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cmiles8yesterday at 10:15 PM5 repliesview on HN

This interview with an AWS leader isn’t aging well, from CBS Sunday morning:

Pogue asked, "I don't mean to give anyone ideas, but let's say I figured out that one of these unmarked buildings was an AWS data center, and I blew it up. Are you saying that it's so backed up and redundant that you probably wouldn't notice?" Wood replied, "Yeah, you wouldn't notice. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice!"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cloud-computing-loudoun-county-...


Replies

krickyesterday at 10:49 PM

That is actually surprising to me. Claims like that are pretty common, they make sense and they should be true, so even though I don't really know AWS (/Backblaze/Azure/whatever) redundancy planning in enough detail, I used to trust them. It's really worrying when they outright say it will be ok, and then a week later it turns out to be not ok.

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echoangleyesterday at 10:54 PM

Isn’t the problem that multiple datacenters in one zone were blown up?

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steveBK123today at 2:16 AM

There's something reassuring in this for me.

There's a lot of magic & handwaving from hyperscalers like AWS about redundancy. I always wondered about some of the engineering to make this absolutely (and literally) bullet proof. At the end of the day most of their answers when you push hard enough involved paying 2-3x to run everything across multiple zones/regions, and lots of awareness in your application to handle this.

In any case, I think it's good that when a data center blows up the data is lost. Noteworthy for future skynet situation, etc.

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jasonfarnonyesterday at 11:19 PM

that quote is definitely making its way into a lawsuit

sparklingyesterday at 10:25 PM

He forgot to add "if it's Multi-AZ" ;)

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