<story><title>Worst Case</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/10/08/The-WOrst-Case</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>implying</author><text>This is a bizarre analysis. Public legal risk is absolutely the last imaginable threat to us-east-1, short of aliens abducting it. The U.S. security apparatus depends on AWS and would never allow it, Wall Street would never allow it, never mind the fact that Amazon itself would leverage every tool at it&amp;#x27;s disposal to protect its reputation for reliability. The politicians involved in this scenario might seek to remove Amazon&amp;#x27;s competitive advantages, or fine them, but the people who understand what AWS even is would never consider a move to shut down a datacenter.&lt;p&gt;Both the &amp;quot;enemy action&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;operation failure&amp;quot; scenarios are much bigger risks than this article makes out to be. Every non-aligned nation-state offensive cyber team has a knockout of us-east-1 at the top of their desired capabilities. I&amp;#x27;m sure efforts range from recruiting Amazon employees to preparing physical sabotage to hoarding 0days in the infrastructure. There&amp;#x27;s no reason to think one of them wouldnt rock the boat if geopolitics dictated.&lt;p&gt;Operational failure is probably the most likely. AWS might have a decade of experience building resilience, but some events happen on longer timescales. A bug that silently corrupts data before checksums and duplication and doesn&amp;#x27;t get noticed until almost every customer is borked, a vendor gives bad ECC ram that fails after 6 months in the field and is already deployed to 10,000 servers, etc. Networking is hard and an extended outage on the order of a week isn&amp;#x27;t completely impossible. How many customer systems can survive a week of downtime? How many customer businesses can?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dijit</author><text>&amp;gt; Amazon itself would leverage every tool at it&amp;#x27;s disposal to protect its reputation for reliability.&lt;p&gt;This is a joke, right? The _real_ degradation map of us-east-1 of the last 5 years looks significantly worse than my non-UPS backed Home PC in Sweden.&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;m not looking at us-east-1 as reliable at all; they even suffered a &amp;quot;harddrive crash&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bleepingcomputer.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;amazon-aws-outage-shows-data-in-the-cloud-is-not-always-safe&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bleepingcomputer.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;amazon-aws-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Worst Case</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/10/08/The-WOrst-Case</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>implying</author><text>This is a bizarre analysis. Public legal risk is absolutely the last imaginable threat to us-east-1, short of aliens abducting it. The U.S. security apparatus depends on AWS and would never allow it, Wall Street would never allow it, never mind the fact that Amazon itself would leverage every tool at it&amp;#x27;s disposal to protect its reputation for reliability. The politicians involved in this scenario might seek to remove Amazon&amp;#x27;s competitive advantages, or fine them, but the people who understand what AWS even is would never consider a move to shut down a datacenter.&lt;p&gt;Both the &amp;quot;enemy action&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;operation failure&amp;quot; scenarios are much bigger risks than this article makes out to be. Every non-aligned nation-state offensive cyber team has a knockout of us-east-1 at the top of their desired capabilities. I&amp;#x27;m sure efforts range from recruiting Amazon employees to preparing physical sabotage to hoarding 0days in the infrastructure. There&amp;#x27;s no reason to think one of them wouldnt rock the boat if geopolitics dictated.&lt;p&gt;Operational failure is probably the most likely. AWS might have a decade of experience building resilience, but some events happen on longer timescales. A bug that silently corrupts data before checksums and duplication and doesn&amp;#x27;t get noticed until almost every customer is borked, a vendor gives bad ECC ram that fails after 6 months in the field and is already deployed to 10,000 servers, etc. Networking is hard and an extended outage on the order of a week isn&amp;#x27;t completely impossible. How many customer systems can survive a week of downtime? How many customer businesses can?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deepstack</author><text>While your analysis is sound, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t disregard a Carrington type of event. It can happen again and we never know where.   None of our current electronic infrastructures are hardened to handle this kind solar storm&amp;#x2F;EMP. IPFS is a good direction in mitigate these kinds of centralised data risk.&lt;p&gt;Diversifying one&amp;#x27;s cloud&amp;#x2F;server provider is a good thing! Or simply don&amp;#x27;t rely only on the cloud.  Storage devices are cheap now days, just have local backup and&amp;#x2F;or in different geographical location.</text></comment>