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!"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cloud-computing-loudoun-county-...

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.

So any software company/project which actually took the time and effort to fully handle the enormous complexity, they can't sell themselves based on that fact because every other company (who didn't invest the effort) is also claiming it and the customer has no mechanism to verify the claims until some major rare event occurs.

And most of the effort is required precisely to handle those 1% of rare situations.

Not disimilar to how AI naratives are pushed on executives these last two years.

If businesses are going to cloud but without engaging / listening to competent people who know these basics -- then the blame needs to be somewhat pointed back at those very business leaders I feel.

This is not obscure magical knowledge either that is tightly controlled. Any cloud vendor will freely teach you that. Or even a google search would.

I mean, every time cloud comes up on HN we see legions of techies posting strowman arguments about why you should offload everything onto AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.

But the problem is right there: "non-technical" leaders. Never work for one if you can avoid it.

I feel like if this was done correctly it would eat a bunch of the market, but I question how many people are actually willing to pay for "the right way". The last time I had that experience it was with Heroku which was quite a leaky abstraction.

And for that, with a simplified use case, well, they can scale up to $20k+ a month if they like, that would be ideal, and if they need a more complicated setup or enterpriseyness, migrate off with my blessing and available-not-required hands on support (again for a reasonable fee, maybe $10k if you want the white glove).

This is true. The latter half of your comment is not. At best they have a duty to shareholders. But your assertion would mean every time a company posted a loss and the price went down the execs would be in legal trouble, which is nonsense.

Something bad happens, stock goes down, angry shareholders sue because they should have been told the bad thing would happen and the stock would go down.

There are plenty of companies who pay no dividends and have not returned growth in share price. They’re still operating and no one’s coming to throw the execs in jail.

On the off chance that there is such a law, please cite it.

It's very clearly not about you being able to set-up redundancy for yourself.

But it's not designed to survive TWO datacenters going offline, and in a permanent fashion.

_You_ are supposed to have three copies of everything - and two of those should be off AWS.

But when I put data on normal S3, isn't my money supposedly paying for triple redundancy?

Look, here's the documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...

"S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive redundantly store objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones in an AWS Region. An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region."

As far as I've heard before that's not with parity and three zones means three copies. But when I search now I see things about 5+4 parity, any insight here?

Not just in terms of service costs, but in time and complexity. In many cases building out that complexity is complicated and difficult. And sometimes the functionality you need isn't supported in the regions you use.

Amazon only claims "99.999999999% durability" per year, even for the properly replicated stuff.[0]

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...

Now I'm thinking about legal/contractual rules that might force that kind of geographic risk.

I mean, logically you could have the Allowable Location send pre-encrypted backups to anywhere in the world, except (A) laws and regulations aren't always logical and (B) you still have the problem of keeping the decryption keys somewhere safe without leaving the key jurisdiction.

They could, of course, open other regional data centers in other countries, or say "data in this geo zone may be in any of X, Y or Z" countries, but for the latter that pretty starkly limits some of the major customers they'd have, I would guess, and for the former, well, they have other geo zones already, so if people weren't replicating to them, I'm not sure why adding me-east-1 me-west-1 me-central-1 would fix that issue, they just wouldn't replicate there either.

He is also violating an enormous amount of compliance requirements, by disclosing the location of the data center, and having strange people inside making a tour. Did he vet the crew and their accompanying party? Did one of them accidentally left some kind of device within the insider perimeter? There at least one or two ISO certifications he is violating there. As customer I would be asking questions...

AWS always made very clear they wont copy your data to another region as only you know what your compliance and data residency requirements are. But at the same time they always said, its up to you to come your with your disaster recovery strategy based on your project requirements. And it has always been the case copying your critical data to another region is one of the first things on your check list.

And their Well Architected Framework and other docs make this plenty clear:

"It is a good practice to always make backups of your data, and copy these to another site (such as another AWS Region)."

Also...

"All DR strategies require that data sources are backed up within the AWS Region, and then those backups are copied to the recovery Region."

And also for single-Region / Multi-AZ architectures:

"Where possible, you should also copy data backups to another AWS Region as an additional layer of protection."

"AWS Architecture Blog — Disaster Recovery Architecture on AWS, Part II" has a whole section named "Backup to another AWS Region": "By copying your data to another Region, you can handle the largest scope of disasters."

