War in Iran Damages Multiple AWS Data Centers, Challenging Multi-AZ Assumptions

"In the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) Region, two of our three Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) remain significantly impaired. The third Availability Zone (mec1-az1) continues to operate normally, though some services have experienced indirect impact due to dependencies on the affected zones. In the ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) Region, one facility has been impacted."

"AWS defines a region as a minimum of three isolated, physically separate AZs within a geographic area. AZs are by design separated by a meaningful distance, far enough that a natural disaster affecting one is unlikely to affect another, but must remain within 100 km of each other to keep latency low between data centers inside the region."

"While the cloud provider claims that architecting across multiple AZs protects from power outages, lightning strikes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and more, the model had not previously been tested in conflict zones. A popular joke among practitioners had always been that a meteor strike would be required to take out an entire region, but a few drones suddenly seemed a more concrete risk."

Iranian drone strikes in early March damaged three AWS data centers in the Middle East, affecting the ME-CENTRAL-1 region in the UAE and ME-SOUTH-1 region in Bahrain. Two of three availability zones in the UAE region were significantly impaired, while the third continued operating with indirect impacts. One facility in Bahrain was also affected. Although AWS regions are designed with minimum three physically isolated availability zones separated by meaningful distances up to 100 km to protect against natural disasters, this architecture had never been tested against military conflict. The incident revealed that geopolitical conflicts pose concrete risks to cloud infrastructure resilience that traditional disaster recovery models did not anticipate.

Read at InfoQ