After 10 years as an AWS customer and open-source contributor, they deleted my account and all data with zero warning. Here's how AWS's 'verification' process became a digital execution, and why you should never trust cloud providers with your only copy of anything.
Not too surprising. Data backups need to be with different providers. The article seems to think it’s not “putting all your eggs in one basket” because the provider had redundancy. But that’s not much different from storing physical backups locally because they were stored in a fire-proof safe. Sure you made backups, but by storing them in the same building as the servers means the same disaster that could take out the servers could take out the backups. A “fire-proof” safe will protect it from some things that won’t protect the servers, but there are still types of disasters that could take out both, like a big enough bomb rather than just a fire.
What if AWS went bankrupt and the servers were repossessed and sold off with the data spread across all the different new owners of the disparate data centers? What if Amazon just decided AWS was no longer profitable and shut it all down.
Sure that’s not going to happen to AWS right now because it’s hugely profitable, but a serious US market crash combined with a major escalation by the current administration in the increasing surveillance state in the US which could kill the trust in the company, cause a massive migration to EU based companies and cause the subsidiary company that holds the data to go bankrupt without necessarily killing Amazon as a whole. Those subsidiaries often “run at a loss” even with extremely high income in order to divert profit to shareholders, claim tax breaks on “losses”, and eliminate liability to the main company.
The legal proceedings of bankruptcy or other events could put the data in legal limbo for years before it’s accessible again.