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Not to turn a blind eye to what would have been a tragic loss of life, but how resistant is Amazon to such an attack, data-wise? How much collateral economic d
by beej71 6y ago
Not to turn a blind eye to what would have been a tragic loss of life, but how resistant is Amazon to such an attack, data-wise?
How much collateral economic damage can you do by taking down an AWS data center?
- klyrs 6y agoYet another alleged would-be bomber who seems to have been goaded by the feds, I'm not too concerned about the alleged would-be loss of life. I don't know the particulars, but I imagine that Amazon is insured, so they wouldn't suffer greatly from the loss of one data center. Lost storage would be painful to some, but if folks are backing up regularly it shouldn't be a huge hit. I doubt amazon does long-term storage at the same sites as their cloud servers, so data loss should be fairly minimal -- though, if a long-term storage facility got hit, we'd probably learn a lot about amazon's commitment to redundancy. Smaller websites would be at the biggest risk, I think, but the internet would largely route around the damage within a few hours.
- mcbutterbunz 6y agoI don’t know much about this data center but I imagine it’s pretty massive. It’s probably highly redundant with multiple pipes in and out on all ends. I highly doubt this guy could procure enough explosives to take out the entire data center. Granted, I’ve never blown one up so I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.
- cm2187 6y agoI would speculate that you only need to generate enough blasts inside to damage hard drive disk heads through the shock waves. Plus perhaps take out the fuel tank and the external power cables. And if you build your datacentre with straw like the OVH little pig...
- WatchDog 6y agoSeems like a pretty tall order for one bomber to be able to do any significant damage to a facility that size. My understanding is that these facilities run on a fairly skeleton crew, especially at night, with staff generally spending most of their time in offices, rather than on the data-center floor. May have intended to carry out his plan with no loss of life.
- sofixa 6y agoVery little. AWS is comprised of independent regions, each with at least three availability zones, each one comprised of at least a datacenter. AZs sometimes fail, and the impact is usually minimal. AWS services are usually at least redundant across 3 AZ, and properly deployed client architectures should be as well. So taking out a whole AZ will cost lots of money and lost capacity, but in terms of data loss and user-facing impact, it's probably minimal.
- tyingq 6y agoI think a backhoe and a map of where all the fiber is would work better than a bunch of explosives. Construction folks find lots of unintended places where "redundant" paths converge, on accident. If you went about that with purpose, I imagine it could be very disruptive. Imagine a former employee from some place like Zayo with a grudge.