My fear of this sort of thing happening is why I don't use github or gitlab.com for primary hosting of my source code; only mirrors. I do primary source control in house, and keep backups on top of that.
It's also why nothing in my AWS account is "canonical storage". If I need, say, a database in AWS, it is live-mirrored to somewhere within my control, on hardware I own, even if that thing never sees any production traffic beyond the mirror itself. Plus backups.
That way, if this ever happens, I can recover fairly easily. The backups protect me from my own mistakes, and the local canonical copies and backups protect me from theirs.
Granted, it gets harder and more expensive with increasing scale, but it's a necessary expense if you care at all about business continuity issues. On a personal level, it's much cheaper though, especially these days.
wewewedxfgdf · 11h ago
I once said to the CTO of the company I worked for "do we back up our source code"?
He said, "no, it's on github".
I said no more.
gerdesj · 11h ago
I would suggest your CTO needs some gentle reminders about risk management and how the cloud really works.
If your boss is that daft, its probably a sign to bail out. Remember to do your own personal due diligence. Due dill is not something that you just do for someone else: do your own! Do your own personal risk assessment. If code was lost, who would be found accountable? You or them?
EDIT: PS - I am a CTO ...
wewewedxfgdf · 11h ago
But it's github ...... it can't be lost.
Unless github closes the account, or a hacker gets access, or a rogue employee gets mad and deletes all, or some development accident results in repo deletion, or etc etc.
weikju · 9h ago
Gotta add AI agents to that list
Dylan16807 · 11h ago
If nobody has the repo checked out, what are the odds it's important?
bryant · 11h ago
> If nobody has the repo checked out, what are the odds it's important?
Oh boy.
Tons of apps in maintenance mode run critical infrastructure and see few commits in a year.
Dylan16807 · 11h ago
And the people using it multiple times a year delete it afterwards?
RealStickman_ · 11h ago
relying on random local copies as a backup strategy is not a strategy.
No comments yet
shakna · 8h ago
They often only have a binary that you would have to reverse engineer. Source code gets lost.
To step outside just utility programs, the reason why Command & Conquer didn't have a remaster was:
> I'm not going to get into this conversation, but I feel this needs to be answered. During this project of getting the games on Steam, no source code from any legacy games showed up in the archives.
bryant · 11h ago
> And the people using it multiple times a year delete it afterwards?
The people wouldn't, but in the environments I'm thinking of, security policies might.
What you're leaning into is a high-risk backup strategy that would rely mostly on luck to get something remotely close to the current version back online. It's pretty reckless.
Lammy · 11h ago
More like “none of the people who worked on it are at the company any more”
burnt-resistor · 8h ago
Popularity != importance. There is plenty of absolutely critical FOSS code that receives very little maintenance and attention, yet is mission critical to society functioning efficiently. And the same happens in organizations too, with say their bootloader for firmware of hardware products.
NewJazz · 11h ago
Devs clean up their workstation sometimes. You can get fancy about deleting build artifacts or just remove the whole directory. Devs move to new machines sometimes and don't always transfer everything. Devs leave.
Software still runs, and if you don't have the source then you'll only have the binary or other build artifact.
OutOfHere · 11h ago
You clearly haven't worked much with code over many years. When laptops change, not all existing projects get checked out.
In fact, in VSCode, one can use a project without cloning and checking it out at all.
Dylan16807 · 10h ago
Honestly I'm just really wondering what the odds are. In particular for code that made it onto git.
OutOfHere · 10h ago
Over the long term, the odds reach 100% that it won't be checked out. That's because people mostly only work on newer projects. As for mature older projects, even if they're running in production, cease to see many/any updates, and so they don't get cloned on to newer laptops. This doesn't mean that the older projects are now less important, because if they ever need to be re-deployed to production, only the source code will allow it.
burnt-resistor · 8h ago
LMAO. Must be one of those MBA CTOs. At least mirror the crown jewels to bitbucket, Tarsnap, or somewhat else that has 2 weeks - 3 months worth of independent copies made daily.
If not MBA, the problem may also stem from the gradual atrophy and disrespect shown towards the sysadmin profession.
OutOfHere · 11h ago
I don't understand how the VC financiers got so rich while being so stupid as to hire such stupid people at the executive level, e.g. your CTO.
pintxo · 3h ago
If only 10 out of 100 of your investments make it, does it matter if one of the 90 failed because of lacking backups? Their risk strategy is diversification of investments. Not making each investment itself bulletproof.
simondotau · 11h ago
If the repo is on GitHub and two or more developers keep reasonably up-to-date checkouts on their local computers, the “3-2-1” principle of backups is satisfied.
Additionally to that, if any of those developers have a backup strategy for their local computer, those also count as a backup of that source code.
wewewedxfgdf · 11h ago
CTO explaining that to the CEO when your source code is completely gone:
CTO: "I know our entire github repo is deleted and all our source code is gone and we never took backups, but I'm hoping the developers might have it all on their machines."
CEO: "Hoping developers had it locally was your strategy for protecting all our source code?"
CTO: "It's a sound approach and ticks all the boxes."
CEO: "You're fired."
Board Directors to CEO: "You're fired."
Tohsig · 9h ago
Technically true, but only if we consider dev checkouts as "backups". In the majority of cases they probably are, but that's not guaranteed. The local repo copy could be in a wildly different state than the primary origin, a shallow clone, etc... While the odds of that mattering are very low, they're not zero. I personally prefer to have a dedicated mirror as a failsafe.
koonsolo · 10h ago
The benefit of DVCS. Losing the source code from github when it's all on local computers is the least of problems.
klysm · 10h ago
I mean it’s also on everybody’s laptop. Recovering from GitHub going away would be trivial for me
cnst · 5h ago
How do you distinguish a mirror from not a mirror on GitHub?
I often have my git configured to push to multiple upstreams, this means that basically all of your mirrors can be primaries.
This is a really good part about GitHub. Every copy is effectively a mirror, too, and it's cryptographically verified as well, so, you don't have to worry about the mirror going rogue without anyone noticing.
floating-io · 3h ago
I use GitLab locally and push only to that. GitLab itself is configured to mirror outbound to the public side of things.
