‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

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

530 points · 452 comments · berkeleyjunk

  1. curuinor · · focus · HN ↗
    They guaranteed 11 9's durability, didn't they?

    e: Yep

    <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;s3&#x2F;storage-classes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;s3&#x2F;storage-classes&#x2F;

    1. beejiu · · focus · HN ↗
      The SLA excludes force majeure.
      1. the8472 · · focus · HN ↗
        Making a probabilistic claim while excluding a factor that dominates those statistics is... is quite creative accounting.
        1. mpyne · · focus · HN ↗
          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?
          1. the8472 · · focus · HN ↗
            I&#x27;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 &quot;force majeure&quot; 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 &gt; 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.

            1. mpyne · · focus · HN ↗
              Cosmic rays and dying hard drives are not force majeure though.
Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.