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.
By krick 2 hours ago
The caveat is always "if you're using the service correctly" which is not necessarily free. Meaning taking advantage of multiple geo zones, building in redundancy to your stack, etc. Like everything he said is possible if your technology stack living in AWS was designed to survive it. Everyone who has ever had the "we lost your data" email from AWS knows at the end of the day the cloud is just someone else's data center with neat provisioning tools and services.
By houssc 2 hours ago
The problem is that lots of people seem to be under the impression that they are doing it right because they are using AWS. They don't realize that AWS is a toolbox, not a 'ready made solution for redundancy against all catastrophes you are possibly exposed to'. They use that to their advantage by pricing such solutions at a level that people will either pay through the nose or will be left without recourse when AWS loses their data. It's stupid, but at the same time these beliefs are surprisingly wide spread.
By jacquesm 2 hours ago
If I were a bit more bloody-minded I would launch a service for vibe-coded apps that, under the hood, did everything "the right way" and just charged a flat fee + percent on the underlying.
I feel like if this was done correctly it would eat a bunch of the market, but I question how many people are actually willing to pay for "the right way". The last time I had that experience it was with Heroku which was quite a leaky abstraction.
By jaggederest a minute ago
Isn’t the problem that multiple datacenters in one zone were blown up?
By echoangle 2 hours ago
They had nine years and more money than god to build redundancy in an unstable region.
By nobodyandproud 2 hours ago
If it's an unstable region, then it might not result in a good return, especially since a blown up data center is 100% loss.
By nomel 2 hours ago
They did build redundancy but most of it was bombed.
By wmf 43 minutes ago
Good. Genocide and everyone who supports it is abhorrent and immoral. The IDF are international criminals, and their leader should answer question about his actions in the ICC. Amazon/Bezos funds genocide, and their genocide datacenters don't have a right to exist in the regions they wish to exterminate.
By recursivegirth 37 minutes ago
IDF wants to exterminate Bahrain and UAE?
By thesmtsolver2 17 minutes ago
Right. And Iran funded Hamas and the Iranian leadership aren’t?
By anon48293 28 minutes ago
> genocide datacenters
By seizethecheese 23 minutes ago
that quote is definitely making its way into a lawsuit
By jasonfarnon 2 hours ago
He forgot to add "if it's Multi-AZ" ;)
By sparkling 3 hours ago
> "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," AWS said in the status update
this is one of one of those things - were in the current era either a cloud provider should provide automatic backups in another geographic zone.
if you're in us-east, then your back-ups should ideally be in eu-west + africa for redundancy.
By dzonga an hour ago
That's absolutely something you can configure your S3 bucket to do if you want (I have one of mine replicating elsewhere).
The amount of data S3 stores "automatically replicating" to other geographical locations would make things prohibitively expensive, especially when you consider the daily delta, and how much of that is ephemeral or frequently mutated data that is stored. The bandwidth costs alone would be eye-watering, let alone the storage costs.
S3 cannot make any automated decision about whether data is, or isn't important, and if they did they'd only open themselves up to lawsuits if they guessed wrong. That's why it's made an option for the end user to enable replication if they want to, or choose to replicate their own data.
By Twirrim an hour ago
> The amount of data S3 stores "automatically replicating" to other geographical locations would make things prohibitively expensive
It did work like this! And it was! My recollection is that the first S3 was out of SEA and had no user concept of region. Then “VDC” was added in virginia. That provided API endpoints in what became us-east-1. A bucket could be accessed from either location, and the original intent was for object store to replicate between them. By the time dub/eu-west-1 came along that was obviously not tenable; itd take 10s of gbs to replicate.
So S3 became regional. But the original sea/vdc deployments still had shared APIs and data in both regions. Your object would be stored in the region of the API you geolocated to via DNS, but read from either. _eventually_ all the data migrated to IAD, but those API endpoints were transparently proxying across the continent until 2013 or so.
And of course glacier had much more interesting takes on this with cross dc/az/region erasure encoding. But i dont think any of the wacky multi dimensional cross region stuff ever materialised in practice.
PS: hi!
By donavanm 2 minutes ago
It's not really a black swan event just an unlikely one. If it were one it would not have been something people talked about before.
By boelboel an hour ago
The minute you cross borders you run into data sovereignty concerns. No idea if it applies at the subnational level (US states, Emirates in the UAE etc) but it wouldn't surprise me if it did in some cases.
By ern 38 minutes ago
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.
By rishikeshs 3 hours ago
Hi, I'm from the future. You might want to consider storing the data somewhere besides an Azure datacenter in the UAE.
By jackb4040 3 hours ago
> the government requirements requires me to store data only in UAE!
By r_lee 3 hours ago
... but not only in an Azure datacenter!
(The obvious option here might be an encrypted backup on some hard drives in a safe in a local office.)
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago
turns out reading comprehension skills have still not gotten better in the future
By birdatlaw 3 hours ago
In the future, some companies begin to store their data on-premises away from big centralized datacenters. But many companies do not, due to costs and the general friction of changing how things are done.
If OP tells me the name of his company I can hop in my time machine and tell him how it plays out.
By jackb4040 3 hours ago
MENA is the on-prem capital of the world, don't worry.
By noeltock 2 hours ago
Are you me from the future? I'm not talking to future strangers. Tell me to deliver the bad news myself from the future, in the future.
By rzzzt 3 hours ago
I'm from the past and I concur.
By SecretDreams 26 minutes ago
Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of national policies, as opposed to a weird authoritarian thing that only China and Russia imposed on their citizens, we[1] spent a bunch of time explaining to their lawmakers that having geographical redundancy was a good thing, actually, and that you should stop insisting on where the data resided for jurisdictional purposes and start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived.
[1] OK, "we" here is probably just me -- it was one of those things where the chances of successfully convincing anyone was so small, and the commercial advantages of just nodding along, and then changing your product offering was so great, that really very few people raised it or had reason to. But somebody had to!