In a collaborative scenario, doing it that way makes sure everything is always properly synchronized. Some individual's lacking config can't break things.
burnt-resistor · 8h ago
Exactly. Techofeudal overlords can switch off all "your" stuff at any time. Always have a personal and a business disaster recovery plan including isolated backups (not synchronized replication) on N >= 2 separate services/modalities.
Options to consider for various circumstances include:
- Different object storage clouds with different accounts (different names, emails, and payment methods), potentially geographically different too
- Tarsnap (while using AWS under the hood but someone else's account(s))
- MEGA
- Onsite warm and/or cold media
- Geographically separate colo DR site, despite the overly-proud trend of "we're 100% (on someone else's SPoF) cloud now"
- Offsite cold media (personal home and/or IronMountain)
ransom1538 · 10h ago
IMHO Lawyers get creative, a github account can show a ton of work activity, nda voilations, etc. Your "private repro" is just a phone call away from being a public repro.
roncesvalles · 6h ago
Your whole GitHub account is a phone call away from being suspended due to frivolous IP/DMCA/what-have-you claims.
spiralcoaster · 11h ago
The amount of self-aggrandizing and lack of self awareness tells me this author is doing to do all of this again. This post could be summed up with "I should have had backups. Lesson learned", but instead they deflect to whining about how their local desktop is a mess and they NEED to store everything remotely to stay organized.
They're going to dazzle you with all of their hardened bunker this, and multiple escape route that, not realizing all of their complex machinery is metaphorically running off of a machine with no battery backup. One power outage and POOF!
mcv · 4h ago
Yeah, at some point the article says:
> I’d done everything right. Vault encryption keys stored separately from my main infrastructure. Defense in depth. Zero trust architecture. The works.
Did you? Is putting all your eggs in one basket "defense in depth"? Is total trust in AWS "zero trust architecture"?
I'm not defending AWS here; they fully deserve all the fallout they can get from this, and I do feel for the dev who lost all their stuff through AWS's fuckup. Lots of people do the same.
My current employer does the same. It's a major bank, and all of their stuff is Microsoft. Azure, SharePoint, Office, Teams, the works. I think it's foolish to trust a single foreign company with all your vital data and infrastructure, operating in q country where the government demands access to everything, but this is what everybody does now.
We trust "the cloud" way too much, and expose ourselves to these sort of fuckups.
seuros · 3h ago
I dont disagree with your broader point—centralizing everything in one provider is a systemic risk.
The architecture was built assuming infrastructure within AWS might fail. What I didn’t plan for was the provider itself turning hostile, skipping their own retention policy, and treating verification as a deletion trigger.
No comments yet
gblargg · 11h ago
The author doesn't grasp what putting all your eggs into one basket means:
> 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:
That's one basket. A single point of failure. "But it should have been impossible to fail!" Backups are to handle the "impossible" failure (in reality nothing is 100% reliable).
davidhyde · 9h ago
This one time, traveling through Asia, a simple merchant transaction triggered a fraud alarm on my card. The default for my bank at the time was to cancel my card automatically. This was before the days where cards could become unblocked. I had to travel to another city to pick up a new card in 10 working ways. This was a Mastercard credit card. I thought I was smart traveling with both a mastercard and a Visa card. Well, the Visa card was automatically cancelled too. Due to the same event. No cards for me to use to get to that city and I had to resort to a dodgy western union transfer to move forward. Also, try booking a flight with cash, it’s not fun.
My point is that the basket that eggs are put in is not always clear in hindsight. I wasn’t even aware that Mastercard and visa shared fraud alerts and that they were automatically linked.
The author’s article is not about backups, it’s about accountability.
seuros · 2h ago
My post is not about backup strategy, it’s about what happens when the infrastructure itself becomes hostile, and support throw you from one team to another. AWS didn't just delete files.
They gaslit me for 20 days while violating their own stated policies.
mcv · 4h ago
Visa and Mastercard are also an excellent example of two companies we trust way too much despite having proven many times they don't deserve that trust.
Tohsig · 9h ago
Fully agree. It's the same reason why you wouldn't put a repo on Github and then mirror that repo to Github. At a minimum any good mirror would be on a different provider, and ideally (if we get real picky) on a completely different cloud service.
seuros · 2h ago
When you put a repo in Github, everybody that forked or clone that repo become a Mirror.
Jedd · 7h ago
Yeah, that post was hard to read.
I'll concede that I'm hugely empathetic for people that suffer data loss. The pithy aphorism about there being two types of people -- those who haven't lost data, and those who do backups -- is doubly droll because only the second group really appreciates the phrase.
But it's surprising to find people with more than a decade in IT who don't appreciate the risks here.
The timeline reveals there were 13 days from when the first signs of trouble surfaced, to when the account was deleted. So a fortnight of very unsubtle reminders to do something AND a fortnight in which to act.
(I recently learned the phrase BATNA[0] and in modern <sic> IT where it's Turtles as a Service, all the way down, it's amazing how often this concept is applicable.)
Author seems very keen to blame his part-time sysadmin rather than his systems architect. I can understand the appeal of that blame distribution algorithm, but it's nonetheless misguided.
The phrasing:
> But here’s the dilemma they’ve created: What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup?
inverts the horse & cart. If you have a petabyte of data that's important, that you can't recreate from other sources, your concern is how to keep your data safe.
If you're paying someone to keep a copy, pay (at least one other) person to keep another copy. Even that isn't something I'd call safe though.
> Me: “You’re answering like I’m Piers Morgan asking ‘Do you condemn October 7th?’ and you reply with historical complexity dating to 1948.”
Yeah...
If I'm working tickets at AWS that kind of dickishness is going to ensure that I don't do more than the least amount of effort for you.
Maybe I could burn my entire weekend trying to see if I can rescue your data... or maybe I'm going to do nothing more than strictly follow procedure and let my boss know that I tried...
seuros · 3h ago
I did have backups. Multi-region. Redundant. I followed AWS’s own best practices to the letter.
The only failure I didn’t plan for? AWS becoming the failure.
The provider nuking everything in violation of their own retention policies. That’s not a backup problem, that is a provider trust problem.
