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

530 points · 452 comments · berkeleyjunk

  1. markive · · focus · HN ↗
    Does this mean that even with 3 availability zones for Amazon S3 storage, that some data is lost?
    1. dhx · · focus · HN ↗
      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.

      [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49033240">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49033240

      [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Failure_Mode,_Effects,_and_Criticality_Analysis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Failure_Mode,_Effects,_and_Cri...

      1. 0cf8612b2e1e · · focus · HN ↗
        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?
        1. sparkling · · focus · HN ↗
          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?
          1. leftbehind · · focus · HN ↗
            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&#x27;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

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