War damage to data centers exceeded what AWS services are designed to withstand.

War damage to data centers exceeded what AWS services are designed to withstand.

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.

Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers.

  • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    I haven’t used aws for ages but “an option when setting up the service” does not encompass my recollection of it: you can set up (say) S3 in multiple regions, but that doesn’t mean your application can actually make use of multiple regions. It doesn’t mean your vlans actually enable anything to talk between the regions.

    • BillyClark@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      I haven’t used it for a while, either, but it was just an option sitting there when using the AWS UI to set up RDS, IIRC.

        • BillyClark@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          You have to set up your application to use the service, regardless, so I would say that you just have to follow the instructions.

          I am not talking about fixing after a service has been set up for only one region, but about following the instructions when first setting it up.

            • BillyClark@piefed.socialEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              The application setup to have the ability to talk to more than one region is the normal setup that you get when you follow instructions. You’re not saving time to set it up a different way. You’re simply creating technical debt for the person who has to come around and set it up in the standard way in the future. And it probably takes you longer to set up services locked into a single region since for the other way, you just have to follow instructions.