The reason i did not kept a local copy, was that i formatted my computer after a hardware failure, after the nurse dropped the laptop in the hospital i was on. Since i have a AWS backup, i just started with a fresh OS while waiting to get discharged to return home and redownload everything.
When i returned 6 days days later, the backup was gone.
No comments yet
akerl_ · 11h ago
They’ve really buried the lede here: this reads like the person paying for the account was not the post author, and AWS asked the payer (who from their perspective is the owner of the account) for information.
That person wasn’t around to respond.
blargey · 11h ago
The lede buried under that lede is that (according to an insider?) some AWS employee accidentally wiped everything immediately (contrary to typical practice in such situations of retaining data while things get sorted out), leading to a chain of brushing-off / covering-up percolating through whatever support chain the OP was talking to.
akerl_ · 11h ago
That does seem to be a mistake on their part. And the comms we’re seeing look bad.
But the overall post and the double buried ledes make me question the degree to which we’re getting the whole story.
Ancapistani · 4h ago
> And the comms we’re seeing look bad.
Right or wrong, those messages look like very standard AWS-speak for "this is your mistake, not ours".
I have no idea if that's a reasonable stance or not, but I _will_ say that AWS's internal culture contributes to this sort of bad press. If they would respond to their customers with even a trace of empathy and ownership, this post would likely never have been written.
yongjik · 9h ago
I find that story really hard to believe. In a company the size of Amazon, I can't imagine a rogue employee running a tool that can willy-nilly wipe out customers' data without several levels of manager approval.
Besides, what would be the potential benefit of such a hypothetical script? The author mentions "a bill under $200," so that's the upper limit on how much it costs AWS to keep the author's whole data. If I was working there and a coworker said "Hey I created a script that can save the company $200 by finding a defunct (but paying) customer and wiping out their data!", I'd have replied "What the fuck is wrong with you."
seuros · 2h ago
The idea of a rogue AWS team running a deletion script without oversight should sound ridiculous. At a company that size of AWS, you will expect guardrails, audits, approvals.
But here is the thing: no one from AWS has given me an official explanation. Not during the 20-day support hell, not after termination, not even when I asked directly: “Does my data still exist?” Just a slow drip of templated replies, evasions, and contradictions.
An AWS insider did reach out claiming it was an internal test gone wrong, triggered by a misused --dry flag and targeting At a company that size, you'd expect guardrails, audits, approvals low-activity accounts.
According to them, the team ran it without proper approval. Maybe it is true. Maybe they were trying to warn me.
Maybe its a trap to get me to throw baseless accusations and discredit myself.
I'm not presenting that theory as fact. I don’t know what happened behind the wall.
What I do know is:
- My account was terminated without following AWS’s own 90-day retention policy
- I had a valid payment method on file
- Support stonewalled every direct question for 20 days
- No answers were provided, even post-mortem
cmckn · 11h ago
> accidentally wiped everything immediately
There is no “wipe everything immediately” button.
anonymars · 10h ago
Did you read the article?
> According to them, AWS MENA was running some kind of proof of concept on “dormant” and “low-activity” accounts. Multiple accounts were affected, not just mine.
If AWS has a 90-day closure policy, why was this account deleted so quickly?
While that is certainly true, the idea that they can so rapidly decimate your data without the possibility to restore is still terrifying if that's your only copy of that data.
They should have to hold it for at least 90 days. In my opinion, it should be more like six months to a year.
In my mind, it's exactly equivalent to a storage space destroying your car five days after you miss a payment. They effectively stole and destroyed the data when they should have been required to return it to the actual owner.
Of course, that's my opinion of how it should be. AFAIK, there is no real legal framework, and how it actually is is entirely up to your provider, which is one reason I never trust them.
akerl_ · 11h ago
The post suggests that even if AWS’s policy had been to hold the data for a year, the same thing would have happened, because they deleted the data early due to operator error.
Similarly, a physical storage company can totally make a mistake and accidentally destroy your stuff if they mix up their bookkeeping, and your remedy is generally either to reach an amicable settlement with them or sue them for your damages.
adastra22 · 11h ago
It sounds like it wasn’t OP’s data though, which is an important distinction.
anonymars · 11h ago
That's not the impression I got
> When AWS demanded this vanished payer validate himself, I pointed out that I already had my own Wise card on file—the same card I’d used to pay before the payer arrangement, kept active specifically in case the payer disconnected while I was traveling or offline
nerdponx · 11h ago
It was his, along with his clients' data.
luckylion · 11h ago
The payer is the owner of the account? I doubt that is AWS' default stance, because their contract is with the account holder, not the payer.
Me paying your bill doesn't give me ownership of your stuff - as far as AWS is concerned, your bill is paid, and that's the extent of their involvement, everything else is between you and me.
If what he writes is true, he remained the account holder and even had a backup billing method in place - something he probably wouldn't have if he wasn't the account holder.
I don't know if he's completely honest about the story, but "somebody else paid, so we decided they are now the owner" isn't how that works.
slashdave · 11h ago
Put your valuables into a safe deposit box. Or, buy some stocks.
Some accident occurs. You don't pay your bill, address changes, etc. You have at least two entire years to contact the holder and claim your property. After that point, it is passed to the state as unclaimed property. You still have an opportunity to claim it.
Digital data? Screw that! One mistake, everything deleted.
akerl_ · 11h ago
Physical storage providers make the same kind of mistakes all the time, accidentally emptying the wrong storage unit or trashing the wrong safety deposit box.
You have potentially stronger civil remedies for recouping on those damages, but not always.
yardie · 11h ago
Cloud user here. If you would read your contracts, and it doesn't matter which cloud service you use, they all have the same section on Share Responsibility.
You, the customer, are responsible for your data. AWS is only responsible for the infrastructure that it resides on.
crote · 11h ago
That's exactly the problem, isn't it?
AWS is not responsible for what you do with your data. AWS, on its own, is not going to make backups for you so you can recover from a failed DB migration you did yourself. AWS cannot be held responsible for your admin fat-fingering and deleting the entire prod environment.
