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That does seem likely, though as far as I know, AWS's biggest zone is located in Northern Virginia. And, I'm sure the AWS people have planned as much as they ca

That does seem likely, though as far as I know, AWS's biggest zone is located in Northern Virginia. And, I'm sure the AWS people have planned as much as they can for this eventuality. (Um, I hope.)

stephengillie 11y ago
AWS West in Oregon are somewhat further inland from I-5. It would probably be impacted, but not to the same degree as the datacenters in other cities like Tukwila.
- trhway 11y ago
  i think the datacenters will get soon to the status of national strategic infrastructure objects similar to bridges, power plants, etc... Given the distributed nature of the services i'd suppose the main threat though isn't from physical effect like earthquake, instead i think the main threat is introduction of something like StuxNet into say AWS (or highjacking the backdoor access that services like NSA already have there)
- sneak 11y ago
  The loss of datacenters is irrelevant; the loss of people to keep the services running is the issue.
Locke1689 11y ago
I doubt the datacenter's locations matter. The services at the bottom of the stack need constant ops to stay alive. With most of the engineers out, I expect barely a few days to go by before one of the essential services needs servicing.
- torinmr 11y ago
  For companies that size, the really important services probably have a distributed ops team, with a team in Europe/Asia alternating 12 hour oncall shifts with a team in North America. In an emergency, the non-North American team could take 24 hour shifts to keep the infrastructure alive. Though of course if headquarters was really wiped off the map, there'd be huge problems with communication, tribal knowledge that only existed in the heads of senior engineers in Seattle, and so forth.
- jsolson 11y ago
  When supporting a service on the scale of say, EC2 and the rest of AWS, one would typically expect follow-the-sun support.

That does seem likely, though as far as I know, AWS's biggest zone is located in Northern Virginia. And, I'm sure the AWS people have planned as much as they can for this eventuality. (Um, I hope.)

stephengillie 11y ago

AWS West in Oregon are somewhat further inland from I-5. It would probably be impacted, but not to the same degree as the datacenters in other cities like Tukwila.

trhway 11y ago
i think the datacenters will get soon to the status of national strategic infrastructure objects similar to bridges, power plants, etc... Given the distributed nature of the services i'd suppose the main threat though isn't from physical effect like earthquake, instead i think the main threat is introduction of something like StuxNet into say AWS (or highjacking the backdoor access that services like NSA already have there)
sneak 11y ago
The loss of datacenters is irrelevant; the loss of people to keep the services running is the issue.

Locke1689 11y ago

I doubt the datacenter's locations matter. The services at the bottom of the stack need constant ops to stay alive. With most of the engineers out, I expect barely a few days to go by before one of the essential services needs servicing.

torinmr 11y ago
For companies that size, the really important services probably have a distributed ops team, with a team in Europe/Asia alternating 12 hour oncall shifts with a team in North America. In an emergency, the non-North American team could take 24 hour shifts to keep the infrastructure alive. Though of course if headquarters was really wiped off the map, there'd be huge problems with communication, tribal knowledge that only existed in the heads of senior engineers in Seattle, and so forth.
jsolson 11y ago
When supporting a service on the scale of say, EC2 and the rest of AWS, one would typically expect follow-the-sun support.