
Amazon AWS Outage Shows Data in the Cloud Is Not Always Safe - turrini
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/amazon-aws-outage-shows-data-in-the-cloud-is-not-always-safe/
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oxymoron
It seems awfully odd to write a full article about this without mentioning
that S3 has completely different guarantees due to the cross-AZ design. I tend
to think that you probably can trust the cloud from a data integrity
standpoint, but I would never feel safe depending on EBS.

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skywhopper
This is a terrible article. EBS can fail. The article even has a screenshot
where Amazon is clear about the reliability ratings. If you want durable
storage, S3 is the best option. Replicate it across regions for even more
protection.

EBS is for storage volumes attached to virtual machines. There are many many
use cases in which a slightly higher failure rate is absolutely fine and for
which the lower cost and higher performance of EBS are the more desirable
tradeoff. But again, it’s clearly stated in all the docs that EBS has a 0.1%
annual failure rate. There are trivially easy tools built in to AWS to enable
backups of EBS volumes. If the data on your EBS volumes is critical, then use
those tools!

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chousuke
Is that 0.1% for non-snapshotted data? I'm under the impression that if you
snapshot your data, EBS can recover some failures from the S3-backed snapshot
transparently, increasing durability.

I obviously don't know the technical details, but it seems plausible to me
that with a proper implementation snapshots could provide additional
durability by reducing the amount of low-redundancy data that is "in danger"
during disk failure recovery.

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SteveNuts
Data on prem is not always safe either. We've had irrecoverable storage
failures from well known storage providers... That's why backups exist.

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booi
Arguably most on prem infrastructure is more susceptible to failure than cloud
data centers

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johnmarcus
That .1-.2% data loss advertised has to happen to someone, statistics do not
lie.

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borramakot
Is that for S3, or EBS?

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viraptor
EBS. S3 is much better:

> Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Standard–IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and S3 Glacier are all
> designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year.

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tj-teej
__Data in one geographic region is not always safe, period. __

Cloud aside, if you store data on Baremetal in one location (or boxes of
tapes) and that location burns down, it 's gone.

If you have mission-critical data to store, it should be spread between
regions, if not cloud-providers.

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david-cako
AWS runs on servers, electricity, and drives like the rest of the internet.

If your application and data are single-AZ it is not fault tolerant. If that
datacenter goes down or the EBS volume fails, at the very least your
application will have downtime.

EBS is replicated within the AZ but that is not guaranteeing you fault
tolerance. You must take snapshots and store them across AZs, like any other
mission critical S3 object.

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mr_toad
Man runs snowflake server in the cloud, and is surprised when it fails.

To be blunt, if you treat your cloud instances as anything other than
disposable and ephemeral: you’re doing it wrong.

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chousuke
It's a good reminder anyway. There are lots of people involved with tech who
genuinely don't seem to understand that things fail, even in "the cloud".

As for pet servers in the cloud, not having them is the ideal, but it's not
nearly always realistic. It's not "wrong" to run a pet server in the cloud if
it's the only reasonable option you have given all other constraints involved.

A real failure-resistant system is often expensive, and sometimes simply not
worth the investment.