However, AWS is responsible for the underlying infrastructure. The website you linked clearly shows "storage" as falling under AWS's responsibility: your virtual hard drives aren't supposed to just magically disappear!
If they can just nuke your entire setup with an "Oops, sorry!", what's all the talk about redundancy and reliability supposed to be worth? At that point, how are they any different from Joe's Discount Basement Hosting?
ProofHouse · 11h ago
This has happened to me too destroyed five years of my life no joke. Obviously it wasn’t just the set up and pipelines that took only 4 to 6 months but as a chain reaction to collapsed the entire startup. It was so unexpected. Lesson learned.
roncesvalles · 6h ago
If it takes more than a day to re-setup your cloud infra on a fresh account, consider investing time in going IaC-first.
infinitedata · 8h ago
If you are not in the US don’t use AWS. There is some shady stuff happening here, also Wise is not trusted by anyone
hyperman1 · 11h ago
The java command line theory seems strange to me. Java has no standard command line parser in the JDK (Standard library). Apache commons cli probably comes closest to a standard, and they support --gnu-style-long-options just like everybody else. The jvm(runtime) has some long non-POSIX options, but that's not very relevant here.
seuros · 2h ago
Yeah, it's fishy. I never claimed the Java theory is confirmed, just that it’s what an insider told me after the fact.
They said a dry-run flag was passed in the --gnu-style form, but the internal tool expected -dry, and since Java has no native CLI parser, it just ignored it and ran for real.
Supposedly the dev team was used to Python-style CLIs, and this got through without proper testing.
huksley · 11h ago
If you are given only 5 days to comply with some request, that's how complicated your infra at AWS should be - so you can migrate to another provider in that time.
Just use EC2 and basic primitives which are easy to migrate (ie S3, SES)
seuros · 3h ago
Hi,
The infrastructure was not complex at at all, i can transfer it in 1 day.
I was hospitalized, in another city, with all the computer at home, and locked behind 2FA.
They send me is on notice on Thursday, by Monday evening, all access was revoked.
For weeks i asked for a readonly access to my data, then they could take anytime they want to verify, they refused.
And he more i ask about my data, they more they avoid to speak about it.
Think about it , you could be sick, on a trip, having jetlag, in some festival, getting married... by the time you are back online, the delay was gone.
jasonvorhe · 11h ago
The amount of people shilling for a multi billion dollar corporation is baffling.
You know the quote: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
A lot of people in this industry have near-zero operations knowledge that doesn't involve AWS, and it's frightening.
jasonvorhe · 11h ago
True. I get that you can blame someone for having no backups and yoloing their thing. But OP did so much right if the threat model doesn't involve "corporate behemoth anti-user automation nukes everything including backups".
Everyone saying "you should've had offsite backups" certainly has a point but 99% of the blame lies with AWS here. This entire process must've crossed so many highly paid "experts" and no one considered freezing an account before nuking it for some compliance thing.
It's just baffling.
Hope these cases will lead to more people leaving the clouds and going back to on-prem stuff.
anonymars · 10h ago
Worth noting that's not the only way this can be a single point of failure, this one was an account breach:
Should I bring up Elon Musk? That gets into cult behavior
S0y · 11h ago
>Just use EC2 and basic primitives which are easy to migrate (ie S3, SES)
If that's your whole infra you really shouldn't be on AWS in the first place.
adastra22 · 11h ago
A bit ironic when that entire stack was invented at AWS.
NewJazz · 11h ago
VMs were invented at AWS? Blob storage?
adastra22 · 10h ago
EC2? S3? Yes. That kind of "cloud" tech was invented at AWS. Nothing like the ec2 API existed before Amazon. It's what made AWS big. Maybe my graybeard is showing, but I remember when that kind of pre-containerization cloud provisioned VM resources was a radically new idea.
cnst · 6h ago
FreeBSD jail predates Amazon Web Services, and so does SWsoft's Virtuozzo that was subsequently open-sourced as OpenVZ. For Amazon SES, DJB's qmail made it possible to send a ridiculous amount of subscription emails very efficiently, too.
I've been using a VPS powered by Virtuozzo since like 2002 or 2003, how is EC2 all that different? Just the API?
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail, FreeBSD jail was committed into FreeBSD in 1999 "after some period of production use by a hosting provider", and released with FreeBSD 4.0 in 2000.
Today, lots of AWS services are basically just re-packaged OSS packages.
adastra22 · 5h ago
EC2 services aren't tied to a machine, just a region. The details of what machine to instantiate a VM on, or the details of moving a VM between hosts, attaching remote drives over IP, or handling the networking that makes this all possible, that was worked out by Amazon to host Amazon.com, which they then resold as a service under the banner AWS. The pieces were there, but not a unified "cloud" architecture.
This is smelling like the classic "Dropbox isn't anything new" HN comment.
TODAY amazon services are just re-packaged OSS packages, yes. That wasn't the case before.
Why use any AWS at all when the other providers offer a cheaper product with better service?
lowbloodsugar · 8h ago
>For years, I’ve watched developers on Reddit and Facebook desperately seeking US or EU billing addresses, willing to pay $100+ premiums to avoid MENA region assignment.
>When I asked why, a colleague warned me: “AWS MENA operates differently. They can terminate you randomly.”
Huh.
cnst · 6h ago
MENA = Middle East / North Africa.
(I did have to look it up.)
sitzkrieg · 1h ago
i hosted a single static webpage critical of israel on cloudfront in aws govcloud and the account was gone within a month
dmead · 11h ago
Reddit deleted my 20 year old account with several warnings
tguvot · 8h ago
Happened to me as well (permaban). Without any warning.
You can request via help site data takeout under ccpa or gdpr. Took about two weeks but i got all my data
dmead · 6h ago
You still get access to log in and delete comments. I'll probably just use a tool to delete all my comments. Fuck em.
tguvot · 5h ago
i can't login. i can change password but no login for me.
dmead · 5h ago
Probably because I was a mod of a moderately popular local sub.