By dannyobrien 2 hours ago
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 assure you that lawmakers were not thinking about efficient disaster recovery plans or back ups when they made the laws. You can also create reasonably diversified data silos within a country.
As an aside, it is quite crazy the world we live in. I am with the majority where I expected Amazon to be more redundant, but I still marvel at the assumption that a US dev can spin up multiple redundant and data sovereign servers in dozens of countries with efficient caching, failover and redundancy (enough to survive an earthquake or targeted missile attack) from their own home. Even a few hours of outage in a foreign country is considered unacceptable.
By wand3r an hour ago
See my other answers, but briefly: no, they were not thinking about this, which is why we were raising it. I guess the counterintuitive point we were trying to get across is that with most things, the best way to keep it safe from being lost is to put it in a known place, and lock it away. But for data, the strategy -- for that scenario -- is to keep it in a lot of places, with heterogenous defense strategies. This is for data loss, of course, not access or surveillance or unlawful processing. But there is a cost as well as a benefit to deliberately limiting your options.
(I can feel someone saying "but surely having redundancy in one country is good enough, so I'll just say that I know relatively sane people who try to have hemispheric redundancy in their data, and also you never know when two different-in-every-quality-but one locations will suffer from the same disaster. Floods; heat-waves; national protests and strikes. It's surprising how often rare things happen!)
On your second point, it really is crazy. And also amazing that this is a capability that is -- or should be -- available to anyone in the world, not just in the US, and not just devs. Hopefully without also having to think about their data suddenly finding itself in a warzone.
By dannyobrien 15 minutes ago
Is there not more than one data center in your country? Is the power feed at your office too small to put a computer there?
By mitxela an hour ago
I think both of these things are (very) often true, but it is also true that if I'm going to have backups, it is (all other things being equal) better to minimize correlated risk. The assumption in a lot of these conversations is that having the data "in one place" (ie inside a country) was "safer" than having it in "somewhere else". The tougher counterintuitive argument was that it can be safer to have data stored in multiple places, for some risk assessments -- and that for others, having data close by was less important, in the case of seizure or surveillance or illegal use, than who had legal or effective access to that data.
By dannyobrien an hour ago
and start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived
Yeah, that was/is just another problem. Considering how that was actually handled in the real world before data residency laws came into force, I'm glad 'we' didn't convince those countries to put their citizens data at risk.
By kjs3 2 hours ago
I'm not sure you were disagreeing with (past) me; but if you were, could you expand on your point?
By dannyobrien 2 hours ago
I'm disagreeing with you. I in the before time, I had all sorts of conversations around this topic with any number of cloud providers that were like:
Us: We are concerned about our citizens (US) data, how are you managing the databases.
Clout Provider (CP): They are only managed by fully background check employees.
Us: Yeah, but where are they? What is their citizenship?
CP: Um...mostly Eastern Europe. Lots in RU. (another CP proudly said "they're pretty much all in China...for cost containment").
Us: ...
Us: We are concerned about our citizens (EU) data, how are you managing encryption?
CP: Everything is perfectly encrypted with hardware HSMs and all the FIPS and stuff.
Us: So...where are the folks who run the HSMs?
CP: Um...mostly SV. Some in the EU.
Us: But can you assemble a quorum of US citizens for the HSM?
CP: Of course!
Us: ...
And on and on. Not to put too fine a point on it, many of us have no faith that vendors self policing international data protection in the face of government level pressure on companies and employees would work. Not that it can't, I don't think it would.
By kjs3 an hour ago
(I like the accidental pun of "Clout Provider" btw, which sadly conveys some of what they try to imply).
We may not be disagreeing that much. My argument was, and is, it's not about where the data is, it's about who has control over it. The counter-argument was "well if it's in another country, then we don't have jurisdiction, so it's going to be much harder". But what you need jurisdiction over is the people. Otherwise, you end up with multi-national corporate end-runs where you have shonky companies offering to store data locally, but who knows what department has control and access.
To be fair, the context I was having these conversations was countries arguing for data residency to combat the threat of mass surveillance (corporate and governmental) in the US, and the limited protections their users had relative to US nationals. But again, the problem is that it assumes that jurisdiction remains territorial: which is not how this was ever going to play out. The next wave after data residency requirements, beyond the usual extraterritorial intelligence community actions, was laws like the US CLOUD Act, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act, and Australia's TIA law, which effectively attempts to provide regular government departments and law enforcement with the legal ability to access data that would technically be on foreign soil.
My point was not that corporations should not self-police, but the concept of "it's stored here so we can oversee it" is not as clearcut as it seemed, and it risks introducing a new level of complexity to resiliently storing data. Which may be worth the price, but was never considered at the level this was discussed.
By dannyobrien 32 minutes ago
You can always selfhost
By jbverschoor 2 hours ago
... in the UAE, so only less risky if your office is remote enough it doesn't also make a nice target (like, say, located within/near Dubai's Internet City).
By alistairSH an hour ago
me (Middle East)
├── me-south-1 (Bahrain) DOWN since 2026-04
│ ├── mes1-az1 me (Middle East)
├── me-south-1 (Bahrain) DOWN since 2026-04
│ ├── mes1-az1 DOWN
│ │ └── mes1-mct1-az1 (Oman, Muscat)
│ ├── mes1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01
│ └── mes1-az3 DOWN
├── me-central-1 (United Arab Emirates)
│ ├── mec1-az1
│ ├── mec1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01
│ └── mec1-az3 DOWN since 2026-03-01
└── il-central-1 (Israel, Tel Aviv)
├── ilc1-az1
├── ilc1-az2
└── ilc1-az3
DOWN
│ │ └── mes1-mct1-az1 (Oman, Muscat)
│ ├── mes1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01
│ └── mes1-az3 DOWN
├── me-central-1 (United Arab Emirates)
│ ├── mec1-az1
│ ├── mec1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01
│ └── mec1-az3 DOWN since 2026-03-01
└── il-central-1 (Israel, Tel Aviv)
├── ilc1-az1
├── ilc1-az2
└── ilc1-az3
By weinzierl 24 minutes ago
The data center layout should look something like this:
me (Middle East)
├── me-south-1 (Bahrain) DOWN since 2026-04
│ ├── mes1-az1 DOWN
│ │ └── mes1-mct1-az1 (Oman, Muscat) ???