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/disaster-recovery-...

Or "Creating backup copies across AWS Regions" - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/cross...

This whole thread of people literally saying , "on no I trusted them...I did not know they could lose my data", with no technical context...is the the kind of incompetence I would expect from a generation raised on vibe coding and llm prompt driven miseducation...

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.

A perfect example of a claim they never made.

Obviously here, he should have mentionned that they can recover a hit on a single data center, provided the customer chose multi-AZ hosting. That's probably why companies run their ads on "This watch is a legacy for your children" rather than any material claim.

Now, there are a few things to consider:

- AWS best practices recommend multiple AZs for workloads and cross-region backups for things like databases and other “stateful” data

- You have to read the fine-print on what AWS offers in terms of recovery: do they reffer to their own infrastructure when they say “you won”t notice” or your data

When Google’s Paris colocation facility was flooded and all AZs there went dark, they sent an email saying “restore from backup in another region and if we can restore your data, we will make it availbale to you”. They did not even issue credits for the downtime.

this is one of one of those things - were in the current era either a cloud provider should provide automatic backups in another geographic zone.

if you're in us-east, then your back-ups should ideally be in eu-west + africa for redundancy.

The amount of data S3 stores "automatically replicating" to other geographical locations would make things prohibitively expensive, especially when you consider the daily delta, and how much of that is ephemeral or frequently mutated data that is stored. The bandwidth costs alone would be eye-watering, let alone the storage costs.

S3 cannot make any automated decision about whether data is, or isn't important, and if they did they'd only open themselves up to lawsuits if they guessed wrong. That's why it's made an option for the end user to enable replication if they want to, or choose to replicate their own data.

It did work like this! And it was! My recollection is that the first S3 was out of SEA and had no user concept of region. Then “VDC” was added in virginia. That provided API endpoints in what became us-east-1. A bucket could be accessed from either location, and the original intent was for object store to replicate between them. By the time dub/eu-west-1 came along that was obviously not tenable; itd take 10s of gbs to replicate.

So S3 became regional. But the original sea/vdc deployments still had shared APIs and data in both regions. Your object would be stored in the region of the API you geolocated to via DNS, but read from either. _eventually_ all the data migrated to IAD, but those API endpoints were transparently proxying across the continent until 2013 or so.

And of course glacier had much more interesting takes on this with cross dc/az/region erasure encoding. But i dont think any of the wacky multi dimensional cross region stuff ever materialised in practice.

PS: hi!

2013-2014 would be about right, they were still in SEA when I joined in 2013 but were actively working on decommissioning it.

(The obvious option here might be an encrypted backup on some hard drives in a safe in a local office.)

If OP tells me the name of his company I can hop in my time machine and tell him how it plays out.

[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!

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.

  > I can assure you that lawmakers were not thinking about efficient disaster recovery plans or back ups when they made the laws.

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.

(I can feel someone saying "but surely having redundancy in one country is good enough, so I'll just say that I know relatively sane people who try to have hemispheric redundancy in their data, and also you never know when two different-in-every-quality-but one locations will suffer from the same disaster. Floods; heat-waves; national protests and strikes. It's surprising how often rare things happen!)

On your second point, it really is crazy. And also amazing that this is a capability that is -- or should be -- available to anyone in the world, not just in the US, and not just devs. Hopefully without also having to think about their data suddenly finding itself in a warzone.

This is why the minority of politicians who actually know about how this stuff works worry about where the data resides for jurisdictional purposes. If the government where the data resides can compel the folks who have physical and/or logical access to the physical machines that contain that data to give them access to that data, then that's game over for you.

«But you just don't permit that sort of breach to happen!» you might say. To which I reply "Yeah, right.".

Substantial physical separation of datacenters is very important, but the politics and policies of the location housing the data cannot be ignored.

We'd have to explain that if the data was physically in Brazil, but hosted by a U.S. company, that would not stop that company from accessing that data remotely -- unless you specified that. We'd have to also explain that if you were intended to defend against US mass surveillance of non-US persons by the US intelligence services, intelligence services and SIGINT are univerally almost defined by their broad remit to target foreign nations on their own territory in violation of local law. And, finally, if you intended to use the prohibiting the movement of of data as a sanction against companies to punish them for violating data protection standards, as pre-GDPR law in the EU had as an ultimate last resort, and the GDPR often ends up relying on as a last resort, you would find that multinationals are more capable of putting up servers in your home territory and continuing to serve your citizens than they are of substantially changing their practices regarding data processing.