I started losing my shit at people posting anti trans hysteria. Part of me wants to send spez a bill for 14 years of deleting dick pics and local kkk posting. And then there was COVID...
tguvot · 4h ago
you should have collected all those dicks in bag and mailed them to spez
saltysalt · 11h ago
This is why I use a local NAS for offline backups.
dboreham · 11h ago
This is good but not really enough. You need another backup to cover the case where this backup is burned to a crisp when your house catches fire. And that second backup needs to be in another geographic region to guard against regional disasters such as meteor impact, super volcano eruption (possibly not a concern for you but it is for me), etc.
EmuAGR · 10h ago
Well, if a meteor impacts and vaporises my entire region, my least concern would be my data.
koonsolo · 10h ago
The NAS backup is already in a different location, no? Or do you want to take into account when both cloud and your NAS catch fire at the same time?
jbrw · 11h ago
Man, so glad I moved away from AWS.
lightedman · 11h ago
Lesson to learn: Never use Amazon or anyone else.
0x696C6961 · 11h ago
Or just pay your bills.
3eb7988a1663 · 11h ago
Billing mistakes happen all the time. Even (especially?) at multinationals with dedicated payment departments.
wewewedxfgdf · 11h ago
So you restored from your off cloud backup, right?
Tell me you have off cloud backups? If not, then I know its brutal, but AWS is responsible for their part in the disaster, and you are responsible for yours - which is not being able to recover at all.
stefan_ · 11h ago
This is really the longest, most self-aggrandizing sermon yet on "I stored my data on this other computer I don't own", complete with conspiracy theory and all.
Store your data on your own disks, then at least you will blame yourself, not .. Java command line parsers?
tchbnl · 11h ago
>Before anyone says “you put all your eggs in one basket,” let me be clear: I didn’t. I put them in one provider
Ah, but that's still one basket.
Bratmon · 11h ago
Does... Does the writer of this piece think the phrase only applies to literal baskets?
jsiepkes · 11h ago
Wild that people don't realize that these "separate" systems in AWS all share things like the same control plane.
PartiallyTyped · 11h ago
That is wrong in every way possible. Each service is isolated, has its own control plane, and often even split into multiple cells.
You’ve missed the point by leaning into your pedantry. The point is that from the perspective of vendor/platform risk (things like account closure, billing disputes, etc), all of AWS is the same basket, even if you use multiple regions and services.
PartiallyTyped · 2h ago
I dismissed the claim that they share a single control panel across services because it is false.
I dismissed that claim alone and talked about nothing else. The comment I replied to added nothing to the conversation except an unsubstantiated and plainly false remark.
> Wild that people don't realize that these "separate" systems in AWS all share things like the same control plane.
This comment does not say anything about all being in one basket. It only claims that all services run the same control plane which is so far from truth it must have been made from somebody utterly unaware of how big cloud teams operate.
Seems that this community has lost the ability to reason and converse and would rather be outraged.
stefan_ · 11h ago
Do all these cells and control planes run different software built by different teams?
I mean, sure every Ford Pinto is strictly it's own vehicle, but each will predictably burst into flames when you impinge its fuel tank and I don't wanna travel on a company operating an all Pinto fleet.
PartiallyTyped · 2h ago
Yes. And parts of each control plane are written by different teams and each component is isolated.
senderista · 11h ago
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is 100% correct from someone else who worked there.
ImPostingOnHN · 11h ago
> Not sure why you’re being downvoted
If you're not sure why someone is being downvoted, there's a good chance there is a misunderstanding somewhere, and a good way for you to understand is to wait for people to comment, and then read those comments.
Alternatively (and in a more general sense), if you want to take a more active role in your learning, a good way to learn is to ask questions, and then read the answers.
PartiallyTyped · 2h ago
There is no misunderstanding involved. HN is often too emotional and will downvote and upvote whatever supports their beliefs or outrage du jour.
averrois · 13h ago
AWS has perfected the art of killing startups...
reactordev · 11h ago
My only question is: where the hell was your support rep? Every org that works with AWS in any enterprise capacity has an enterprise agreement and an account rep. They should have been the one to guide you through this.
If you were just yolo’ing it on your own identification without a contract, well, that’s that. You should have converted over to an enterprise agreement so they couldn’t fuck you over. And they will fuck you over.
foundry27 · 11h ago
Editorial comment: It’s a bit weird to see AI-written (at least partially; you can see the usual em-dashes, it’s-not-X-it’s-Y) blog posts like this detract from an author’s true writing style, which in this case I found significantly more pleasant to read. Read his first ever post, and compare it to this one and many of the other recent posts: https://www.seuros.com/blog/noflylist-how-noflylist-got-clea...
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I could imagine a blog post almost identical to this one being generated in response to a prompt like “write a first-person narrative about: a cloud provider abruptly deleting a decade-old account and all associated data without warning. Include a plot twist”.
I literally cannot tell if this story is something that really happened or not. It scares me a little, because if this was a real problem and I was in the author’s shoes, I would want people to believe me.
seuros · 3h ago
Not AI-generated. Not everyone is born writing flawless English.
If it sounds like an LLM, maybe it is because people like me had to learn how to write clearly from LLMs because English is not our first language.
I could’ve written in my native tongue, but then someone else will have complained that not how english is structured.
Also, the story is real. Just because it is well-structured doesn't mean it's fiction. Yes, i used AI to resort it, but i can assure you that no AI will generate the Piers Morgan reference.
ageitgey · 10h ago
I didn't get an AI vibe from this post. Grammar checkers add em dashes, too.
If anything, an AI tool would have written a shorter, less rambling post.
foundry27 · 9h ago
It’s easy to be fooled, myself included it seems :)
For context, here’s a handful of the ChatGPT cues I see.
- “wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open‑source development”
- “wasn’t standard AWS incompetence; this was something else entirely”
- “you’re not being targeted; you’re being algorithmically categorized”
- “isn’t a system failure; the architecture and promises are sound”
- “This isn’t just about my account. It’s about what happens when […]”
- “This wasn’t my production infrastructure […] it was my launch pad for updating other infrastructure”
- “The cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business”
I counted about THIRTY em-dashes, which any frequent generative AI user would understand to be a major tell. It’s got an average word count in each sentence of around ~11 (try to write with only 11 words in each sentence, and you’ll see why this is silly), and much of the article consists of brief, punchy sentences separated by periods or question marks, which is the classic ChatGPT prose style. For crying out loud, it even has a table with quippy one-word cell contents at the end of the article like what ChatGPT generates 9/10 times when asked for a comparison of two things.
