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by the847211 hours ago |
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upvoteby mjr0010 hours ago|
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Force majeure carveouts are really common in every type of contract.

You should check your home insurance contract, for instance... It likely would not cover an ICBM strike.

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upvoteby sire-vc10 hours ago|
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Somehow I feel like the biggest post-apocalyptic problem will be the loss of home equity due to uninsured damage causing a collapse of financial markets.
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upvoteby mpyne10 hours ago|
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Are you saying that most data loss happens because your data center gets blown up in a shooting war? Like, AWS is the first digital service provider to lose data in decades?
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upvoteby the847210 hours ago|
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I'm saying that if you have eliminated more mundane failures like dying harddrives, cosmic rays and so on from your systems and your calculation ends up with 11 nines then actually those "force majeure" events are probable enough that they dominate whatever other residuals are supposedly hiding in those last 0.0000000001%.

The region has seen a bunch of wars in the last 100 years, so the annual war-rate is > 1%. Even if we generously add the assumption that only 1 in 100 wars affects a datacenter you can see that wars become a major source of correlated hardware failures that they need to solve to actually deliver that kind of reliability.

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upvoteby ployable78 hours ago|
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You don’t want to blend probabilities like this, because the tactics you use as a consumer vary between the two. If you consider 11 9s like “object AFR”, you might build systems that are resilient to very occasional single object loss. And it’s useful to know at what rate that might occur.

Whereas with these force majeure events you’d want a complete DR setup, and it’s typically an async recovery. Here it is useful to understand the fault domain (single server or single building or multi-building) so you can plan.

Blending the two numbers doesn’t help you build better against the systems. And the force majeure events are rare enough that they won’t happen … until they do. I’m not sure that knowing the precise probability that Iran would attack a gulf nation would change the fact that if they do, you need to have a DR story.

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upvoteby mpyne9 hours ago|
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Cosmic rays and dying hard drives are not force majeure though.
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upvoteby eli10 hours ago|
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I think it's what most people comparing provider SLAs would expect
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upvoteby unethical_ban10 hours ago|
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Are you suggesting that their technical documents have separate availability numbers to predict geopolitical events and war?
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upvoteby throwawaythekey9 hours ago|
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The sales pitch should change from "probabilistically we will NEVER lose your data" to "you are most likely to lose your data due to wars, terrorists, software bugs, someone losing the master encryption key, the government forcing us to...".

Offsite backups are sadly rare these days, and aws sales is the main reason why.

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upvoteby mitxela10 hours ago|
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Creative accounting works and is good because it works. If your customers give you more money because you lied to them, but it's legal, then it's good.
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