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

530 points · 452 comments · berkeleyjunk

cmiles8 · 1789596948 · focus · HN ↗
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!"
<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cloud-computing-loudoun-county-virginia/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cloud-computing-loudoun-county-...
1. sparkling · 1789597551 · focus · HN ↗
  He forgot to add "if it's Multi-AZ" ;)
  1. bdangubic · 1789598648 · focus · HN ↗
    multi-AZ doesn’t help against multi-AZ drones :)
    dzonga · 1789602932 · focus · HN ↗
    black swan events.
    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.
    boelboel · 1789603396 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Twirrim · 1789604012 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    donavanm · 1789607085 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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!
    Twirrim · 1789623651 · focus · HN ↗
    Long time no see.
    2013-2014 would be about right, they were still in SEA when I joined in 2013 but were actively working on decommissioning it.
    ern · 1789604929 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    ployable7 · 1789612533 · focus · HN ↗
    It applies subnationally. Think about different gambling laws per US state, and if you’re running the infrastructure for that across state lines.
    pianopatrick · 1789616827 · focus · HN ↗
    "Black Swan" would be a good name for an attack drone
    TeMPOraL · 1789648105 · focus · HN ↗
    Along with "Outside Context", "Tail Risk", "Impossible to Predict", "Force Majeure" and "Spanish Inquisition".
    ngc248 · 1789628421 · focus · HN ↗
    they should provide and option for multi-AZ with drone defenders now
  2. dogecoinbase · 1789600131 · focus · HN ↗
    The me-south-1 (Bahrain) Region was three AZs: <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/regions/aws-regions.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg...
  3. selcuka · 1789602250 · focus · HN ↗
    > "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

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