It’s just disappointing. The author is undermining his own credibility for what would otherwise be a very real problem, and again, his real writing style when you read his actual written work is great.
_caw · 8h ago
I got the sense the author wrote the post in collaboration with LLMs as a way of processing the experience:
> I was alone. Nobody understood the weight of losing a decade of work. But I had ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok to talk to
> To everyone who worked on these AIs, who contributed to their training data—thank you. Without you, this post might have been a very different kind of message.
It sounded like perhaps this post would have conveyed a message the author didn't think constructive if they wrote it entirely themselves
Ancapistani · 4h ago
The author explicitly states that their communication style is frequently recognized as AI.
I use both em-dashes and semicolons extensively in my own writing.
Even if the article _were_ written by or in coordination with ChatGPT... why does it matter? The content is either honest or dishonest.
CamperBob2 · 7h ago
It's not the case in this article, but we're starting to see a lot of comments and blog posts from people who have something worthwhile to contribute, but who aren't confident enough in their English proficiency to post their thoughts without running them through an LLM for cleanup.
IMHO that's a good thing, something that should be encouraged. Counting the em dashes is just an exercise in missing the forest for the trees. Accusing someone of posting AI slop without evidence should be treated no differently here than accusing them of shilling or sock-puppetry. In other words, it should be prohibited by the site guidelines.
cnst · 6h ago
Isn't that part of AI, simply because that's how the patterns work, and how we're taught to write in the writing classes?
BTW, I actually use the em-dash symbols very frequently myself — on a Mac and on Android, it's very easy through the standard keyboard, with Option-Dash being the shortcut on the Mac.
It's also why nothing in my AWS account is "canonical storage". If I need, say, a database in AWS, it is live-mirrored to somewhere within my control, on hardware I own, even if that thing never sees any production traffic beyond the mirror itself. Plus backups.
That way, if this ever happens, I can recover fairly easily. The backups protect me from my own mistakes, and the local canonical copies and backups protect me from theirs.
Granted, it gets harder and more expensive with increasing scale, but it's a necessary expense if you care at all about business continuity issues. On a personal level, it's much cheaper though, especially these days.
He said, "no, it's on github".
I said no more.
If your boss is that daft, its probably a sign to bail out. Remember to do your own personal due diligence. Due dill is not something that you just do for someone else: do your own! Do your own personal risk assessment. If code was lost, who would be found accountable? You or them?
EDIT: PS - I am a CTO ...
Unless github closes the account, or a hacker gets access, or a rogue employee gets mad and deletes all, or some development accident results in repo deletion, or etc etc.
Oh boy.
Tons of apps in maintenance mode run critical infrastructure and see few commits in a year.
No comments yet
To step outside just utility programs, the reason why Command & Conquer didn't have a remaster was:
> I'm not going to get into this conversation, but I feel this needs to be answered. During this project of getting the games on Steam, no source code from any legacy games showed up in the archives.
The people wouldn't, but in the environments I'm thinking of, security policies might.
What you're leaning into is a high-risk backup strategy that would rely mostly on luck to get something remotely close to the current version back online. It's pretty reckless.
Software still runs, and if you don't have the source then you'll only have the binary or other build artifact.
In fact, in VSCode, one can use a project without cloning and checking it out at all.
If not MBA, the problem may also stem from the gradual atrophy and disrespect shown towards the sysadmin profession.
Additionally to that, if any of those developers have a backup strategy for their local computer, those also count as a backup of that source code.
CTO: "I know our entire github repo is deleted and all our source code is gone and we never took backups, but I'm hoping the developers might have it all on their machines."
CEO: "Hoping developers had it locally was your strategy for protecting all our source code?"
CTO: "It's a sound approach and ticks all the boxes."
CEO: "You're fired."
Board Directors to CEO: "You're fired."
I often have my git configured to push to multiple upstreams, this means that basically all of your mirrors can be primaries.
This is a really good part about GitHub. Every copy is effectively a mirror, too, and it's cryptographically verified as well, so, you don't have to worry about the mirror going rogue without anyone noticing.
In a collaborative scenario, doing it that way makes sure everything is always properly synchronized. Some individual's lacking config can't break things.
Options to consider for various circumstances include:
- Different object storage clouds with different accounts (different names, emails, and payment methods), potentially geographically different too
- Tarsnap (while using AWS under the hood but someone else's account(s))
- MEGA
- Onsite warm and/or cold media
- Geographically separate colo DR site, despite the overly-proud trend of "we're 100% (on someone else's SPoF) cloud now"
- Offsite cold media (personal home and/or IronMountain)
They're going to dazzle you with all of their hardened bunker this, and multiple escape route that, not realizing all of their complex machinery is metaphorically running off of a machine with no battery backup. One power outage and POOF!
> I’d done everything right. Vault encryption keys stored separately from my main infrastructure. Defense in depth. Zero trust architecture. The works.
Did you? Is putting all your eggs in one basket "defense in depth"? Is total trust in AWS "zero trust architecture"?
I'm not defending AWS here; they fully deserve all the fallout they can get from this, and I do feel for the dev who lost all their stuff through AWS's fuckup. Lots of people do the same.
My current employer does the same. It's a major bank, and all of their stuff is Microsoft. Azure, SharePoint, Office, Teams, the works. I think it's foolish to trust a single foreign company with all your vital data and infrastructure, operating in q country where the government demands access to everything, but this is what everybody does now.
We trust "the cloud" way too much, and expose ourselves to these sort of fuckups.
The architecture was built assuming infrastructure within AWS might fail. What I didn’t plan for was the provider itself turning hostile, skipping their own retention policy, and treating verification as a deletion trigger.
No comments yet
> 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:
That's one basket. A single point of failure. "But it should have been impossible to fail!" Backups are to handle the "impossible" failure (in reality nothing is 100% reliable).
