Comment by ployable7

11 hours ago

You don’t want to blend probabilities like this, because the tactics you use as a consumer vary between the two. If you consider 11 9s like “object AFR”, you might build systems that are resilient to very occasional single object loss. And it’s useful to know at what rate that might occur.

Whereas with these force majeure events you’d want a complete DR setup, and it’s typically an async recovery. Here it is useful to understand the fault domain (single server or single building or multi-building) so you can plan.

Blending the two numbers doesn’t help you build better against the systems. And the force majeure events are rare enough that they won’t happen … until they do. I’m not sure that knowing the precise probability that Iran would attack a gulf nation would change the fact that if they do, you need to have a DR story.

Seems like begging the question to me. You can't blend the numbers because amazon didn't blend the numbers. If they did and miraculously still arrived at 11 9s then that would also cover things such as wars and natural catastrophes, e.g. because they do offsite backups internally.