Comment by Neil44

4 days ago

Shows unavailable, last status update 30th April https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.

Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587

  • There were almost daily posts in HNs front page about it 4 months ago when it first happened, as well as front page headlines on CNN and WSJ and other news outlets, though they quickly got drowned out by all of the other Iran war stories when the war first broke out.

    This is just one of the popular ones, but there were also tens of posts about it with only 1-10 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632503

    The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.

  • It's been extensively reported on, and any AWS user that clicks on the health dashboard would also have seen it, even if they don't consume from news outlets.

    As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.

    • The only reason we knew about it is that it was one of our network output 'node', but I don't think I've read anything about it in generalist medias

    • Are you implying that something that gets reported on, shouldn't be on HN? Also, clearly it wasn't that extensive if GP hadn't heard about it

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  • > Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.

    Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.

    Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".

There was a building hit near the data center on the first day of the war and that took down one AZ (unfortunately, two of my three EC2 instances were in that AZ). The hit on April 1 pretty much took it all down. Fortunately I had relatively up-to-date backups (both within 24 hours before each outage) so all I lost was a little email (spam) and some libera chat logs. I've moved to ap-southeast-1, which means trading a ~ 60ms ping to ~ 110ms.

  • I'm sure there are businesses in the UAE, but wondering, why would one keep instances/data on a zone at risk since well over a year now.

    Genuinely curious. Aside for high frequency trading where latency is so vital.

    • The next closest region is Tel-Aviv, I guess it's pretty obvious they won't put their workload here.

      And after that it's Mumbai, 2500km away. That will easily double your latency, which is someone that you can feel in usage.

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me-south-1 is in fact, quite possibly permanently, "offline".

  • I'm kinda surprised Amazon didn't send a team to collect all storage devices from the wreckage and ship them elsewhere to be connected to the network for recovery.

    • I didn't see any photos of the building/damages, but assuming it caught fire and fire surpression systems were activated, many to most of the drives would not be easy to recover data from, to say nothing of physical recovery.

      You're expected to keep your data redundant in a 2nd region... I'm sure not everyone does, but I'd guess most AWS customers that only keep their data in a single region have chosen a different region (us-east-1 perhaps...)