My point is that the basket that eggs are put in is not always clear in hindsight. I wasn’t even aware that Mastercard and visa shared fraud alerts and that they were automatically linked.
The author’s article is not about backups, it’s about accountability.
They gaslit me for 20 days while violating their own stated policies.
I'll concede that I'm hugely empathetic for people that suffer data loss. The pithy aphorism about there being two types of people -- those who haven't lost data, and those who do backups -- is doubly droll because only the second group really appreciates the phrase.
But it's surprising to find people with more than a decade in IT who don't appreciate the risks here.
The timeline reveals there were 13 days from when the first signs of trouble surfaced, to when the account was deleted. So a fortnight of very unsubtle reminders to do something AND a fortnight in which to act.
(I recently learned the phrase BATNA[0] and in modern <sic> IT where it's Turtles as a Service, all the way down, it's amazing how often this concept is applicable.)
Author seems very keen to blame his part-time sysadmin rather than his systems architect. I can understand the appeal of that blame distribution algorithm, but it's nonetheless misguided.
The phrasing:
> But here’s the dilemma they’ve created: What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup?
inverts the horse & cart. If you have a petabyte of data that's important, that you can't recreate from other sources, your concern is how to keep your data safe.
If you're paying someone to keep a copy, pay (at least one other) person to keep another copy. Even that isn't something I'd call safe though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
Yeah...
If I'm working tickets at AWS that kind of dickishness is going to ensure that I don't do more than the least amount of effort for you.
Maybe I could burn my entire weekend trying to see if I can rescue your data... or maybe I'm going to do nothing more than strictly follow procedure and let my boss know that I tried...
The only failure I didn’t plan for? AWS becoming the failure.
The provider nuking everything in violation of their own retention policies. That’s not a backup problem, that is a provider trust problem.
The reason i did not kept a local copy, was that i formatted my computer after a hardware failure, after the nurse dropped the laptop in the hospital i was on. Since i have a AWS backup, i just started with a fresh OS while waiting to get discharged to return home and redownload everything.
When i returned 6 days days later, the backup was gone.
No comments yet
That person wasn’t around to respond.
But the overall post and the double buried ledes make me question the degree to which we’re getting the whole story.
Right or wrong, those messages look like very standard AWS-speak for "this is your mistake, not ours".
I have no idea if that's a reasonable stance or not, but I _will_ say that AWS's internal culture contributes to this sort of bad press. If they would respond to their customers with even a trace of empathy and ownership, this post would likely never have been written.
Besides, what would be the potential benefit of such a hypothetical script? The author mentions "a bill under $200," so that's the upper limit on how much it costs AWS to keep the author's whole data. If I was working there and a coworker said "Hey I created a script that can save the company $200 by finding a defunct (but paying) customer and wiping out their data!", I'd have replied "What the fuck is wrong with you."
But here is the thing: no one from AWS has given me an official explanation. Not during the 20-day support hell, not after termination, not even when I asked directly: “Does my data still exist?” Just a slow drip of templated replies, evasions, and contradictions.
An AWS insider did reach out claiming it was an internal test gone wrong, triggered by a misused --dry flag and targeting At a company that size, you'd expect guardrails, audits, approvals low-activity accounts.
According to them, the team ran it without proper approval. Maybe it is true. Maybe they were trying to warn me. Maybe its a trap to get me to throw baseless accusations and discredit myself.
I'm not presenting that theory as fact. I don’t know what happened behind the wall.
What I do know is:
- My account was terminated without following AWS’s own 90-day retention policy
- I had a valid payment method on file
- Support stonewalled every direct question for 20 days
- No answers were provided, even post-mortem
There is no “wipe everything immediately” button.
> According to them, AWS MENA was running some kind of proof of concept on “dormant” and “low-activity” accounts. Multiple accounts were affected, not just mine.
If AWS has a 90-day closure policy, why was this account deleted so quickly?
They should have to hold it for at least 90 days. In my opinion, it should be more like six months to a year.
In my mind, it's exactly equivalent to a storage space destroying your car five days after you miss a payment. They effectively stole and destroyed the data when they should have been required to return it to the actual owner.
Of course, that's my opinion of how it should be. AFAIK, there is no real legal framework, and how it actually is is entirely up to your provider, which is one reason I never trust them.
Similarly, a physical storage company can totally make a mistake and accidentally destroy your stuff if they mix up their bookkeeping, and your remedy is generally either to reach an amicable settlement with them or sue them for your damages.
> When AWS demanded this vanished payer validate himself, I pointed out that I already had my own Wise card on file—the same card I’d used to pay before the payer arrangement, kept active specifically in case the payer disconnected while I was traveling or offline
Me paying your bill doesn't give me ownership of your stuff - as far as AWS is concerned, your bill is paid, and that's the extent of their involvement, everything else is between you and me.
If what he writes is true, he remained the account holder and even had a backup billing method in place - something he probably wouldn't have if he wasn't the account holder.
I don't know if he's completely honest about the story, but "somebody else paid, so we decided they are now the owner" isn't how that works.
Some accident occurs. You don't pay your bill, address changes, etc. You have at least two entire years to contact the holder and claim your property. After that point, it is passed to the state as unclaimed property. You still have an opportunity to claim it.
Digital data? Screw that! One mistake, everything deleted.
You have potentially stronger civil remedies for recouping on those damages, but not always.
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-mode...
You, the customer, are responsible for your data. AWS is only responsible for the infrastructure that it resides on.
AWS is not responsible for what you do with your data. AWS, on its own, is not going to make backups for you so you can recover from a failed DB migration you did yourself. AWS cannot be held responsible for your admin fat-fingering and deleting the entire prod environment.
However, AWS is responsible for the underlying infrastructure. The website you linked clearly shows "storage" as falling under AWS's responsibility: your virtual hard drives aren't supposed to just magically disappear!
If they can just nuke your entire setup with an "Oops, sorry!", what's all the talk about redundancy and reliability supposed to be worth? At that point, how are they any different from Joe's Discount Basement Hosting?
They said a dry-run flag was passed in the --gnu-style form, but the internal tool expected -dry, and since Java has no native CLI parser, it just ignored it and ran for real.
