‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

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

530 points · 452 comments · berkeleyjunk

  1. Art9681 · · focus · HN ↗
    No disaster recovery plan? No offsite backups? Someone failed to applied the most basic principles that have existed for decades.
    1. advisedwang · · focus · HN ↗
      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.

      1. altcognito · · focus · HN ↗
        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.

        1. kevml · · focus · HN ↗
          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.
          1. londons_explore · · focus · HN ↗
            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.

            1. kccqzy · · focus · HN ↗
              Most of Google's customers wouldn't know how to choose anyways, if these were exposed. My memory was quite hazy but I recall having a discussion with my colleague on choosing which Reed–Solomon code for our Colossus files, and apparently the choice was down to RS(8,3) or RS(9,3). I don't think even as Googlers we really had enough information to make an informed choice. Comparatively it was much easier to decide which cells to use for multi-location replication in Placer.
          2. mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
            You call it "discount" but it's a 20% discount on a 10x inflated price, so it's an 8x inflated price
Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.