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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!"
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1. steveBK123 · 1789611385 · focus · HN ↗
  There's something reassuring in this for me.
  There's a lot of magic & handwaving from hyperscalers like AWS about redundancy. I always wondered about some of the engineering to make this absolutely (and literally) bullet proof. At the end of the day most of their answers when you push hard enough involved paying 2-3x to run everything across multiple zones/regions, and lots of awareness in your application to handle this.
  In any case, I think it's good that when a data center blows up the data is lost. Noteworthy for future skynet situation, etc.
  1. cmiles8 · 1789644904 · focus · HN ↗
    AWS has a history of making hand wavy explanations on the robustness of its infrastructure that were misleading at best. See comments about how regions are truly independent only for everyone to find out if us-east-1 goes down you could still be down even if you built in other regions. Those dependencies were not well documented and previously hand-waved away by AWS when it boasted about how its regions were truly independent.
    Similar here, there’s a lot of detail that got hand-waved away by a sloppy “yeah we good” puff PR answer.
    steveBK123 · 1789645649 · focus · HN ↗
    I suspect at this point, given the nature of the AWS org.. they actually don't even know themselves either.

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