Supposedly the dev team was used to Python-style CLIs, and this got through without proper testing.
Just use EC2 and basic primitives which are easy to migrate (ie S3, SES)
I was hospitalized, in another city, with all the computer at home, and locked behind 2FA.
They send me is on notice on Thursday, by Monday evening, all access was revoked.
For weeks i asked for a readonly access to my data, then they could take anytime they want to verify, they refused.
And he more i ask about my data, they more they avoid to speak about it.
Think about it , you could be sick, on a trip, having jetlag, in some festival, getting married... by the time you are back online, the delay was gone.
A lot of people in this industry have near-zero operations knowledge that doesn't involve AWS, and it's frightening.
Everyone saying "you should've had offsite backups" certainly has a point but 99% of the blame lies with AWS here. This entire process must've crossed so many highly paid "experts" and no one considered freezing an account before nuking it for some compliance thing.
It's just baffling.
Hope these cases will lead to more people leaving the clouds and going back to on-prem stuff.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/code-spaces-demis...
If that's your whole infra you really shouldn't be on AWS in the first place.
I've been using a VPS powered by Virtuozzo since like 2002 or 2003, how is EC2 all that different? Just the API?
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company), SWsoft was founded in 1997, and publicly released Virtuozzo in 2000.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail, FreeBSD jail was committed into FreeBSD in 1999 "after some period of production use by a hosting provider", and released with FreeBSD 4.0 in 2000.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail, qmail was released in 1998.
Today, lots of AWS services are basically just re-packaged OSS packages.
This is smelling like the classic "Dropbox isn't anything new" HN comment.
TODAY amazon services are just re-packaged OSS packages, yes. That wasn't the case before.
>When I asked why, a colleague warned me: “AWS MENA operates differently. They can terminate you randomly.”
Huh.
(I did have to look it up.)
You can request via help site data takeout under ccpa or gdpr. Took about two weeks but i got all my data
I started losing my shit at people posting anti trans hysteria. Part of me wants to send spez a bill for 14 years of deleting dick pics and local kkk posting. And then there was COVID...
Tell me you have off cloud backups? If not, then I know its brutal, but AWS is responsible for their part in the disaster, and you are responsible for yours - which is not being able to recover at all.
Store your data on your own disks, then at least you will blame yourself, not .. Java command line parsers?
Ah, but that's still one basket.
Source: I worked there.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/reducing-...
I dismissed that claim alone and talked about nothing else. The comment I replied to added nothing to the conversation except an unsubstantiated and plainly false remark.
> Wild that people don't realize that these "separate" systems in AWS all share things like the same control plane.
This comment does not say anything about all being in one basket. It only claims that all services run the same control plane which is so far from truth it must have been made from somebody utterly unaware of how big cloud teams operate.
Seems that this community has lost the ability to reason and converse and would rather be outraged.
I mean, sure every Ford Pinto is strictly it's own vehicle, but each will predictably burst into flames when you impinge its fuel tank and I don't wanna travel on a company operating an all Pinto fleet.
If you're not sure why someone is being downvoted, there's a good chance there is a misunderstanding somewhere, and a good way for you to understand is to wait for people to comment, and then read those comments.
Alternatively (and in a more general sense), if you want to take a more active role in your learning, a good way to learn is to ask questions, and then read the answers.
If you were just yolo’ing it on your own identification without a contract, well, that’s that. You should have converted over to an enterprise agreement so they couldn’t fuck you over. And they will fuck you over.
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I could imagine a blog post almost identical to this one being generated in response to a prompt like “write a first-person narrative about: a cloud provider abruptly deleting a decade-old account and all associated data without warning. Include a plot twist”.
I literally cannot tell if this story is something that really happened or not. It scares me a little, because if this was a real problem and I was in the author’s shoes, I would want people to believe me.
If it sounds like an LLM, maybe it is because people like me had to learn how to write clearly from LLMs because English is not our first language.
I could’ve written in my native tongue, but then someone else will have complained that not how english is structured.
Also, the story is real. Just because it is well-structured doesn't mean it's fiction. Yes, i used AI to resort it, but i can assure you that no AI will generate the Piers Morgan reference.
If anything, an AI tool would have written a shorter, less rambling post.
For context, here’s a handful of the ChatGPT cues I see.
- “wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open‑source development” - “wasn’t standard AWS incompetence; this was something else entirely” - “you’re not being targeted; you’re being algorithmically categorized” - “isn’t a system failure; the architecture and promises are sound” - “This isn’t just about my account. It’s about what happens when […]” - “This wasn’t my production infrastructure […] it was my launch pad for updating other infrastructure” - “The cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business”
I counted about THIRTY em-dashes, which any frequent generative AI user would understand to be a major tell. It’s got an average word count in each sentence of around ~11 (try to write with only 11 words in each sentence, and you’ll see why this is silly), and much of the article consists of brief, punchy sentences separated by periods or question marks, which is the classic ChatGPT prose style. For crying out loud, it even has a table with quippy one-word cell contents at the end of the article like what ChatGPT generates 9/10 times when asked for a comparison of two things.
It’s just disappointing. The author is undermining his own credibility for what would otherwise be a very real problem, and again, his real writing style when you read his actual written work is great.
> I was alone. Nobody understood the weight of losing a decade of work. But I had ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok to talk to
> To everyone who worked on these AIs, who contributed to their training data—thank you. Without you, this post might have been a very different kind of message.
It sounded like perhaps this post would have conveyed a message the author didn't think constructive if they wrote it entirely themselves
I use both em-dashes and semicolons extensively in my own writing.
Even if the article _were_ written by or in coordination with ChatGPT... why does it matter? The content is either honest or dishonest.
IMHO that's a good thing, something that should be encouraged. Counting the em dashes is just an exercise in missing the forest for the trees. Accusing someone of posting AI slop without evidence should be treated no differently here than accusing them of shilling or sock-puppetry. In other words, it should be prohibited by the site guidelines.
BTW, I actually use the em-dash symbols very frequently myself — on a Mac and on Android, it's very easy through the standard keyboard, with Option-Dash being the shortcut on the Mac.