Comment by knorker
13 hours ago
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.
> In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted
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"
An AWS data center is going to look like a bright shining beacon on the CARVER matrix.
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.
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Risk is always present, We quantify it for a reason and then we mitigate if it's beyond a level we are comfortable.
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.
An American-run data center is much more likely to be targeted than some locally-owned and run company that isn't obviously connected to a foriegn power or the state that hosts it.
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
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Can't, not invited