- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
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Just stop thinking your shit is safe in the “cloud” people. It isn’t. And trusting in a single company to have your back, or even care about you is naive at best.
Why I have everything backed up on a hard drive of my own. Wish could build my own server, but don’t have the funds at this time. But pretty close just starting my own internet.
You can run a basic server with an old laptop, desktop, mini-pc, anything. Everyone starts somewhere. If you eventually need ‘more’ or ‘better’, you can figure things out then. Getting started with a used office PC for 40$ off eBay (or anything old you already have) is fine. Just get started.
I have an old Toshiba laptop that put Linux on, I wouldn’t mind turning into a server. I want to build a new gaming rig, then I can take my current rig and turn it into a big server. Definitely like to just wire me and my two sons rigs into our own private network.
Just try it with the old laptop. I personally found dietpi the incredibly easy entry. Super bare bones Linux actually meant for raspberry pi and such, but you can run it on any old laptop. Using your all gaming rig might be a high energy usage if you’re just gonna run barely more than a NAS. If you do it with the laptop, take out the battery or put a timer on charger outlet, permanently connected and charging with a system that isn’t actively managing the battery and charging could get you a spicy pillow quickly.
That’s perfect! I ran my server on an old HP laptop for 2 years before I put together a desktop SFF server with 2nd hand gaming PC parts.
Just throw Debian or opensuse MicroOS on it and take off!
Even for a step in between the two if you need more storage, I used one of these docking stations that you can get for cheap to add more storage.
I’m guessing they don’t live with you? And you need to setup a VPN? If so you can do that with a pretty low powered machine. Even a rPi is good enough.
My NAS is a 10+ year old Dell XPS that I just shoved new drives into. I need to get a rack mounted low power server to replace it but it works fine for now.
some home nas can also be budget friendly… or some vps, where you can start small and scale up on-the-fly when you need it.
The cloud is, and always has been, merely other people’s computers.
Their only legitimate use case is as disposable, transient, dumb nodes and synapses of a system you retain control and agency of.
It’s truly amazing that Amazon is able to convince anyone that it’s a good idea to store valuable business data on their computers
People are so eager to relinquish control of their business, even their life, for the tiniest bit of convenience.
Before anyone says “you put all your eggs in one basket,” let me be clear: I didn’t. I put them in one provider, with what should have been bulletproof redundancy
This shouldn’t happen and the OOP clearly knows what he was doing but putting everything in a single provider with multiple services clearly is not redundancy.
Multi-cloud is a significant amount of effort to pull off.
Being on one cloud provider across multiple regions is often plenty of redundancy.
Being available across multiple cloud providers is really REALLY difficult
Multi-cloud is difficult, that’s true. But having backups outside the single cloud is easy.
That way if your cloud provider pulls the plug, you will have to reconfigure everything but at least your data stays intact.
To be able to recover from something like that you don’t need multiple working cloud setups. You just need backups, so that in an event like OOP’s, you spend a few weeks rebuilding the configurations instead of years rebuilding your projects.
It really depends, pulling hundreds of GiB out of AWS for backing up on say GCS is going to add up extremely quickly. The cloud companies make it intentionally painful to leave or interop.
Even large projects rarely have hundreds of GB of code. They might have hundreds of gigs of artifacts and history, but not all of that needs to be backed up. That’s where tiered backup strategies come into play.
Code (or what ever else is the most painful to recover) is backed up in e.g. git, with version history and many different locations.
Artifacts either don’t need a backup at all, or maybe one copy. If they get lost, they can be rebuilt.
Temporary stuff like build caches don’t need backups.
You don’t even need to backup the VMs. Backing up a setup script is enough. Sure, all of this is more complicated than to just backup your whole cloud storage space, but it also requires orders of magnitude less storage.
In this guy’s specific case, it may be financially feasible to back up onto other cloud solutions, for the reasons you stated.
However public cloud is used for a ton of different things. If you have 4TiB of data in Glacier, you will be paying through the absolute nose pulling that data down into another cloud; highway robbery prices.
Further as soon as you talk about something more than just code (say: UGC, assets, databases) the amount of data needing to be “egressed” from the cloud balloons, as does the price.
