Thread

1. rishikeshs · 1789595308 · focus · HN ↗

   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.

   1. dannyobrien · 1789599969 · focus · HN ↗

      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!

      1. wand3r · 1789602743 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. bonestamp2 · 1789607614 · focus · HN ↗

            > You can also create reasonably diversified data silos within a country.

            I generally agree, although if a small country only had half a dozen or so redundant data centers then it would be relatively easy for a powerful adversary to wipe out all of the data centers and potentially have a significant economic impact on that country.

            Having a backup data center in an ally country might make sense. Kind of like how I keep an encrypted backup hard drive at my parents house. Whenever I go to visit I pull it out and backup my laptop there too.

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