│ ├── mes1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01
│ └── mes1-az3 DOWN
├── me-central-1 (United Arab Emirates)
│ ├── mec1-az1
│ ├── mec1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01
│ └── mec1-az3 DOWN since 2026-03-01
└── il-central-1 (Israel, Tel Aviv)
├── ilc1-az1
├── ilc1-az2
└── ilc1-az3
Not sure about the Muscat local zone, whole me-south-1 region has been reported down despite Muscat still being operational.
If someone had told me a year ago that a whole AWS region could go down I'd called them crazy, but now me is close to exactly that happening.
No disaster recovery plan? No offsite backups? Someone failed to applied the most basic principles that have existed for decades.
By Art9681 4 hours ago
That depends on the data. If this is EBS or single-AZ S3, then from Amazon's perspective this was correct. Backup responsibly (for any data that does need to be backed up) lives with the customer, and Amazon has no way of knowing about that. EBS data data is unrecoverable, and that's what's reported.
Now if this was multi-AZ S3 or whatever then this would be significant.
The article does not tell us what products were impacted.
By advisedwang 3 hours ago
I was unaware that Amazon even sold single AZ S3. 20% discount. Doesn't seem worth it. By the time I commit to purchasing S3 space, it has to be important data.
I get that S3 is convenient and reasonably performant, but it is not cheap at all.
By altcognito 3 hours ago
That’s simply not true. I use S3 (well GCS mostly) for data that I wouldn’t be upset if it’s lost. And I pay the zonal discount for it.
By kevml 2 hours ago
Google internally has lots of possible redundancy levels for data.
They don't sell any of the lower and less reliable levels to the public, I suspect simply because the reputational damage from losing user data is so bad, and the news will take no notice of the fact the user got a discount for less reliable storage.
By londons_explore 2 hours ago
You call it "discount" but it's a 20% discount on a 10x inflated price, so it's an 8x inflated price
By mitxela an hour ago
Single AZ S3 has other benefits. The point isn't the price, it's that it's _highly performant_ since you can keep all of your reads in the same AZ
By cheeze 2 hours ago
> EBS data data (sic) is unrecoverable, and that's what's reported.
I don't see where this is reported? TFA does not mention EBS. In fact, TFA seems to be nigh content-free, beyond "AWS (allegedly, and is uncited) says they cannot restore some data."
> The article does not tell us what products were impacted.
… right … which conflicts with EBS being what's reported …
(I would agree with your point that if EBS, or some AZ-level data was lost, then, yeah, that's the contract.)
By deathanatos an hour ago
The more dramatic contingency you have to plan for, the more expensive the plan gets.
Earlier this week I mentioned that if we lose enough data centres to bring our operation down, the first items in the to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel.
By rbanffy 4 hours ago
> to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel.
I toured a datacenter once back in the early 2000s and they showed me 30 days of generator fuel storage. When i asked them why 30 days and not 35 they replied "we're such a major customer of both electricity and fuel that if we don't get electricity or fuel for 30 days there's way bigger problems than your website not being online" hah.
By chasd00 3 hours ago
You also need to understand whether the generator backup actually runs everything. Where I work it doesn't. Only "essential" systems get backup power.
And if the data center is more than about 5 years old it almost certainly was not planned with adequate backup power to run racks of GPUs.
By SoftTalker an hour ago
That's probably already true for 7 days or less
By mr_mitm 3 hours ago
Large storms regularly result in some customers with lack of utility power for more than 7 days for some customers. When storms take out major transmission lines and roads and bridges, you can end up with some pretty lengthy outages, and fuel deliveries will also be difficult.
Look at data center responses from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. This guy [1] was onsite for Katrina. Lost utility power on August 29. They did have some access to fuel on Sep 1, but pretty spotty until maybe the 3rd. Looks like power started coming back in some places Sep 8, and maybe widely restored on Sep 14th.
I would say, by 7 days in you'll probably have a good idea of if 30 days might not be enough.
7 days of unreliable electricity wouldn't be unheard of for a very large storm
By ehe78qhe 2 hours ago
I had the same discussion with a manager about the backups of financial contracts for cleaning school facilities.
He just couldn't get past the notion that if the six copies in four buildings across two states were all simultaneously physically destroyed, then most likely there are also no more schools left standing, and hence the contracts to clean them are null and void. Also, payment is now in booze and ammunition, not dollars.
By jiggawatts 3 hours ago
"Daddy, where were you when the flames reached our house?"
"I was in the office, reviewing Terraform plans"
By ares623 3 hours ago
Offsite to.. where? Sea? Data residency in Gulf states is very strict and basically nothing is leaving the countries
By nixass 3 hours ago
Typically 300 miles geographically but could be hard in some Gulf States
By firesteelrain 3 hours ago
In a Gulf State 300 miles is still within ballistic missile range and any belligerent is going to target both places if at all.
Strictly speaking from a missile defense perspective there's an argument 2 sites are a waste of valuable interceptors.
By XorNot 2 hours ago
They're likely going to target two datacenters, not the datacenters + your medium sized company's office NAS and the safe in the office manager's home.
(Encryption handles confidentiality concerns.)
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago
> (Encryption handles confidentiality concerns.)
Which is why data residency is such a stupid concept.
By niij an hour ago
A datacenter not owned/run by a major US or Israeli company seems like it might be a good first step.
