor disputes or other industrial disturbances, electrical or power outages, utilities or other telecommunications failures, earthquak…

> including acts of God Serious question: how do we know something is or isn't an act of god?

It's a legal term of art not directly tied to religion any more. Act of God is basically "natural disasters"; eg: hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, etc.

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

#432

Post by ashkankiani »

sandeepkd wrote: post #241
krick wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually surprising to me. Claims like that are pretty common, they make sense and they should be true, so even though I don't really know AWS (/Backblaze/Azure/whatever) redundancy planning in enough detail, I used to trust them. It's really worrying when they outright say it will be ok, and then a week later it turns out to be not ok.

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.

I would love if someone could tell me the name for this phenomena. FWIW, using an LLM incites this same undue assurance as well. No matter how much you know that an LLM might just be hallucinating, it still happens anyway. It's a hard instinct to fight.

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

#433

Post by edgyquant »

krick wrote: post #109
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!…

That is actually surprising to me. Claims like that are pretty common, they make sense and they should be true, so even though I don't really know AWS (/Backblaze/Azure/whatever) redundancy planning in enough detail, I used to trust them. It's really worrying when they outright say it will be ok, and then a week later it turns out to be not ok.

How much data is stored in the average aws data center? Assuming they do regularly back ups, it makes sense that recent data can’t be instantly backed up and so there will always be some data in transit or queued up no?

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

#434

Post by snapcaster »

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.

No, because "actual specialists" like to pretend power and politics don't exist. If you're a leader of a sovereign nation and let all your data be stored in US datacenters you're either stupid or corrupt

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

#435

Post by dessimus »

everfrustrated wrote: post #400
gregates wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is important to understand the failure modes that the durability model accounts for and what it doesn't. It only accounts for "normal" failures, like an HDD reaching end of life. For example, you mention Backblaze. Backblaze has public posts about their durability model. They claim to use 17:20 Reed-Solomon erasure encoding. That means there are 20 shards of a blob, and you can lose 3 of them and still reco…

As far as I'm aware Backblaze stores data only within a single datacenter (for a given region). This likely made sense in their original business model of being "offsite" copy of data. But it very much breaks down for B2 where they're now storing original data. I hope they rethink this model. You do get what you pay for. There's a reason they're cheap.

My org isn't a Backblaze customer but a Wasabi one. Wasabi offers the ability to replicate buckets to other zones at double the cost, of course.

I would imagine Backblaze would offer something similar for original data storage for their customers to choose.

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

#436

Post by [deleted] »

jackb4040 wrote: post #60
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.

Hi, I'm from the future. You might want to consider storing the data somewhere besides an Azure datacenter in the UAE.

[deleted]

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

#437

Post by sharemywin »

whizzter wrote: post #356
rob74 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

Perhaps, cheapness is always an factor but I'm potentially reading it as the customers perhaps not wanting data to move outside of the country and with AWS only have one datacenter in said country produced this result.

but the general assumption is your data isn't going to get lost if you use Amazon. so once the trust is gone it's gone.

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

#438

Post by sharemywin »

austin-cheney wrote: post #398
sandeepkd wrote: post #241

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.

That is why contracts are more than one page in length. The details matter. I can remember receiving a contract class in Afghanistan about something as simple as moving gravel. Yeah, use your imagination with that and whatever absurd cartoon like fantasy you could dream up regarding "moving gravel" is still probably less strange than the real events that occurred. I don't write contracts for a living, at least yet, b…

but aren't amazon contracts pretty one sided?

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

#439

Post by earth-tattoo »

Edman274 wrote: post #260
shepherdjerred wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If a senior leader at Doordash swore to God that your sandwich would 100% guaranteed make it to you, regardless of whether or not there was a car crash, then yeah, maybe you should complain

Correct analogy would be: they promised to make 3 copies of my sandwich, from 3 different restaurants, and deliver them by 3 different cars, taking different routes, in case one of them gets in a crash. But in this case all 3 restaurants were bombed by Iran!

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

#440

Post by dormento »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #409
SecretDreams wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from the past and I concur.

I'm waiting for a messenger from the future coming back to tell people that passkeys are stupid, and having passwords on post-it notes attached to the monitor was never a real problem, it's just the security industry that got threat modeling backwards for couple decades...

Don't worry. After the great captcha war of 2029 there was an awakening and things got better for a while (until the Flock smart glasses incident...)
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