
Ask HN: What would happen if an AWS data center was suddenly wiped out? - pwython
For example, North Korea nukes North Virginia. I&#x27;m wondering how AWS currently backs ups data in regions... and with a scenario like that, how would it play out for the huge amount of East coast customers?
======
Dunedan
Well, you should probably ask AWS, as they are the only ones that can tell you
for sure.

Aside from that, us-east-1 is the most critical region to loose for AWS as
some services run solely there. So if AWS looses us-east-1 I expect some
services not to function anymore globally, at least for a while. In contrast
if they loose one of their more recent regions, let's say eu-central-1, I
expect all other regions to continue to run as usual.

Another problem with loosing us-east-1 is that it's also the most frequented
AWS region. So lot's of customers would shift their workloads to other AWS
regions. While that could cause some stability problem due to unexpected
spikes in usage they'd be probably just temporary. What's more relevent is
when you look at available resources. Let's take EC2 as an example. I'm pretty
certain that AWS doesn't have enough spare capacity in other regions than us-
east-1 to satisfy all customers in case us-east-1 is suddenly not available
anymore. And there starts the interesting part. For EC2 it's simple: customers
with reserved instances first. For all other service it's probably: Most
important customers first. So if you happen to be a not so important customer
for AWS you might end up not able to run your infrastructure, simply because
AWS has no capacity left to satisfy all customers. If in general all AWS
regions would be equally utilized that probably wouldn't be a problem at all.

------
QuinnyPig
It would be quite the trick to take out multiple AZs, much less all of them in
a single region. They’re spread out within the region in virtually all cases.

Contrary to popular myth, nukes don’t have a 30 mile blast radius.

