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Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai
- kelsey98765431 7mo agoif you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.
- stavros 7mo agoWhy would I want to own a cut-off datacenter in Dubai?
- duskwuff 7mo ago... with some extra holes in it, no less.
- xoa 7mo ago>if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything. I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers. The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?
- indolering 7mo agoI think it's a joke: you REALLY don't want to own your own servers.
- lta 7mo agoI don't think it is. There are many many cases where you do want to own them. The people you rent yours from are making a shit load of money so it doesn't sound that bad of an idea
- sophacles 7mo agoI buy lots of things from people who make a pile of money from low margin goods/services sheerly on scale. There are many things i could not reproduce more cheaply from constituent parts, even if i value my time at $0. This includes things I have expertise in.
- rcxdude 7mo agoAWS is clearly not in a low-margin business, though.
- onoesworkacct 7mo agoyou're going to save money by having your own physical servers?
- integralid 7mo agoYes, a lot of money in fact.
- brianwawok 7mo agoIt sometimes makes financial sense to own your own servers
- UltraSane 7mo agoYou do if you need absolute control over data location, isolation, and physical access.
- rcxdude 7mo agoThe challenges of doing so are often significantly overstated. It can make a lot of sense to own them.
- postepowanieadm 7mo agoYour servers also may get hit with a bomb/missle.
- pvtmert 7mo agoI don't think co-locating with AWS or any other DC in Middle-East would help in this case. Unless you bring your own missile defence network, you are vulnerable. In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway. (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate, with your Patriot or whatever)
- NooneAtAll3 7mo agoboolean "you are vulnerable" means nothing, because it's always True spreading out decreases risk, concentration increases it
- legitster 7mo agoYou should have the opposite takeaway - if you don't have redundancy in the cloud you don't actually have uptime.
- UltraSane 7mo ago"If you don't colo your own generators you don't own anything."
- sva_ 7mo ago[flagged]
- culi 7mo agoIt's not quite as bad as in the UAE where only about 10% of the nation has citizenship but it's basically the same picture. Most people there are practically indentured servants
- xoa 7mo agoThis may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst the biggest there is, and according to mappers like [0] there are only around 240 operational total worldwide with another 130ish under construction. Like, in one respect that seems like a bunch, but vs the kind of attacks we see done in a matter of days in modern wars it's a pretty small number for the whole planet isn't it? In the first 24 hours of the war the US and Israel launched on Iran, they hit something like 1500-2000 targets. How hardened are the data centers? Are they in structures that handle some level of explosives? Do they have counter measures like internal blast walls dividing things into cells so a few hundred pounds of high explosive in one area doesn't damage outside the cell? I mean, of course like all data centers they'll have considered extensive countermeasures to fire, environmental threats, grid issues and so on. But has "nation-state level attack via mass drones or bombardment" been part of the threat model over the last few decades? Hardening of telecoms was certainly considered for old Ma Bell and such back in the CW days but that was a very different environment. I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers. Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What would be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it? ---- 0: https://www.datacentermap.com/c/amazon-aws/ https://www.datacentermap.com/c/amazon-aws/
- asdff 7mo agoThe way everything is so overleveraged on the success of these companies being packed into ETFs, it would probably take down the whole economy. You'd be able to shut down even more manufacturing without even destroying it just from economic forces. That is unless the US responds by nationalizing everything, which they won't. They'd rather it go to smithereens so someone has a chance to be made wildly rich rebuilding.
- shevy-java 7mo agoTrump really only babbles nothing burgers now. The whole "we must open the Strait of Hormuz", but it was closed following the invasion of Iran at the behest of Netanyahu proxy-controlling Trump - so how is that then logical that you refer to a prior state that already existed, as a new war-meta-goal? This is like an autogenerate of fake news and lies. This can not be the person really "leading" the USA, so who is really making those decisions? Trump even forgets what he said the day before and even contradicts himself in the very same sentence; then he chains buzzwords that make no sense, such as "we can not have healthcare because we must wage war instead". This is like George Orwell 1984, but stupid. George Orwell's book made sense; Trump is just dementia 2.0 1984 reversed. Nobody would read that Trump-novel, just as nobody serious would watch Melania. It's the ultimate Soap TV show for the US audience, but it is just not watchable. No risk management or analysis; Hegseth recently mass-fired those who said his plan is stupid. Well, even after firing people, the plan is just stupid.
- beloch 7mo agoMost of the world is past blaming Trump for this. They're now blaming Americans for not removing an obviously insane tyrant from power. Americans have long said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Well, where's that vigilance? You're not all blind, are you? Suddenly lost your taste for "freedom", have you? You may not have voted for Trump, but now you're accountable to the world for him.
- postsantum 7mo agoI hate when "the cloud" which I imagined to be some entity in ether space, turns out to be just a building with computers that can be bombed
- yard2010 6mo agoIt's someone else's computer. Better that someone not be in the middle east..
- afavour 7mo agoI wonder if this is what Bezos had in mind when he doubled down on support for Trump.
- UltraSane 6mo agoThe way the richest people in the US have sucked up to Trump is shameful.
- AnotherGoodName 7mo ago>Amazon tells its employees to deprioritize these regions as the Iran war deals meaningful damage to its infrastructure in the Gulf. Deprioritised means migrate usage out of this zone just in case anyone misreads the context here.
- c16 7mo agoDoes the status page still show it as up?
- tomjen3 7mo agoNot your (drone)air-defense, not your data center I guess.
- znpy 7mo agoThe big security mantra from aws has always been that they deal with the security of the cloud and you/we deal with the security in the cloud. I wonder if this will translate to amazon implementing para-militar security of the cloud (eg: drones to defend from drone attacks). My intuition suggests me that: - Bezos would have absolutely considered this, like seriously considered - the current ceo likely won’t Btw the writing has been on the proverbial wall for some time, amazon is in their day-2 era.
- dataflow360 6mo agoThis is the part I don’t understand about Elon’s Terafab: What protects it from a missile? Or laser? Better yet: Jeff or Sir Richard hook up one of their ships and just tow away the Terafab… yoink! There are good physics-based reasons to put data centers in space, but the geo-political world isn’t informed merely by physics.
- make3 6mo agoTrying to build things in a way that they have to be resistant to missile and drone stand is not a very reasonable scaling constraint. That's why we need non stupid leaders who don't start pointless wars