I don't want to sound nihilistic about this -- regulations can exist in these areas. But it's those politics and policies of the institutions with control over the data that are the most important part of this: not where the bits are kept. Especially when those bits are encrypted, and the keys and access controls are elsewhere.

You think most countries have one data center or less, and most offices have less than two hundred watts of electricity supply?

And second, the USA is in the middle of power grab that completely ensures any data stored there will be taken hostage wherever suitable for "negotiations".

Yeah, that was/is just another problem. Considering how that was actually handled in the real world before data residency laws came into force, I'm glad 'we' didn't convince those countries to put their citizens data at risk.

Us: We are concerned about our citizens (US) data, how are you managing the databases. Clout Provider (CP): They are only managed by fully background check employees. Us: Yeah, but where are they? What is their citizenship? CP: Um...mostly Eastern Europe. Lots in RU. (another CP proudly said "they're pretty much all in China...for cost containment"). Us: ...

Us: We are concerned about our citizens (EU) data, how are you managing encryption? CP: Everything is perfectly encrypted with hardware HSMs and all the FIPS and stuff. Us: So...where are the folks who run the HSMs? CP: Um...mostly SV. Some in the EU. Us: But can you assemble a quorum of US citizens for the HSM? CP: Of course! Us: ...

And on and on. Not to put too fine a point on it, many of us have no faith that vendors self policing international data protection in the face of government level pressure on companies and employees would work. Not that it can't, I don't think it would.

We may not be disagreeing that much. My argument was, and is, it's not about where the data is, it's about who has control over it. The counter-argument was "well if it's in another country, then we don't have jurisdiction, so it's going to be much harder". But what you need jurisdiction over is the people. Otherwise, you end up with multi-national corporate end-runs where you have shonky companies offering to store data locally, but who knows what department has control and access.

To be fair, the context I was having these conversations was countries arguing for data residency to combat the threat of mass surveillance (corporate and governmental) in the US, and the limited protections their users had relative to US nationals. But again, the problem is that it assumes that jurisdiction remains territorial: which is not how this was ever going to play out. The next wave after data residency requirements, beyond the usual extraterritorial intelligence community actions, was laws like the US CLOUD Act, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act, and Australia's TIA law, which effectively attempts to provide regular government departments and law enforcement with the legal ability to access data that would technically be on foreign soil.

My point was not that corporations should not self-police, but the concept of "it's stored here so we can oversee it" is not as clearcut as it seemed, and it risks introducing a new level of complexity to resiliently storing data. Which may be worth the price, but was never considered at the level this was discussed.

Best laid plans and all that.

You're saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that data sovereignty laws are unconditionally bad because they inevitably lead to totalitarian followon laws and there's nothing to stop them. I'm saying if we didn't have enforceable data sovereignty laws we would be in worse shape for data privacy and we should have prevented the followon laws from coming to be (and, true enough, we didn't).

Further, the UAE datacenter issue is a red herring. It's an engineering issue not a political one (data sovereignty without physical redundancy is...stupid?), but schadenfreude is a helluva drug.

No, I'm making no "unconditionality" claim here: there are just risks and benefits. Sometimes you're the person in the room highlighting the potential problems. The risk with doing that is that when those problems don't happen, you look like a fool. But someone should raise the problems anyway, because that's part of the risk assessment!

Of course, if the problems do happen, then you get to indulge in "I told you so". But only if you failed to convince anyone at the time.

Serious question: how do we know something is or isn't an act of god?

e: Yep

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/

> In the unlikely case of the loss or damage to all or part of an AWS Availability Zone, data in a One Zone storage class may be lost. For example, events like fire and water damage could result in data loss

> In response to another question, Mr Vance rejected using the word “war” to characterise US operations in Iran, saying there was “no active shooting”.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596955

I'm not going to complain to DoorDash if my order is delayed due to a car crash

Did Amazon make such a promise? They didn't as far as I know. My understanding is they provide specific guarantees like given an AZ outage, your data is still safe (provided you architect correctly).

You should check your home insurance contract, for instance... It likely would not cover an ICBM strike.

The region has seen a bunch of wars in the last 100 years, so the annual war-rate is > 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.

