Comment by steveBK123

10 hours ago

There's something reassuring in this for me.

There's a lot of magic & handwaving from hyperscalers like AWS about redundancy. I always wondered about some of the engineering to make this absolutely (and literally) bullet proof. At the end of the day most of their answers when you push hard enough involved paying 2-3x to run everything across multiple zones/regions, and lots of awareness in your application to handle this.

In any case, I think it's good that when a data center blows up the data is lost. Noteworthy for future skynet situation, etc.

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steveBK123

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cmiles8  1 hour ago

AWS has a history of making hand wavy explanations on the robustness of its infrastructure that were misleading at best. See comments about how regions are truly independent only for everyone to find out if us-east-1 goes down you could still be down even if you built in other regions. Those dependencies were not well documented and previously hand-waved away by AWS when it boasted about how its regions were truly independent.

Similar here, there’s a lot of detail that got hand-waved away by a sloppy “yeah we good” puff PR answer.

  • steveBK123  1 hour ago

    I suspect at this point, given the nature of the AWS org.. they actually don't even know themselves either.

antonvs  9 hours ago

> I think it's good that when a data center blows up the data is lost. Noteworthy for future skynet situation, etc.

Doesn’t really apply, because the only reason data was lost is because customers chose not to replicate it to other regions, either because of legal data residency requirements, cost, or just not bothering.

If Skynet wants to make sure it’s backed up, none of that prevents it from doing so. Although it would be amusing if Skynet was stopped by a billing alert when it tries to copy itself to another region.

  • mitxela  6 hours ago

    AWS promises to keep data safe without requiring cross region redundancy. If you choose not to trust them that's valid but then why use them at all?