By abeyer 3 hours ago
Do you think they could ask for a backup
By KnightHawk3 2 hours ago
If you had data at two facilities in different countries hundreds of miles apart (about 250 miles between Dubai and Bahrain), that would count as offsite backup most of the time.
Certainly, this event will inform people's disaster recovery plans, but when you're also looking at data residency requirements, small countries, and state level military action against your hosting provider, it can be hard to keep your data.
By toast0 2 hours ago
But that is something the customer needs to consider. AWS doesnt offer that as standard if your data is in one zone, and during a war even multiple zones in the same region may not be sufficient.
By cpncrunch 3 hours ago
Nothing is ever real-time.
Eventual consistency leads to some data are not backed up.
You talking as if this is some mom-and-pop shop that you run.
By yipinwong 3 hours ago
That isn't recovery from AWS's point of view. If the customer has data in another region, thats great for them but AWS isn't really a part of that, AWS doesn't know which data is fungible in every case. Sure they have some data is replicated, what they can't recover is the data THEY do not replicate.
By jeremyjh 3 hours ago
You apparently don't do business out here with the unwashed masses where "whadda mean with all that nonsense? It's cloud...it's by definition safe[1][2]!" is an all too common preconception.
[1] That's a quote, including the Boston accent.
[2] The only one I had that was better was a C-level who said "why are you asking for all this money for security in Azure. It's Microsoft so it's already secure.". That, too, is a quote.
By kjs3 2 hours ago
Did local laws permit?
By rokhayakebe 3 hours ago
Not all data is allowed to leave all countries.
By tjwebbnorfolk 2 hours ago
If a AWS customer chooses to store their data in a single AZ, that is a design choice. AWS is not taking a daily copy of a entire regions S3 cluster and driving it to some warehouse for a "just in case" situation. That is why Multi-AZ exists.
By sparkling 3 hours ago
Isn't S3 claiming eleven nines of data durability?
"Additionally, S3 stores data redundantly across a minimum of 3 Availability Zones by default, providing built-in resilience against widespread disaster."
I wonder if "can't restore some data" includes any S3 data?
I'd expect to lose EC2 instance EBS data in the event of a datacenter being destroyed, but I kinda assume I wouldn't lose S3 data? Now I'm wondering if RDS backups are more like EBS or S3...
The footnote which says that is the design durability against equipment failure literally begins:
> In the unlikely case of the loss or damage to all or part of an AWS Availability Zone, data in a One Zone storage class may be lost. For example, events like fire and water damage could result in data loss
By jameshart 3 hours ago
Even if they have payable SLA on this, most SLAs have Acts of God and Acts of War exemption.
By stackskipton 3 hours ago
But do they have Act of Special Operation exemptions?
By lbreakjai 2 hours ago
The SLA excludes force majeure.
By beejiu 3 hours ago
Making a probabilistic claim while excluding a factor that dominates those statistics is... is quite creative accounting.
By the8472 3 hours ago
Force majeure carveouts are really common in every type of contract.
You should check your home insurance contract, for instance... It likely would not cover an ICBM strike.
By mjr00 2 hours ago
Somehow I feel like the biggest post-apocalyptic problem will be the loss of home equity due to uninsured damage causing a collapse of financial markets.
By sire-vc 2 hours ago
Are you saying that most data loss happens because your data center gets blown up in a shooting war? Like, AWS is the first digital service provider to lose data in decades?
By mpyne 2 hours ago
I'm saying that if you have eliminated more mundane failures like dying harddrives, cosmic rays and so on from your systems and your calculation ends up with 11 nines then actually those "force majeure" events are probable enough that they dominate whatever other residuals are supposedly hiding in those last 0.0000000001%.
The region has seen a bunch of wars in the last 100 years, so the annual war-rate is > 1%. Even if we generously add the assumption that only 1 in 100 wars affects a datacenter you can see that wars become a major source of correlated hardware failures that they need to solve to actually deliver that kind of reliability.
By the8472 2 hours ago
Cosmic rays and dying hard drives are not force majeure though.
By mpyne an hour ago
I think it's what most people comparing provider SLAs would expect
By eli 2 hours ago
Creative accounting works and is good because it works. If your customers give you more money because you lied to them, but it's legal, then it's good.
By mitxela an hour ago
Are you suggesting that their technical documents have separate availability numbers to predict geopolitical events and war?
By unethical_ban 2 hours ago
The sales pitch should change from "probabilistically we will NEVER lose your data" to "you are most likely to lose your data due to wars, terrorists, software bugs, someone losing the master encryption key, the government forcing us to...".
Offsite backups are sadly rare these days, and aws sales is the main reason why.
By throwawaythekey 36 minutes ago
This
By LastTrain 3 hours ago
I don't think this has any teeth. They don't compensate in the event of loss afaict.
By jonahx 4 hours ago
They say it's "designed for" 11 9s, not guaranteed.
By advisedwang 3 hours ago
But if they want to design for extreme probabilities you need to account for tail risks, so their design should have included a missile defense system.
At some point you need to start worrying about asteroid defense too.
By the8472 3 hours ago
Considering all the data they have globally, they might still be compliant.
By rbanffy 4 hours ago
Well… they have a good excuse.
By rbanffy 4 hours ago
They say "some" data, i wonder what percentage that really is. I haven't seen pictures but I find it hard to imagine all of me-south-1 was completely leveled to the point where's there's just nothing left. On the other hand, if you have 100 rows of racks and then randomly take out a contiguous 10% across both rows and columns it may be functionally equivalent to taking out everything.
By chasd00 2 hours ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the engineers said "we can probably recover between 20-30% of the data but it will cost 200 hours of engineering and the data will be 7 months old by then" and the beancounters said "we'd rather have one news cycle rather than the news watching what we can and cannot recover + save those 200 hours, we'll just say it's all gone".
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago
"..even if something happens only once in a billion requests, that means it happens multiple times per day within S3."
but one in a trillion...
