Comment by apple_innocent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apple_innocent | Hacker News Reader

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Did you have any "disaster recovery" plans in place, what you would do if the cloud failed.

I think looking at this issue with the example of "Parler" may be missing the point. The issue worth debating is surely not whether Amazon made the right decision. Of course they did. The issue worth discussing is who gets to make this decision in light of what the decision implies. Due to how much businesses are choosing[1] to rely on companies like Google and Amazon as service providers, these "tech" companies can easily kill other businesses by denying service, without violating any laws in the process.

These "tech" company middlemen are generally not treated like utilities under existing laws but the question is whether they are being treated as such by customers, the public.

1. Perhaps not so much consciously choosing as being persuaded by tech company salespeople and, IMHO, biased "media coverage" (=hype).

Disaster recovery was a hot topic. Most transformations kept DR within the cloud. A few architectures wanted to fail over to another public cloud (AWS->Azure). The issue of “de-platforming” still exists. Most wanted to get rid of the on-prem costs without keeping a rack around for DR.

You’re absolutely right that the real meat of discussion needs to be how a cloud company like AWS makes these decisions? What criteria? What protections does a consumer have? What about data?

There’s a lot of unknowns there. AWS’ Business Agreement you can get their legal and your legal to agree upon, doesn’t really touch on all those points. Further, AWS’ has a canned agreement they use and don’t make concessions even if you’re a Fortune 500.

Enterprise customers, of signficant volume, do indeed get custom agreements. (Or at least, they used to be able to do so.)

Are the terms confidential. Can customers "compare notes" to see if they are getting less favourable terms than others.

They all include a NDA about the agreement itself. So yes, the terms are confidential. Even the fact that a particular that you may or may not have an agreement at all is confidential.

Are the terms of the NDA confidential.

With respect to the fact of the existence of an agreement being confidential information, usually an NDA will only apply to information that has not already become public through no fault of either party.

Every Master Service Agreement (MSA) I’ve seen has had a ton of legal back and forth. To say that they all include NDAs is a generalization which isn’t even mostly true in my experience.

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