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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. krick · 1789598998 · focus · HN ↗
  That is actually surprising to me. Claims like that are pretty common, they make sense and they should be true, so even though I don't really know AWS (/Backblaze/Azure/whatever) redundancy planning in enough detail, I used to trust them. It's really worrying when they outright say it will be ok, and then a week later it turns out to be not ok.
  1. sandeepkd · 1789612952 · focus · HN ↗
    The devil is always in the details. Somehow I feel that when we offload the responsibility to some one else we get this feeling that the other person/entity would be doing full diligence and whatever else is required to carry out the job perfectly. However in reality most of the times they just do the bare minimum to pass your evaluation criteria to get the job.
    dijit · 1789626781 · focus · HN ↗
    its also the fact that a lot of fundamental systems work in trade offs.
    Do you want performance, or correctness.
    Well, if you want performance you use write through caching and in the case of distributed storage: more nodes confirming the block before returning. Huge performance cost.
    Outsourcing this just means someone else makes these tradeoffs, they will prioritise the general case- and they’re even more incentivised to move the needle towards things that are most visible to the end user.
    In this case, performance.
    You won’t notice that theres a third commit server off-site (unless that site is bombed), but you will notice slower writes- and the general case says that people will express comparative dissatisfaction with weaker performance and use it as a justification to use another provider.
    dijit · 1789644778 · focus · HN ↗
    if you want correctness* you use write through caching.
    My mistake, if you want performance you choose write-back caching, and fewer nodes need to acknowledge the write. Sorry for clumsily typing the inverse when I was in a morning haze waking up :(

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