By vanjajaja1 43 minutes ago
I wonder if they'll start adding an underground bunker to new data centers so you can put an S3 replica there?
By skybrian 3 hours ago
Guess those multi-AZ promises have an asterisk when actual missiles are involved. Makes you double-check your own off-site backups.
By Kvarnek an hour ago
Does this mean that even with 3 availability zones for Amazon S3 storage, that some data is lost?
By markive a day ago
Did they say its S3 data? Could also be single-az EBS or RDS.
By OrangeDelonge a day ago
Obviously what you understand is different from the reality after you actually follow all the footnotes.
By MiroslavPokorny a day ago
I think so.
Although the more paranoid AWS customers who turned on (and pay for) S3 cross region replication or similar cross region DR for other services would be fine.
By gregw2 3 hours ago
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 they've deliberately excluded (such as meteor strike) or else every FMECA would be full of failure modes that have never been measured, and are not worth anyone's time worrying about. These exclusions vary by application--a time capsule, seed vault, etc are intended to outlast wars and collapses of empires. Typically a bunch of data centres aren't designed to withstand such failures.
I do think however it'd be reasonable to include the prospect of war for calculating data centre / cloud service availability. Especially in a place such as Bahrain where the country is obviously concerned enough about the prospect of war to have built very permanent and expensive air/missile defence sites. New Zealand on the other hand--maybe not so important to consider.
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?
"You choose the AWS Region(s) in which your content is stored. You can replicate and back up your content in more than one AWS Region. We will not move or replicate your content outside of your chosen AWS Region(s) without your agreement."
By testplzignore 3 hours ago
That would be a legal nightmare. They don't necessarily know what customers' data residency requirements are.
By ericpruitt 3 hours ago
This. We have (well, had) customers running in me-south-1 and once the first AZ went down we wanted to proactively move their data to other regions even just as cold backups. But our legal department slapped that down pretty quickly.
By bumblehean 2 hours ago
Most likely, their own data residency terms prohibit this. It would be interesting to know if, when 2 out of 3 AZs got destroyed, customers got a heads up to move their data to a different region?
By sparkling 3 hours ago
We received repeated, constant heads up to move our data by the first AZ much less second. The problem is that nobody is storing data in Bahrain unless there are data residency requirements for it.
nobody wakes up one morning and chooses to launch instances, CDN or S3 and would choose Bahrain as that without a requirement to, we were contractually and legally forbidden (in the middle as a vendor) to copy even encrypted data where we don't have the key out for redundancy, so the best we could do was tell our subcustomers to download all of their buckets to their office or some employee laptops at their office
By leftbehind 2 hours ago
AZs weren’t meant to be disaster resistant, eg, an earthquake or hurricane could take out a whole region.
Regions were always the scale of disaster isolation on AWS.
By zmgsabst 3 hours ago
Regions are really the scale of disaster isolation only in extreme cases - such as global catastrophe (meteor strike taking out a city) or in this case, when actively targeted in war. I don't really see the same thing happening to a US or European region.
By flumpcakes 3 hours ago
Hey but that's exactly as per design. It is the customer's responsibility to store stuff elsewhere as DR backup, not AWS.
By ernsheong 2 hours ago
That's the excuse they'll say, yes, then we quote back to them "eleven nines" and they come up with an excuse for that too
By mitxela an hour ago
What a nightmare scenario to tabletop. How do you even begin to recover from something like this?
By michael-bey 4 hours ago
For providers that just act as middlemen, I assume data that doesn't have a residency requirement is stored outside, so probably
a) letting customers in other areas know that their data is backed up to another continent
b) asking the AI model of your choice to translate the following into PR-speak: "Because of the boneheaded data residency requirements in this country, all your data is gone, and we weren't able to do anything about it - here's an empty copy of a re-setup version of whatever infrastructure we provide, glhf setting up everything from scratch, hope you had backups"
For customers who use such a provider or operate primarily in that area: Restore from local backups, or tell whoever depended on you that everything is gone and if you really didn't have backups, probably close up shop.
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago
Backups in a different region?
By NegativeLatency 3 hours ago
Works unless local laws specifically block you doing that which they do for some classes of data in some countries.
Multi-cloud in the same country (if that exists in the country and is far enough apart) maybe.
By noir_lord 3 hours ago
I wonder what exactly these laws prohibit. Like, does it apply to a fully encrypted cold-copy on Amazon Glacier? If you don't store the encryption key outside of UAE, I'd say this isn't even the same data that gets transferred to the third party, it's just some random blob. But I have no idea if the authorities of that country would agree and if it's even actually enforced for that matter, or if it's one of those laws that actually cause problems only if you follow them.
By krick 37 minutes ago
Do cloud providers even share data center locations so you can assess the "far enough" bit yourself?
By criemen 3 hours ago
You usually get city level location information. Depends on your definition for 'far enough' if that works for you.
me-south-1 is about 250 miles away from me-central-1, but that's not far enough in this instance. Given that, I think city level location information should be good enough.
250 miles is pretty good for weather or not specifically targeted destruction (wildfire / industrial explosions / arson), but it's clearly not enough if your data is in a building targeted in a regional war. Assuming datacenters remain targets in wartime, I think it's fair to assume if one datacenter in any particular country is attacked, all the rest of the datacenters in that country are likely to be attacked, too. In that case, offline storage (tapes and things) in inconspicuous locations might be the way.
By toast0 2 hours ago
No - and usually the reason is so they cannot be targeted.
By flumpcakes 3 hours ago
Backup both locally and everywhere no matter what.
By rvz 3 hours ago
50%+ of companies that lose all of their data go out of business in 6 months.
DR/BCP costs are readily justified by doing a Business Impact Analysis (BIA).. budget up to some fraction of risk cost * risk probability.
And a friendly reminder that replication isn't a tested data backup.
