Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.

Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587

There were almost daily posts in HNs front page about it 4 months ago when it first happened, as well as front page headlines on CNN and WSJ and other news outlets, though they quickly got drowned out by all of the other Iran war stories when the war first broke out.

This is just one of the popular ones, but there were also tens of posts about it with only 1-10 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641788

Here’s another popular one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632503

The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.

> Why would it be flagged?

Because individual HN users do the flagging and many are tired of the inevitable and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war that predictably erupts on any topic related to the Middle East.

> Why is it pointless to inform and remind others about what Israel did in the region?

It’s the act of comment warring that is pointless. [X/Y] partisans are not intellectually curious about statements coming from a [Y/X] partisan. Nobody’s minds are going to change either way.

There presumably some third parties who could hypothetically be swayed, but from what I’ve seen they’re few and far between.

I love how you immediately proved their point while trying to prove them wrong.

For the same reason you chose to exclude the any mention of informing and reminding others about what Hamas did in the region.

You comment presumes that either the posted article or the comments are doing in any informing. I contend that neither do, they are both simply writing prompts for partisans.

Your comment also presumes that the entire earth is not already saturated in Israel v Palestine content. You not getting your desired outcome is not evidence that people are uninformed.

Whether they are or are not, you are also sidestepping an even more important question - why must all internet sites cover all topics? There's nothing wrong with any site making clear what topics they want to focus on. HN and it's users have made it clear they prefer to focus on tech and there are literally 70 million other places you can go to fight over Israel & Palestine. If that's your thing, have at it, you don't need to do it here.

In fact, I would argue that both HN and Israel v Palestine fight sites would be better for it. If all sites are for all issues then all sites just devolve to the same slop. If sites can focus, they develop their own unique community. The attempt to invade such spaces and force them to have the discussions you want them to have is just colonialism by another name.

It isn't a proxy discussion though. It is the same discussion.

Yes.

The point is that every random going-on gets used as an excuse to rehash the entire conflict from 1947 onwards, and a lot of people are just not interested in that, and don't consider it relevant to the site.

It’s a rehash of a conflict from abut 3000 BCE onwards. Who really is the “historical people” of the land that is now Palestine/Israel has been the subject of bloody conflict for 5000 years.

It's been extensively reported on, and any AWS user that clicks on the health dashboard would also have seen it, even if they don't consume from news outlets.

As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.

The only reason we knew about it is that it was one of our network output 'node', but I don't think I've read anything about it in generalist medias

Are you implying that something that gets reported on, shouldn't be on HN? Also, clearly it wasn't that extensive if GP hadn't heard about it

I learned about it from HN, a while ago.

> Are you implying that something that gets reported on, shouldn't be on HN?

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Oftentimes discussions get killed not because the source article is bad but because the discussions themselves devolve into flame bait/war?

Having reviewed the comments I don’t see any indication of why it would be flagged for the discussion.

Probably somebody flagged it for being too well moderated and therefore not agreeing enough with their side.

> Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.

Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.

Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".

There was a building hit near the data center on the first day of the war and that took down one AZ (unfortunately, two of my three EC2 instances were in that AZ). The hit on April 1 pretty much took it all down. Fortunately I had relatively up-to-date backups (both within 24 hours before each outage) so all I lost was a little email (spam) and some libera chat logs. I've moved to ap-southeast-1, which means trading a ~ 60ms ping to ~ 110ms.

I'm sure there are businesses in the UAE, but wondering, why would one keep instances/data on a zone at risk since well over a year now.

Genuinely curious. Aside for high frequency trading where latency is so vital.

The next closest region is Tel-Aviv, I guess it's pretty obvious they won't put their workload here.

And after that it's Mumbai, 2500km away. That will easily double your latency, which is someone that you can feel in usage.

Why wouldn’t they - Israel and UAE have good relations

Israel starts new war every month, you can understand that it is risky to put your data in a data center that could be the target as well.

Sat Photo https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-amazon-web-service...

me-south-1 is in fact, quite possibly permanently, "offline".

I'm kinda surprised Amazon didn't send a team to collect all storage devices from the wreckage and ship them elsewhere to be connected to the network for recovery.

I'm surprised you'd think sending civilians into a war zone is a good thing.

It's not like Amazon doesn't have tactical teams on call - if that was a priority, I'm sure it would have been done. But like any good datacenter provider, they have offsite backups, and I'd expect the damaged hardware will just be written off.

The company line has been that they expect you to have your own backups in a region outside of the Middle East or you’re hosed until they can turn the (now destroyed) buildings back on.

I wonder if AWS even has the capacity to keep an entire region’s data elsewhere if they wanted to (I mean they could with their margins, but I doubt they do.)

Yeah, they have backups of their shit, not your shit. If you don’t use their cross-region backups, I don’t know what to tell you. Even us-east-1 isn’t entirely immune to disasters manmade or otherwise…

War zones tend to have lots of people in already, and many of them really want a job.

1.5M civilians already live in Bahrain. This usage makes the term "war zone" meaningless.

With how overpaid and with how poorly the average AWS employee treats those around them (especially their colleagues), I think a little bit of real action is massively overdue for the average AWS peon. Please ship them to a war zone! Please!!!

Earn those bananas! Bezos isn't rich enough yet! Work harder!

I didn't see any photos of the building/damages, but assuming it caught fire and fire surpression systems were activated, many to most of the drives would not be easy to recover data from, to say nothing of physical recovery.

You're expected to keep your data redundant in a 2nd region... I'm sure not everyone does, but I'd guess most AWS customers that only keep their data in a single region have chosen a different region (us-east-1 perhaps...)