Retrofitting stuff is of course difficult. If it’s done from the beginning it wouldn’t be that difficult or expensive.
4TB isn’t that much. That’s small enough that it can fit in a cold backup on a hard drive or two.
Multi-cloud is far from trivial, which is why most companies… don’t.
Even if you are multi-cloud, you will be egressing data from one platform to another and racking up large bills (imagine putting CloudFront in front of a GCS endpoint lmao), you are incentivized to stick on a single platform. I don’t blame anyone for being single-cloud with the barriers they put up, and how difficult maintaining your own infrastructure is.
Once you get large enough to afford tape libraries then yeah having your own offsite for large backups makes a lot of sense, but otherwise the convenience and reliability (when AWS isn’t nuking your account) of managed storage is hard to beat — cold HDDs are not great, and m-disc is pricey.
In terms of service availability, yes.
In terms of data backup, no.
The author put it well:
What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.
Multi-region cloud computing is already difficult and expensive enough, multi-cloud is not only technically complex but financially and legally fraught with uncertainties. At that point you’re giving up so much of the promise of cloud computing that you might as well rent rack space somewhere, install bare-metal infra, and pay someone to drive there to manually backup to tape every 3 months.
This level of technical purity is economically unfeasible for virtually everyone, that’s the whole point of paying a vendor to deal with it for us. And you know who doesn’t need to put up with the insane overhead of multi-cloud setups? That’s right, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who will be getting paid for hosting everyone else’s multi-cloud setups while they get to run their huge infra on their own cloud without fear. The last thing GAFAM competitors - especially OSS projects - need is even fewer economies of scale.
Stop with the victim-blaming, this blunder is squarely on AWS.
Yeah this is the right take, IMO.
Good on you to those of you who actually do multi-cloud backups.
Even if this was just a loss of their infrastructure, it would be catastrophic to any company without good infrastructure as code practices.
Not to mention the downtime.
This sure as shit doesn’t look “customer obsessed”.
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Did you even read the article? Even under the VERY GENEROUS interpretation of contract law that contracts can’t be predatory (which is not a particularly popular philosophical stance outside of cyberpunk fiction), AWS MENA fell short of even their typical termination procedures because they accidentally nuked it while doing a dry-run.
I don’t know where you work but if we did that to a paying customer, even IF there was a technicality through which we could deny responsibility, we would be trying to make it right.
Yeah, but he was paying the provider for providing the redundancy on this level.
We shouldn’t blame him on the technical level for what is a problem with the provider on the organizational level. If this had happened to a Fortune 500 company, Amazon would have had an army of lawyers descend on them.
“i didn’t put all my eggs in one basket, i put them multiple metal boxes… that i paid the same guy to hold for me. it’s different.”
During the entire article I kept thinking how it wasn’t best practice to use the same cloud for everything, that you needed a different cloud because occasionally, your account can just get nuked from orbit. People dont understand that these corporations are really just held together with luck prayers and duct tape. Software enables us to develop in the worst ways possible, and then call it production.
Platform decay strikes again.
Bezos and the shareholders weren’t happy with AWS already being one of the single most profitable products in human history, because capitalism demands unending infinite year-on-year growth.
Whenever you hear them cry that capitalism breeds innovation, the kinds of innovation they’re talking about are this shitty AI profit-maximising algorithm that created OOP’s problem. This isn’t a crazy conspiracy theory either; I’ve consulted in the software dev teams of dozens of major multinationals and the projects were always, without exception, some variant on “how can we replace people” or “how can we reduce costs by doing something slightly worse”.
I’ve consulted in the software dev teams of dozens of major multinationals and the projects were always, without exception, some variant on “how can we replace people” or “how can we reduce costs by doing something slightly worse”.
Always might be an overstatement, but this has been true over the past couple years for myself and the people I know at these companies. Especially right now - upper management seems to be deluded into thinking that LLMs can do anything, or more likely, they’re just trying to sell hype like everyone else just to raise the stock price.