By burnt-resistor 3 hours ago
Uh.
Uh-oh.
It's not clear from their messaging if multiple availability zones were severely damaged, or if the damage to one availability zone was simply more than they planned for. If it's the latter, that's a big uh-oh.
The wording certainly seems very careful:
"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand"
By phendrenad2 2 hours ago
I'm sorry but your data is in another castle.
By chews 19 hours ago
This should have been in that super Dario game.
By Chance-Device 4 hours ago
It was always a bad bet for billionaires like Bezos to become Trump enablers. You weren't buying a seat at the table, or the privilege of being left alone, you were just signing yourself up to be force-fed shit sandwiches over and over (And the shit-to-bread ratio gets worse as time goes on)
You should have used your considerable resources to fight. If only billionaires would oppose aspiring tyrants with the same zeal with which they oppose even minor tax increases.
By SmirkingRevenge 3 hours ago
Bezos hasn't lost anything from this. He's only gotten richer.
By mitxela an hour ago
He had little choice. The Trump tariffs could've been a massive, massive blow to Amazon, so I'm sure he felt he had to get out in front of them and buy some influence with the incoming administration.
See also Tim Cook. Doesn't make it right to suck up to Trump, but it was, and unfortunately still is, a rational move.
By CamperBob2 2 hours ago
How about ... stop bombing other countries? Trump is like a
professional liar. From "no more forever wars" to "hey this is
what must be done now" in a second. He is almost as good as
Putin with regards to lies - the ultimate agent Krasnov. Minus
the apparent dementia now.
By shevy-java 3 hours ago
It's a war that he started to benefit Israel, and is now causing suffering for so many others.
By Cyclone_ 3 hours ago
Israel had been trying to get every president to bomb Iran for decades. There's a reason they wouldn't do it themselves. They finally got a president stupid enough to listen.
By mitxela an hour ago
You can't have a bunch of deranged mullahs threaten the entire region and world with missiles or nukes. Chanting "death to America" for half a century and killing thousands of Americans directly or indirectly. America should have blasted the hell out of the mullahs when they took hostages about 50 years ago. This is the first administration in a long time with the cohones to do something about it.
By drnick1 3 hours ago
This is not exactly a nuanced view of the conflict, and in either case, the fact that you don't like that someone on the other side of the world is chanting death to America doesn't give you a bonus card for a free attack.
Seriously, it's like people, when deciding whether to launch a war or not, are not thinking "how will the other side react and will this conflict benefit me" but instead they are only thinking "does this nation deserve to get hit".
Well, news flash, your moral outrage does not translate into you not suffering more than your opponent during a conflict. It's a completely separate issue, and a personal issue between you and your priest or rabbi. When it comes to starting wars, you have to look at military capabilities and long term outcomes, not "does this nation deserve to be attacked".
By carefree-bob 3 hours ago
> You can't have a bunch of deranged mullahs threaten the entire region and world with missiles or nukes.
Can and do. It's called the United States of America.
By mitxela an hour ago
> This is the first administration in a long time with the cohones to do something about it.
Containment worked WAY WAY better than "doing something about it" and surrendering the strait to them. They "solved it" by aerosolizing asbestos everywhere and still have no cleanup plan. Sometimes containment works much better, which is why intelligent foreign policy worked the problem from that angle.
Wasn't victory declared 1 year ago and also a number of months ago?
By darkarmani 2 hours ago
You mean the same people who were told to keep the hostages until after Reagan got elected?
The same people who bought weapons sold by the Reagan administration to fund the Sandistas?
That’s some revisionist history you’ve got there.
By clownstrikelol 2 hours ago
Do you know why Iranians were chanting "Death To America"? Because we toppled their democratically elected government in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator so that we could continue to pillage their oil.(1) When the mullahs finally toppled that dictator in 1979 they had reason to be angry with us. This is especially true because almost immediately afterwards, in the 1980s, we used our proxy Saddam Hussein to launch a war against Iran, in which over a million Iranians were killed. During this time we provided Hussein with the means to make both chemical weapons and biological weapons (2), which Iraq used extensively against Iran. I suspect if another country did the same to us, we'd be chanting "Death to XYZ" too.
We're chanting "Death to Iran" - isn't turnabout fair play?
By mitxela an hour ago
This is the flipside of data residency requirements that countries are now starting to require. If the EU wants to keep data in the EU, then great, but when the war comes and energy and infrastructure are hit, people would have wished for backups in North America, Asia, and the middle east.
By carefree-bob 4 hours ago
The EU is big enough to house multiple regions for multiple cloud providers, all in the same jurisdiction (so they can actually be used within data sovereignty requirements). Not true for most of the other places in Asia/UK/South America/etc.
By flumpcakes 3 hours ago
I'm comfortable enough with the Sydney and Melbourne AWS regions - about 700km (400 miles) apart and with (at least) 3 AZs in each. If something takes out enough AWS datacenters to lose some of work's or client data stored across all that, the uptime and resilience of the CRUD platforms I'm responsible for will not be very high on my personal priority list. (At least on AWS datacenter is within 10km of my home. I'm hoping that well before Australia gets involved in the sort of geopolitical conflict that might mean missile strikes against civilian infrastructure, I'll have headed bush to hang out with my off grid friends)
By bigiain 2 hours ago
I don't think this is a flipside, unless you're thinking from the PoV of data itself rather than its owners.
By numpad0 4 hours ago
For long-term backups you want offline cold storage in an underground facility in a friendly jurisdiction, not a datacenter.
By kibwen 4 hours ago
We've beer-o-clock wargamed this a bit.
If I had an "important enough" client, I think I'd store all out local (Sydney + Melbourne AWS cross region) data to AWS Singapore (to protect against Australian jurisdictional and political risks) and to a non AWS cloud provider in the EU somewhere. I reckon thatd be close to as resilient a pile of hard drives in an underground bunker, for significantly less setup and ongoing cost, while also being much more available when needed. (Can you imagine the queue at the underground bunker when multiple AWS regions get bombed? Or even imagine getting to the bunker in "a friendly jurisdiction" while a shooting war is taking place?)
