The Iranians targeted three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East with drones and managed to reveal how flaky cloud sites are.
Amazon Web Services said late Monday that two data centres in the United Arab Emirates were “directly struck” and another facility in Bahrain was damaged after a drone landed nearby.
Amazon Web Services wrote: “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” in an update on its online dashboard
It said by late Tuesday that recovery efforts at the UAE data centres were making progress.
Unlike the familiar AWS faceplants caused by buggy software, the AP says this episode produced local disruption rather than a global meltdown. Even so, Amazon Web Services hosts an eye-watering chunk of government, university and business services, so a “limited” outage still bites.
Amazon Web Services told customers running servers in the Middle East to migrate workloads to other regions and steer traffic away from the UAE and Bahrain.
University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, IT professor Mike Chapple said: “Amazon has generally configured its services so that the loss of a single data centre would be relatively unimportant to its operations,” and described how other sites in the same zone can pick up workloads.
“That said, the loss of multiple data centres within an availability zone could cause serious issues, as things could reach a point where there simply isn’t enough remaining capacity to handle all the work.”
Amazon does not say how many data centres it runs worldwide, though it claims 39 geographic regions, with three in the Middle East covering the UAE, Bahrain and Israel. Each AWS region is split into at least three availability zones, separated by “a meaningful distance” within 100 km (60 miles) of each other, connected by “ultra-low-latency networks”.
Amazon Web Services says its sites have redundant water, power, telecoms and internet connections “so we can maintain continuous operations in an emergency.”
Physical security, including guards, fences, cameras, and alarms, is designed to stop intruders, not to shrug off drones.
Chapple said the hits prove cloud computing is not “magical” and “still requires physical facilities on the ground, which are vulnerable to all sorts of disaster scenarios.”
“Organisations using services from any cloud provider in the Middle East should immediately take steps to shift their computing to other regions,” he said.