Whereas with these force majeure events you’d want a complete DR setup, and it’s typically an async recovery. Here it is useful to understand the fault domain (single server or single building or multi-building) so you can plan.

Blending the two numbers doesn’t help you build better against the systems. And the force majeure events are rare enough that they won’t happen … until they do. I’m not sure that knowing the precise probability that Iran would attack a gulf nation would change the fact that if they do, you need to have a DR story.

Offsite backups are sadly rare these days, and aws sales is the main reason why.

Now if this was multi-AZ S3 or whatever then this would be significant.

The article does not tell us what products were impacted.

I get that S3 is convenient and reasonably performant, but it is not cheap at all.

They don't sell any of the lower and less reliable levels to the public, I suspect simply because the reputational damage from losing user data is so bad, and the news will take no notice of the fact the user got a discount for less reliable storage.

If it dies, we will just have to re-download the data.

I don't see where this is reported? TFA does not mention EBS. In fact, TFA seems to be nigh content-free, beyond "AWS (allegedly, and is uncited) says they cannot restore some data."

> The article does not tell us what products were impacted.

… right … which conflicts with EBS being what's reported …

(I would agree with your point that if EBS, or some AZ-level data was lost, then, yeah, that's the contract.)

Earlier this week I mentioned that if we lose enough data centres to bring our operation down, the first items in the to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel.

I toured a datacenter once back in the early 2000s and they showed me 30 days of generator fuel storage. When i asked them why 30 days and not 35 they replied "we're such a major customer of both electricity and fuel that if we don't get electricity or fuel for 30 days there's way bigger problems than your website not being online" hah.

And if the data center is more than about 5 years old it almost certainly was not planned with adequate backup power to run racks of GPUs.

Look at data center responses from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. This guy [1] was onsite for Katrina. Lost utility power on August 29. They did have some access to fuel on Sep 1, but pretty spotty until maybe the 3rd. Looks like power started coming back in some places Sep 8, and maybe widely restored on Sep 14th.

I would say, by 7 days in you'll probably have a good idea of if 30 days might not be enough.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20061206181753/http://interdicto...

He just couldn't get past the notion that if the six copies in four buildings across two states were all simultaneously physically destroyed, then most likely there are also no more schools left standing, and hence the contracts to clean them are null and void. Also, payment is now in booze and ammunition, not dollars.

"I was in the office, reviewing Terraform plans"

Strictly speaking from a missile defense perspective there's an argument 2 sites are a waste of valuable interceptors.

(Encryption handles confidentiality concerns.)

Which is why data residency is such a stupid concept.

There is nothing to say that a determined adversary may still get at your data so it needs to stay in country.

Certainly, this event will inform people's disaster recovery plans, but when you're also looking at data residency requirements, small countries, and state level military action against your hosting provider, it can be hard to keep your data.

You talking as if this is some mom-and-pop shop that you run.

[1] That's a quote, including the Boston accent. [2] The only one I had that was better was a C-level who said "why are you asking for all this money for security in Azure. It's Microsoft so it's already secure.". That, too, is a quote.

   me (Middle East)
   ├── me-south-1 (Bahrain)                                DOWN since 2026-04
   │   ├── mes1-az1                            me (Middle East)

Although the more paranoid AWS customers who turned on (and pay for) S3 cross region replication or similar cross region DR for other services would be fine.

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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033240

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_Mode,_Effects,_and_Cri...

"You choose the AWS Region(s) in which your content is stored. You can replicate and back up your content in more than one AWS Region. We will not move or replicate your content outside of your chosen AWS Region(s) without your agreement."

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'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

Regions were always the scale of disaster isolation on AWS.

    me (Middle East)
    ├── me-south-1 (Bahrain) DOWN since 2026-04
    │   ├── mes1-az1 DOWN
    │   │   └── mes1-mct1-az1 (Oman, Muscat) ???
    │   ├── mes1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01
    │   └── mes1-az3 DOWN
    ├── me-central-1 (United Arab Emirates)
    │   ├── mec1-az1
    │   ├── mec1-az2 DOWN since 2026-03-01
    │   └── mec1-az3         DOWN since 2026-03-01
    └── il-central-1 (Israel, Tel Aviv)
        ├── ilc1-az1
        ├── ilc1-az2
        └── ilc1-az3

If someone had told me a year ago that a whole AWS region could go down I'd called them crazy, but now me is close to exactly that happening.

