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Posted by berkeleyjunk 1 day ago

AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran(www.wsj.com)
https://archive.is/Ay7RJ
406 points | 341 commentspage 3
Kvarnek 11 hours ago|
Guess those multi-AZ promises have an asterisk when actual missiles are involved. Makes you double-check your own off-site backups.
ernsheong 12 hours ago||
Hey but that's exactly as per design. It is the customer's responsibility to store stuff elsewhere as DR backup, not AWS.
mitxela 11 hours ago|
That's the excuse they'll say, yes, then we quote back to them "eleven nines" and they come up with an excuse for that too
expedition32 2 hours ago||
I suppose this is why Microsoft and Google want to build data centers in the Netherlands. Its not cheap but it is safe.
genxy 3 hours ago||
So many AWS simps in this thread that don't actually understand how AWS scrimped out and fucked their customers. You can't all suck up to AWS at the same time, you need to serialize.
michael-bey 13 hours ago||
What a nightmare scenario to tabletop. How do you even begin to recover from something like this?
tgsovlerkhgsel 12 hours ago||
For providers that just act as middlemen, I assume data that doesn't have a residency requirement is stored outside, so probably

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.

NegativeLatency 13 hours ago||
Backups in a different region?
noir_lord 13 hours ago|||
Works unless local laws specifically block you doing that which they do for some classes of data in some countries.

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

krick 10 hours ago|||
I wonder what exactly these laws prohibit. Like, does it apply to a fully encrypted cold-copy on Amazon Glacier? If you don't store the encryption key outside of UAE, I'd say this isn't even the same data that gets transferred to the third party, it's just some random blob. But I have no idea if the authorities of that country would agree and if it's even actually enforced for that matter, or if it's one of those laws that actually cause problems only if you follow them.
criemen 13 hours ago||||
Do cloud providers even share data center locations so you can assess the "far enough" bit yourself?
toast0 12 hours ago|||
You usually get city level location information. Depends on your definition for 'far enough' if that works for you.

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.

niltecedu 1 hour ago||||
Kinda they do? Atleast our company knows the exact location of ours
flumpcakes 12 hours ago|||
No - and usually the reason is so they cannot be targeted.
ares623 6 hours ago|||
In this case, a local on-prem backup in your office-that-is-not-an-aws-datacenter would've worked and satisfy the law right?

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

simoncion 9 hours ago||
Since roughly zero of the articles I've seen link back to the source of their quotes, here it is: <https://status.aws.amazon.com/#multipleservices-me-south-1_1...>
xyst 6 hours ago||
We collectively gave this company trillions over the years and they still can’t get it right.
spbaar 10 hours ago||
us-east-1 is finally looking pretty stable for once.
carabiner 7 hours ago||
Everything not saved will be lost.
pembrook 4 hours ago|
Ahhh the downside of “data sovereignty” rules and the de-globalization meme strikes again. I’d bet a bajillion dollars the reason this happened is due to government thinking it’s a good idea to make it illegal to store data outside their country.

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.

pjc50 1 hour ago||
This is a valid point if you're not so confrontational about it.
WA 3 hours ago||
The EU is big enough to have several geographically independent data centers. without leaving the sovereign territory.
pembrook 3 hours ago||
Yes there’s never been division or wars in Europe and the EU will always exist…

Germany and France in a debt spiral and turning inward/hyper-nationalist while massively re-militarizing means the EU is a safe place to structure your data with zero redundancy.

I wouldn’t bother worrying about key industries and functions, since, as history has shown, the EU is a bulletproof institution that no country has ever left.

And of course every data center in Europe has Israel-grade air defenses, it’s not like they are just sitting ducks for a fleet of drones to take out within 24 hours.

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