They guaranteed 11 9's durability, didn't they?
e: Yep
e: Yep
> In the unlikely case of the loss or damage to all or part of an AWS Availability Zone, data in a One Zone storage class may be lost. For example, events like fire and water damage could result in data loss
The insurers always know how to weasel out of it.
> In response to another question, Mr Vance rejected using the word “war” to characterise US operations in Iran, saying there was “no active shooting”.
I'm not going to complain to DoorDash if my order is delayed due to a car crash
Did Amazon make such a promise? They didn't as far as I know. My understanding is they provide specific guarantees like given an AZ outage, your data is still safe (provided you architect correctly).
The region has seen a bunch of wars in the last 100 years, so the annual war-rate is > 1%. Even if we generously add the assumption that only 1 in 100 wars affects a datacenter you can see that wars become a major source of correlated hardware failures that they need to solve to actually deliver that kind of reliability.
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.
You want to know how reliable the service is in steady state. For example it’s useful to know that S3 is effectively lossless in steady state whereas EBS volumes have an AFR of about 0.1%. You build your apps very differently between S3 and EBS knowing this. You can build highly resilient applications on each, but you code them differently, informed by these design goals.
You separately want to understand the failure modes that will require you to fully recover from backup. For example knowing that cloud storage is resilient to everything but region failure would inform you that your backups should be out of the region, not just a bucket in the same region. You don’t get that perspective from just a 9s number.
You should check your home insurance contract, for instance... It likely would not cover an ICBM strike.
Offsite backups are sadly rare these days, and aws sales is the main reason why.
Invoking force majeure requires the entity to prove all three following to be true:
A. That the event was unexpected and therefore unavoidable.
B. That the event was outside the control of the entity.
C. That the event made it impossible for the company to resolve the issue.
War in the region is as you say rather common unfortunately. The fact that AWS is used by the IDF (https://www.972mag.com/cloud-israeli-army-gaza-amazon-google...) should be considered a factor whether or not their data centre became a more likely target or not. What remains is the ability or not for AWS to do multi-location reduncancy.
How could it be otherwise - do you expect AWS to have its own army and missile defence system?