See also previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033240

Hey EU, take note of this next time you create silly data residency requirements that don’t allow data to travel outside your region. Encryption is an easy solution to multi-region residency…as long as the European Commission doesn’t stupidly keep trying to make encryption illegal too!

Hint: Russia absolutely knows where your data centers are.

Sometimes those rules can have serious consequences.

but one in a trillion...

a) letting customers in other areas know that their data is backed up to another continent

b) asking the AI model of your choice to translate the following into PR-speak: "Because of the boneheaded data residency requirements in this country, all your data is gone, and we weren't able to do anything about it - here's an empty copy of a re-setup version of whatever infrastructure we provide, glhf setting up everything from scratch, hope you had backups"

For customers who use such a provider or operate primarily in that area: Restore from local backups, or tell whoever depended on you that everything is gone and if you really didn't have backups, probably close up shop.

Multi-cloud in the same country (if that exists in the country and is far enough apart) maybe.

me-south-1 is about 250 miles away from me-central-1, but that's not far enough in this instance. Given that, I think city level location information should be good enough.

250 miles is pretty good for weather or not specifically targeted destruction (wildfire / industrial explosions / arson), but it's clearly not enough if your data is in a building targeted in a regional war. Assuming datacenters remain targets in wartime, I think it's fair to assume if one datacenter in any particular country is attacked, all the rest of the datacenters in that country are likely to be attacked, too. In that case, offline storage (tapes and things) in inconspicuous locations might be the way.

(or an AWS Outpost thingy, assuming those things work even if the mothership is down)

DR/BCP costs are readily justified by doing a Business Impact Analysis (BIA).. budget up to some fraction of risk cost * risk probability.

And a friendly reminder that replication isn't a tested data backup.

Uh-oh.

It's not clear from their messaging if multiple availability zones were severely damaged, or if the damage to one availability zone was simply more than they planned for. If it's the latter, that's a big uh-oh.

The wording certainly seems very careful:

"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand"

You should have used your considerable resources to fight. If only billionaires would oppose aspiring tyrants with the same zeal with which they oppose even minor tax increases.

See also Tim Cook. Doesn't make it right to suck up to Trump, but it was, and unfortunately still is, a rational move.

Seriously, it's like people, when deciding whether to launch a war or not, are not thinking "how will the other side react and will this conflict benefit me" but instead they are only thinking "does this nation deserve to get hit".

Well, news flash, your moral outrage does not translate into you not suffering more than your opponent during a conflict. It's a completely separate issue, and a personal issue between you and your priest or rabbi. When it comes to starting wars, you have to look at military capabilities and long term outcomes, not "does this nation deserve to be attacked".

This was not "a free attack". The goal was and is preventing the world's leading terror organization from acquiring nuclear weapons, especially when they already have the missiles to carry them. It's just a bad situation and the decisions are difficult. Even now, the IRGC continues attacking their erstwhile allies. Those would likely be nukes if they'd had them.

Can and do. It's called the United States of America.

Containment worked WAY WAY better than "doing something about it" and surrendering the strait to them. They "solved it" by aerosolizing asbestos everywhere and still have no cleanup plan. Sometimes containment works much better, which is why intelligent foreign policy worked the problem from that angle.

Wasn't victory declared 1 year ago and also a number of months ago?

We haven't surrendered anything to them. It's an open secret that the U.S. has been moving oil out of the Strait all along. Of course, all the IRGC does is attack civilian ships because it is unable to do anything against the U.S. Navy, and knows it would face immense pain if it directly attacked American military vessels. Last time the IRGC tried, it lost half a dozen oil tankers that were sitting ducks in the Strait. The only language these people understand is violence. An MoU was signed this summer, but the IRGC had a point to make and resumed attacks shortly after.

And containment hasn't worked well at all. Iran has been building underground facilities for more than two decades. It is very clear that they want to be a nuclear power, and we can't let that happen. The moment you grant Iran any kind of ceasefire or sanction relief, that money goes straight into funding weapons and terrorism.

The same people who bought weapons sold by the Reagan administration to fund the Sandistas?

That’s some revisionist history you’ve got there.

(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

(2)https://irp.fas.org/congress/2002_cr/s092002.html

How are you dealing with the rise of low-cast swarm attacks from drones?

Is it land-based, sea-based or space-based and at what point of the trajectory do you target and do you use jamming?

