← Back to context

Comment by curuinor

1 day ago

They guaranteed 11 9's durability, didn't they?

e: Yep

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

The footnote which says that is the design durability against equipment failure literally begins:

> 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

Even if they have payable SLA on this, most SLAs have Acts of God and Acts of War exemption.

  • But do they have Act of Special Operation exemptions?

    • I'm going to reword my Terms of Service this second to add "any military operation" next to "acts of war". But I'm sure we'll then have to demonstrate whether paramilitary are assimilated to the military.

It seems unreasonable to blame Amazon here. The AZ was destroyed. Are they supposed to have missile/drone defense?

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

  • If a senior leader at Doordash swore to God that your sandwich would 100% guaranteed make it to you, regardless of whether or not there was a car crash, then yeah, maybe you should complain

    • Yeah I agree with you. If they made a specific promise to some unlikely case out of their control, then I would expect compensation.

      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).

If they haven't changed it recently, 11 nines is the durability target by design, but it is not set in any SLA. the S3 SLA is focused on availability.

The SLA excludes force majeure.

  • Making a probabilistic claim while excluding a factor that dominates those statistics is... is quite creative accounting.

    • Force majeure carveouts are really common in every type of contract.

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

      1 reply →

    • Are you saying that most data loss happens because your data center gets blown up in a shooting war? Like, AWS is the first digital service provider to lose data in decades?

      3 replies →

    • Creative accounting works and is good because it works. If your customers give you more money because you lied to them, but it's legal, then it's good.

  • Excluding war as force majeure in the Middle East is the same as excluding high tide as force majeure building a sandcastle at low tide.

    • This is very on point. While I am not legally trained in US law, and especially not in any Middle Eastern law, I have a enough knowledge on the law in my country here where I live…

      Invoking force majeure requires the entity to prove all three following to be true:

      A. That the event was unexpected and therefore unavoidable.

      B. That the event was outside the control of the entity.

      C. That the event made it impossible for the company to resolve the issue.

      War in the region is as you say rather common unfortunately. The fact that AWS is used by the IDF (https://www.972mag.com/cloud-israeli-army-gaza-amazon-google...) should be considered a factor whether or not their data centre became a more likely target or not. What remains is the ability or not for AWS to do multi-location reduncancy.

I don't think this has any teeth. They don't compensate in the event of loss afaict.

They say it's "designed for" 11 9s, not guaranteed.

  • But if they want to design for extreme probabilities you need to account for tail risks, so their design should have included a missile defense system. At some point you need to start worrying about asteroid defense too.

Hot take: if you have a service that is 11 nines reliable, but there is an underlying component whose reliability is lower, cap the nines to that component.