Comment by wewewedxfgdf

14 hours ago

[flagged]

Can you post the specs on your missile defense system for your home lab?

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?

  • If you have servers on multiple continents that's enough to become immune to attacks like this. You don't need missile defense.

  • Eh I get your point but would point out that distribution does mitigate the risk here, having all your data in DC's that can be seen from space also isn't a panacea when your next door neighbour targets them in retaliation for what your ally did.

this is reductionist to the point of absurdism.

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.

What's you point? That if you had run your own DC in that region (because that was your business requirement) then you'd have better missile defense than AWS?

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.

  • You don't need better missile defense than AWS. You don't need missile defense at all because you won't be a target. 99.999999% of the land has no missile threat on it. You are actively increasing the threat to your business by running it on the same servers that military contractors run their software on.

    • > You don't need better missile defense than AWS.

      Well, obviously.

      > You don't need missile defense at all because you won't be a target.

      No, you don't need it because you have offsite backups. And this is completely disconnected from whether you use AWS or DIY.

      > you won't be a target.

      Of missiles, maybe in this particular conflict, sure. But running a DC is not your core business, so which DC is more likely to be subject to burglary, power outages, diesel shortages (Amazon will have better negotiators than you), fire suppression, hell, private fire departments if needed, etc…

      Was missiles or copper thieves the biggest threat, even there, in 2020? Would AWS or every small company be better at protecting against the latter?

    • In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted, anyone should consider themselves a valid target.

      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.

      5 replies →

  • The point is that AWS has the same problem as Wildberries.

    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?

    • > If your organization runs on AWS then you should have a contingency plan for the data center being destroyed by drones.

      If your organization runs on servers in your basement you should have a contingency plan for flooding, fire, copper thieves, diesel shortages, etc… etc… etc…

      Or are you basically saying that the only safe place is outsourcing your ops to a mid sized operator? Too small and nobody will pay for the every day risks. Too big and it's a war target? Ok, let's continue that plan. Now military users move their workloads to the mid sized operators for the exact same reason you did. Oh no, we're back at square 1.

      A plan of putting all your eggs in one basket is never good. And it's completely orthogonal to AWS vs the non-AWS options.

      Pretty basic stuff.

      > If you don't know what Wildberries is

      Not exactly esoteric knowledge. But it's also not the same thing. Wildberries could not "back up" their inventory to an offsite location with the footprint of a suitcase.

      > 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?

      Sure, if you discard ALL other risks, that happen every day, leaving only war as the remaining risk to manage, then your risk management plan makes sense.

      But the other risks are still there. Your DC operator going bankrupt and having their power cut is a risk that didn't go away.

  • > What's you point?

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

    • Sure. But given that the affected customers would by definition not have offsite backup, the comparison is against a smaller operator that has way more risk of fires, theft, bankruptcy, incompetence, earthquakes, power delivery, and all the other risks.

      Sure, fewer customers per location, but the critique here is of customers who chose AWS, the fair comparison is NOT against those who chose to be in 6 different non-AWS DCs, but against those who chose to be in ONE non-AWS DC. Decentralized aggregated across customers or not, the customers who chose unluckily still lose data.

  • I read that as a statement that says something along the (nowadays very tired) line that the cloud is not magical, it's just other people's computers.

  • How about not bombing other countries and then acting surprised when retaliation happens? I mean clearly the problem isn't AWS as such - it is the problem that someone leading a country is totally clueless about the world. Only personal profit is in the interest of the orange clown.

    • > I mean clearly the problem isn't AWS as such

      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