Four prevalent themes in the discussion
1. AWS durability claims vs. SLA exclusions (force‑majeure/acts of war)
Many commenters note that AWS’s “11 nines” durability is a design target, not a guarantee, and that SLAs routinely carve out force‑majeure events such as war.
- “Making a probabilistic claim while excluding a factor that dominates those statistics is… quite creative accounting.” – the8472
- “They say it's 'designed for' 11 9s, not guaranteed.” – advisedwang
- “The SLA excludes force majeure.” – beejiu
- “Force majeure carveouts are really common in every type of contract.” – mjr00
2. Data‑residency / legal constraints blocking cross‑region redundancy
Customers often cannot move data out of a region (e.g., Bahrain) because of local laws or contractual terms, which left them exposed when the AZs were destroyed.
- “We received repeated, constant heads up to move our data by the first AZ much less second. The problem is that nobody is storing data in Bahrain unless there are data residency requirements for it.” – leftbehind
- “We have (well, had) customers running in me‑south‑1 and once the first AZ went down we wanted to proactively move their data to other regions… But our legal department slapped that down pretty quickly.” – bumblehean
- “You choose the AWS Region(s) in which your content is stored… We will not move or replicate your content outside of your chosen AWS Region(s) without your agreement.” – testplzignore (quoting AWS FAQ)
3. Responsibility for disaster recovery lies with the customer
Several participants argue that relying solely on AWS’s built‑in redundancy is insufficient; customers must implement their own cross‑region or offline backups.
- “Hey but that's exactly as per design. It is the customer's responsibility to store stuff elsewhere as DR backup, not AWS.” – ersheong
- “Although the more paranoid AWS customers who turned on (and pay for) S3 cross region replication… would be fine.” – gregw2
- “If I had an 'important enough' client, I think I'd store all out local … data to AWS Singapore … to protect against Australian jurisdictional and political risks.” – bigiain
4. Geopolitical risk and targeting of data centers in unstable regions
The discussion repeatedly highlights that locating infrastructure in a conflict‑prone area (Bahrain) makes it a legitimate target, and that centralized cloud assets increase risk during war.
- “For me‑south‑1 (Bahrain), all 3 data centres providing the redundancy were blown up by Iran… The redundancy was localised to small geographic area and a single government….” – dhx
- “The region has seen a bunch of wars in the last 100 years, so the annual war‑rate is > 1%.” – the8472
- “In a war where schools and bridges… are targeted, anyone should consider themselves a valid target.” – vkou
- “AWS is one of the largest military contractors… An estimated $4B a year in military spending goes to AWS.” – culi