We haven't worked out a decent solution to Visa and Mastercard payment network going down for more than a couple of cloud billing cycles though.
By bigiain 2 hours ago
More likely than the network going down is you getting banned from the network because someone thought you were selling porn.
By mitxela an hour ago
If you can not restore data from EU based Amazon Datacenters because it’s destroyed … you will definitely have better things to do like packing your go bag or buying the last groceries for a while.
By BonoboIO 4 hours ago
Ah yeah, the EU, a historically stable area.
By fooker 2 hours ago
Border between France and Germany is a particularly well know peaceful area, especially Alsace-Lorraine.
By sire-vc an hour ago
data residency requirements in the EU don't categorically exclude data storage in other countries. The EDPB explicitly recognizes encrypted backups, for example, as valid as long as the keys remain in the EU and there's a secure transfer mechanism (p. 30) exactly for reasons such as disaster recovery.
War did not randomly came. America intentionally caused it.
And has lawless goverment and unaccountable tech industry making it bad place for data.
By watwut 4 hours ago
I wonder if Amazon can sue the US govt bc they basically caused this material loss to their business. I'm sure they cannot. Maybe a lawyer can explain why?
By aprilthird2021 4 hours ago
In US courts you can sue anyone for anything but you might not win. The US government has sovereign immunity from most civil liability. As for the legal system in Bahrain I have no idea but hypothetically even if Amazon could somehow win a judgment they wouldn't be able to collect.
By nradov 3 hours ago
Why wouldn't they be able to collect? As long as Amazon does business in a country the legal system in that country can collect.
By jeltz 2 hours ago
How would the Bahrain legal system force the USA to pay reparations for the war it started? Seize all US assets, the way we did with Russia?
By mitxela an hour ago
"Use the cloud" they say.
"It's the only way." the true believers say.
"You can't run your own computer systems.", they say.
"Trust us.", they say.
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Wildberries has nothing to do with AWS.
"Massive centralisation of computing can never go wrong."
"We don't need to host our own systems, it's all safe in one of 20 global data centers."
etc etc
By wewewedxfgdf 4 hours ago
Can you post the specs on your missile defense system for your home lab?
How are you dealing with the rise of low-cast swarm attacks from drones?
Is it land-based, sea-based or space-based and at what point of the trajectory do you target and do you use jamming?
By shitloadofbooks 3 hours ago
I would but then I'd have to kill you.
By sire-vc an hour ago
Eh I get your point but would point out that distribution does mitigate the risk here, having all your data in DC's that can be seen from space also isn't a panacea when your next door neighbour targets them in retaliation for what your ally did.
By noir_lord 3 hours ago
this is reductionist to the point of absurdism.
It can be true that using cloud storage, using managed services, and paying a premium is still worth it for a lot of people and organizations, and while not perfect, still a hell of a lot better compared to the fully in your control tape backups that you distribute to different physical locations every week.
I'm not a particular fan of relying on one provider or vendor lock in, but to pretend they don't provide a service with failure rates that are low enough to be very useful is a very short-sighted take.
By justonenote 3 hours ago
What's you point? That if you had run your own DC in that region (because that was your business requirement) then you'd have better missile defense than AWS?
Or maybe AWS or DIY, you are always responsible for geographic diversity?
Anyone losing data over this lost it because they'd literally told AWS to only store it in one place.
By knorker 3 hours ago
You don't need better missile defense than AWS. You don't need missile defense at all because you won't be a target. 99.999999% of the land has no missile threat on it. You are actively increasing the threat to your business by running it on the same servers that military contractors run their software on.
By culi 3 hours ago
In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted, anyone should consider themselves a valid target.
It's true that you are less likely to be a target than a state-sponsored tech megacorp's data centers, but the risk is still present.
By vkou 3 hours ago
> In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted
Yes but that's clearly not this war. This is a missile war where high-value strategic military targets are the priority. The US and Israel hit some prisons, damaged some hospitals, and ofc killed 168 schoolchildren. They also targeted residential areas to assassinate important leaders. But Iran has not returned that. They've stuck pretty strictly to military targets with very few exceptions
If this was a war where bridges were a target, Iran would not be so successful. There's simply a too limited amount of missiles. Also only 20% of Saudi Arabia has citizenship while almost the whole rest is basically indentured servants. It's not like they could provoke a popular uprising or anything. There's no strategic value in hitting "bread lines"
By culi 3 hours ago
Risk is always present, We quantify it for a reason and then we mitigate if it's beyond a level we are comfortable.
Living is risk, every time I go to the shop for milk there is a non-zero chance I don't come back but the risk is so low I don't worry about it.
By noir_lord 3 hours ago
An American-run data center is much more likely to be targeted than some locally-owned and run company that isn't obviously connected to a foriegn power or the state that hosts it.
By anigbrowl 3 hours ago
The point is that AWS has the same problem as Wildberries.
There is no difference at all between Wildberries and AWS data centers.
If you don't know what Wildberries is then go watch their facilities systematically destroyed on YouTube - centralisation is a target.
If your organization runs on AWS then you should have a contingency plan for the data center being destroyed by drones. Is that on your risk management plan?
By wewewedxfgdf 3 hours ago
> What's you point?
Not the OP, but the point is that decentralized infrastructure is a lot more resilient to attacks of any kind.
By drnick1 3 hours ago
HN shitposting is the point. If you want actual pragmatic commentary, use Lobsters.
By gleezard 3 hours ago
Can't, not invited
By mitxela an hour ago
How about not bombing other countries and then acting surprised when retaliation happens? I mean clearly the problem isn't AWS as such - it is the problem that someone leading a country is totally clueless about the world. Only personal profit is in the interest of the orange clown.
