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It’s designed for that level of durability, but it’s only as good as a single change or correlated set of hardware failures that can quickly change the theoretical durability model. Or even corrupting data is possible too.

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You're totally correct, but these products also need to be specifically designed against these failure cases (i.e. it's more than just MTTR + MTTF == durability). You (of course) can't just run deployments without validating that the durability property is satisfied throughout the change.

Yep! There’s a lot of checksum verification, carefully orchestrated deployments, hardware diversity, erasure code selection, the list goes on and on. I help run a multi-exabyte storage system - I’ve seen a few things.

This is true. While I prefer non-SaaS solutions generally, S3 is something that’s hard to cost effectively replace. I can setup an AWS account, create an S3 bucket, and have a system that can then persist at least one copy of my data to at least two data centers each within a goal of 1 second. And then layer cross-region replication if I need.

It’s by no means impossible to do that yourself, but it costs a lot more in time and upfront expense.

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