Before anyone says “you put all your eggs in one basket,” let me be clear: I didn’t. I put them in one provider, with what should have been bulletproof redundancy
Tldr; “I didn’t put all my eggs in one basket. I put them into multiple smaller baskets and put those into one basket. That’s still more than one basket right? …right!?”
Trust me, they never delete your data, just your account.
Sure, but they’ll never make the effort to let you access your data.
Basically “try to sue us”
If they never deleted any data of close accounts, wouldn’t that be a lot of wasted storage space? Wouldn’t it be way too much data?
As an ex AWS employee, you are so full of shit, it’s leaking out of my screen. It also shows a low level of technical literacy imo.
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This is a really interesting read, but this dude missed a major component of best practices, which is that your architecture needs to be able to respond to a proper disaster, which includes Amazon just dropping out of the sky and nuking your entire account.
Frankly, it’s shocking that he didn’t have local copies or a home server that he kept backups too. I’ve seen some people mention that a multi-cloud architecture is hard to set up, which is true, it’s also expensive, but I don’t think it would be super hard to set up, like, a blob storage in Azure, or a Google Cloud Storage, to just keep backups of whatever you’re working on. We should always keep in mind that our accounts getting locked is always a possibility.
It’s kinda weird, normally when you hear about things like this, it’s the other way around where somebody was running a major production component on personal infrastructure and couldn’t handle the bare metal.
Yeah the 3 2 1 backup strategy involves local backups
This stuff terrifies me. I’m de-googling as fast as I can and reviewing all my local backups plus add encryption to what stays in the cloud.
i have:
- 2 disks at 1 TB each full of my backups, all in the format 2025-05-03 each.
- the disks are encrypted using linux’s
cryptsetup luksOpenmethod.
the password for encryption is a three-word sequence, example “apple broccoli joanna”, and i store a paper on it with the three questions “my favorite food, first vegetables i planted, first girl i liked” or sth
More reason that other countries developing smaller, regional cloud providers is a good thing. Part of the reason AWS thinks they can get away with this is that there are 2-3 other providers they compete with, and moving is onerous. If there were 200+ cloud providers, there would almost certainly be a standard set of tools and much better customer service.
Well, at least for the OP, they made his moving really easy
A fair point. Kind of like an arsonist could make my next move really easy.
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Sorry but this is bullshit. In no sane world is a 5-day warning a valid precursor to a irrevocable total wipe. People go on vacation. People get sick. This is an stupendously bad take.
Yes this developer did a mistake in trusting AWS like this, but this is still an AWS fault.
5 days including the weekend then wiping the account is utter bullshit. I think he should have had an off-site and for that I blame him, but this is a ridiculous take.
JFC this poor dev.
Luckily many of my jobs or clients don’t like AWS and have gone elsewhere. One of my projects is self-hosted (with an off-site backup).
I wish this person the best moving forward, I didn’t recommend AWS before, but I’ll definitely make sure to push against it now.
and why you should never trust cloud providers with your only copy of anything
well, yeah. Even the old 3-2-1 backup policy is against that.
Fuck, this is bad.
Mr Bezos doesn’t give a shit about you.
Never has. Never will.Ruining your entire life doesn’t bother him in the slightest.
He doesn’t even give a shit about your money,
he has incomprehensibly vast amounts of money
and you don’t make the tiniest molecule of difference to his life.All he gives a shit about is
extracting
the largest possible amount of money
on average
from the largest possible pool of people
and businesses.So you don’t matter to him. Not even slightly.
He cares much, much more about a worm he’s never seen that lives under his lawn than he cares about you.
And he doesn’t give a fuck about the worm.Quit giving Bezos your money, everyone. He doesn’t need it. You do.
Not that I don’t think Bezos is a complete piece of shit, but he is no longer the CEO of Amazon.
Anyway, fuck Jeffrey Bezos.
I think he’s now chairman and certainly still profits from Amazon.
It’s interesting that LLMs emotionally saved them, allowing them to bounce back from a destructive to a constructive mindset.
Reading another post of theirs, they seem to really love AI. Albeit in that post, it feels to me like they took AI responses too literally, with too much meaning (as if sentient, or ignoring potential training bias, etc).
I really need to start backups of my S3 bucket and my Hetzner Server to a local hard drive.
