A software engineer has warned against trusting cloud data storage services in a painstakingly detailed blog post detailing their own “complete digital annihilation” at the hands of AWS admins. Developer Abdelkader Boudih, pen name Seuros, says they had been a fee-paying AWS subscriber for a decade, with the cloud service becoming a firm part of their workflow. Suffice to say, the developer’s long-standing relationship with AWS has now ended acrimoniously.
Isn’t the whole idea of the cloud that you pay for it to be safe? Why bother if they’re not going to keep it safe for you?
Backups are about protecting your stuff from yourself as much as anything. If it’s possible to delete all record of all your stuff with one wrong key press then you haven’t backed it up properly.
I suspect that if this person had known that using AWS was putting all of their data within one wrong key press of being completely deleted without recovery, then they would have reconsidered using AWS.
Maybe, but I dunno, AWS isn’t advertised as a consumer cloud storage like OneDrive or Dropbox, right? It’s object storage for people who understand technical things like this and who write programs that include things like a recycle bin for recovery.
All of the diligence in the world on your end does not matter if, on the AWS end, the employees can and do delete all of your data via fat-fingering without involving you at all, which is what happened here.
I guess so. I dunno. A 3 2 1 backup is pretty common around here. So even if someone deleted one copy, you’d have two left. Having a single place with all your data in the world just seems like a bad idea (yes I’m aware that this is the case for many users of cloud storage).
Sure, but the point is that he was supposedly paying AWS to have multiple backups in multiple regions, which he very carefully set up to maximize redundancy. If, at the end of the day, there is no actual redundancy because AWS itself is actually malicious insofar that it will delete all of your data for no good reason at all and then blame it on you, then they are being very dishonest about their product.
No. The ‘whole idea’ of the cloud is that it’s cheaper than self-hosting via your hosted servers you manage in a DC or in-house. That’s been its primary value proposition for the last 15+ years.
Rigorous backups and data safety are secondary concerns that you often pay for as an additional service or add-on feature with your cloud provider.