By shevy-java 3 hours ago
> I mean clearly the problem isn't AWS as such
I get your main point, but just wanna point out that AWS is one of the largest military contractors in the world. They hold multi-billion dollar contracts from the DoD, USAF, CIA, and more. An estimated $4B a year in military spending goes to AWS
By cmiles8 3 hours ago
By krick 2 hours ago
By houssc 2 hours ago
By jacquesm 2 hours ago
By jaggederest a minute ago
By echoangle 2 hours ago
By nobodyandproud 2 hours ago
By nomel 2 hours ago
By wmf 43 minutes ago
By recursivegirth 37 minutes ago
By thesmtsolver2 17 minutes ago
By anon48293 28 minutes ago
By seizethecheese 23 minutes ago
By jasonfarnon 2 hours ago
By sparkling 3 hours ago
By selcuka an hour ago
By dogecoinbase 2 hours ago
By bdangubic 2 hours ago
By dzonga an hour ago
By Twirrim an hour ago
By donavanm 2 minutes ago
By boelboel an hour ago
By ern 38 minutes ago
By rishikeshs 3 hours ago
By jackb4040 3 hours ago
By r_lee 3 hours ago
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago
By birdatlaw 3 hours ago
By jackb4040 3 hours ago
By noeltock 2 hours ago
By rzzzt 3 hours ago
By SecretDreams 26 minutes ago
By dannyobrien 2 hours ago
By wand3r an hour ago
By dannyobrien 15 minutes ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By dannyobrien an hour ago
By kjs3 2 hours ago
By dannyobrien 2 hours ago
By kjs3 an hour ago
By dannyobrien 32 minutes ago
By jbverschoor 2 hours ago
By alistairSH an hour ago
By weinzierl 24 minutes ago
By weinzierl 23 minutes ago
By Art9681 4 hours ago
By advisedwang 3 hours ago
By altcognito 3 hours ago
By kevml 2 hours ago
By londons_explore 2 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By cheeze 2 hours ago
By deathanatos an hour ago
By rbanffy 4 hours ago
By chasd00 3 hours ago
By SoftTalker an hour ago
By mr_mitm 3 hours ago
By toast0 2 hours ago
By ehe78qhe 2 hours ago
By jiggawatts 3 hours ago
By ares623 3 hours ago
By nixass 3 hours ago
By firesteelrain 3 hours ago
By XorNot 2 hours ago
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago
By niij an hour ago
By abeyer 3 hours ago
By KnightHawk3 2 hours ago
By toast0 2 hours ago
By cpncrunch 3 hours ago
By yipinwong 3 hours ago
By jeremyjh 3 hours ago
By kjs3 2 hours ago
By rokhayakebe 3 hours ago
By tjwebbnorfolk 2 hours ago
By sparkling 3 hours ago
By bigiain 2 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By curuinor a day ago
By jameshart 3 hours ago
By stackskipton 3 hours ago
By lbreakjai 2 hours ago
By beejiu 3 hours ago
By the8472 3 hours ago
By mjr00 2 hours ago
By sire-vc 2 hours ago
By mpyne 2 hours ago
By the8472 2 hours ago
By mpyne an hour ago
By eli 2 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By unethical_ban 2 hours ago
By throwawaythekey 36 minutes ago
By LastTrain 3 hours ago
By jonahx 4 hours ago
By advisedwang 3 hours ago
By the8472 3 hours ago
By rbanffy 4 hours ago
By rbanffy 4 hours ago
By chasd00 2 hours ago
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago
By vanjajaja1 43 minutes ago
By skybrian 3 hours ago
By Kvarnek an hour ago
By markive a day ago
By OrangeDelonge a day ago
By MiroslavPokorny a day ago
By gregw2 3 hours ago
By dhx 15 hours ago
By 0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago
By testplzignore 3 hours ago
By ericpruitt 3 hours ago
By bumblehean 2 hours ago
By sparkling 3 hours ago
By leftbehind 2 hours ago
By zmgsabst 3 hours ago
By flumpcakes 3 hours ago
By ernsheong 2 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By michael-bey 4 hours ago
By tgsovlerkhgsel 2 hours ago
By NegativeLatency 3 hours ago
By noir_lord 3 hours ago
By krick 37 minutes ago
By criemen 3 hours ago
By toast0 2 hours ago
By flumpcakes 3 hours ago
By rvz 3 hours ago
By burnt-resistor 3 hours ago
By phendrenad2 2 hours ago
By chews 19 hours ago
By Chance-Device 4 hours ago
By SmirkingRevenge 3 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By CamperBob2 2 hours ago
By shevy-java 3 hours ago
By Cyclone_ 3 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By drnick1 3 hours ago
By carefree-bob 3 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By darkarmani 2 hours ago
By clownstrikelol 2 hours ago
By StanislavPetrov 2 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By carefree-bob 4 hours ago
By flumpcakes 3 hours ago
By bigiain 2 hours ago
By numpad0 4 hours ago
By kibwen 4 hours ago
By bigiain 2 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By BonoboIO 4 hours ago
By fooker 2 hours ago
By sire-vc an hour ago
By Barrin92 3 hours ago
By watwut 4 hours ago
By aprilthird2021 4 hours ago
By nradov 3 hours ago
By jeltz 2 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By wewewedxfgdf 4 hours ago
By shitloadofbooks 3 hours ago
By sire-vc an hour ago
By noir_lord 3 hours ago
By justonenote 3 hours ago
By knorker 3 hours ago
By culi 3 hours ago
By vkou 3 hours ago
By culi 3 hours ago
By noir_lord 3 hours ago
By anigbrowl 3 hours ago
By wewewedxfgdf 3 hours ago
By drnick1 3 hours ago
By gleezard 3 hours ago
By mitxela an hour ago
By shevy-java 3 hours ago
By culi 3 hours ago