It can be true that using cloud storage, using managed services, and paying a premium is still worth it for a lot of people and organizations, and while not perfect, still a hell of a lot better compared to the fully in your control tape backups that you distribute to different physical locations every week.

I'm not a particular fan of relying on one provider or vendor lock in, but to pretend they don't provide a service with failure rates that are low enough to be very useful is a very short-sighted take.

Or maybe AWS or DIY, you are always responsible for geographic diversity?

Anyone losing data over this lost it because they'd literally told AWS to only store it in one place.

It's true that you are less likely to be a target than a state-sponsored tech megacorp's data centers, but the risk is still present.

Yes but that's clearly not this war. This is a missile war where high-value strategic military targets are the priority. The US and Israel hit some prisons, damaged some hospitals, and ofc killed 168 schoolchildren. They also targeted residential areas to assassinate important leaders. But Iran has not returned that. They've stuck pretty strictly to military targets with very few exceptions

If this was a war where bridges were a target, Iran would not be so successful. There's simply a too limited amount of missiles. Also only 20% of Saudi Arabia has citizenship while almost the whole rest is basically indentured servants. It's not like they could provoke a popular uprising or anything. There's no strategic value in hitting "bread lines"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARVER_matrix

What CARVER score would you give an AWS data center? I would probably put it around the 40 to 50s. Where would you put your own individual company by itself on the CARVER matrix as it relates to enemy forces? Pretty damn low.

Living is risk, every time I go to the shop for milk there is a non-zero chance I don't come back but the risk is so low I don't worry about it.

There is no difference at all between Wildberries and AWS data centers.

If you don't know what Wildberries is then go watch their facilities systematically destroyed on YouTube - centralisation is a target.

If your organization runs on AWS then you should have a contingency plan for the data center being destroyed by drones. Is that on your risk management plan?

Not the OP, but the point is that decentralized infrastructure is a lot more resilient to attacks of any kind.

I get your main point, but just wanna point out that AWS is one of the largest military contractors in the world. They hold multi-billion dollar contracts from the DoD, USAF, CIA, and more. An estimated $4B a year in military spending goes to AWS

https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2021-06/ed...

If I had an "important enough" client, I think I'd store all out local (Sydney + Melbourne AWS cross region) data to AWS Singapore (to protect against Australian jurisdictional and political risks) and to a non AWS cloud provider in the EU somewhere. I reckon thatd be close to as resilient a pile of hard drives in an underground bunker, for significantly less setup and ongoing cost, while also being much more available when needed. (Can you imagine the queue at the underground bunker when multiple AWS regions get bombed? Or even imagine getting to the bunker in "a friendly jurisdiction" while a shooting war is taking place?)

We haven't worked out a decent solution to Visa and Mastercard payment network going down for more than a couple of cloud billing cycles though.

For one thing, regardless of what the US did, they did not launch the attack that damaged the datacenters. That attack was provoked by US actions, but the attack was an intentional and voluntary act by Iran/IRGC. I don't think any of the usual settings for liability for the acts of others really apply here, but I'm not a lawyer.

You'd also need to find a court of competent jurisdiction. The US is out because of soveriegn immunity. The Military Claims Act prohibits claims that "arise from action by an enemy or result directly or indirectly from an act of the armed forces of the United States in combat" [1]. The Federal Tort Claims Act bars "any claim arising in a foreign country" as well as "any claim arising out of the combatant activities of the military or naval forces, or the Coast Guard, during time of war" [2] and precedent recognize a state of war without a declaration.

The courts in the country where the data centers were attacked might not be interested in addressing conduct of the US that didn't happen in their country. The courts in Iran are likely to consider the attack on the data center a legitimate act of war and not a tort; anyway good luck collecting against the US with a judgement from an Iranian court.

Amazon might have a better time making a claim against Iran, in the court where the attacks took place, but good luck collecting a judgement. Maybe a case in the International Court of Justice, but those have to be submitted by a country and involved countries must consent.

[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title10/sub... chapter section 2734 (b) (3)

[2] see page 28 and 29 of https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R45732/...

Putin is launching and provoking wars, not the EU.

> you will probably still blame America

No, we would blame Putin, because he's the blameworthy party.

As for Iran, Trump (and Trump voters by extension) is the blameworthy party. I don't even think any other R would have been dumb enough to go at Iran like this.