The SLA excludes force majeure.

Making a probabilistic claim while excluding a factor that dominates those statistics is... is quite creative accounting.

Force majeure carveouts are really common in every type of contract.

You should check your home insurance contract, for instance... It likely would not cover an ICBM strike.

Somehow I feel like the biggest post-apocalyptic problem will be the loss of home equity due to uninsured damage causing a collapse of financial markets.

Are you saying that most data loss happens because your data center gets blown up in a shooting war? Like, AWS is the first digital service provider to lose data in decades?

I'm saying that if you have eliminated more mundane failures like dying harddrives, cosmic rays and so on from your systems and your calculation ends up with 11 nines then actually those "force majeure" events are probable enough that they dominate whatever other residuals are supposedly hiding in those last 0.0000000001%.

The region has seen a bunch of wars in the last 100 years, so the annual war-rate is > 1%. Even if we generously add the assumption that only 1 in 100 wars affects a datacenter you can see that wars become a major source of correlated hardware failures that they need to solve to actually deliver that kind of reliability.

You don’t want to blend probabilities like this, because the tactics you use as a consumer vary between the two. If you consider 11 9s like “object AFR”, you might build systems that are resilient to very occasional single object loss. And it’s useful to know at what rate that might occur.

Whereas with these force majeure events you’d want a complete DR setup, and it’s typically an async recovery. Here it is useful to understand the fault domain (single server or single building or multi-building) so you can plan.

Blending the two numbers doesn’t help you build better against the systems. And the force majeure events are rare enough that they won’t happen … until they do. I’m not sure that knowing the precise probability that Iran would attack a gulf nation would change the fact that if they do, you need to have a DR story.

I’m not saying you can’t blend the numbers, I’m saying you shouldn’t blend the numbers. Because one number doesn’t communicate what you actually need to know to build.

You want to know how reliable the service is in steady state. For example it’s useful to know that S3 is effectively lossless in steady state whereas EBS volumes have an AFR of about 0.1%. You build your apps very differently between S3 and EBS knowing this. You can build highly resilient applications on each, but you code them differently, informed by these design goals.

You separately want to understand the failure modes that will require you to fully recover from backup. For example knowing that cloud storage is resilient to everything but region failure would inform you that your backups should be out of the region, not just a bucket in the same region. You don’t get that perspective from just a 9s number.

Cosmic rays and dying hard drives are not force majeure though.

Are you suggesting that their technical documents have separate availability numbers to predict geopolitical events and war?

The sales pitch should change from "probabilistically we will NEVER lose your data" to "you are most likely to lose your data due to wars, terrorists, software bugs, someone losing the master encryption key, the government forcing us to...".

Offsite backups are sadly rare these days, and aws sales is the main reason why.

I think it's what most people comparing provider SLAs would expect

Creative accounting works and is good because it works. If your customers give you more money because you lied to them, but it's legal, then it's good.

Excluding war as force majeure in the Middle East is the same as excluding high tide as force majeure building a sandcastle at low tide.

This is very on point. While I am not legally trained in US law, and especially not in any Middle Eastern law, I have a enough knowledge on the law in my country here where I live…

Invoking force majeure requires the entity to prove all three following to be true:

A. That the event was unexpected and therefore unavoidable.

B. That the event was outside the control of the entity.

C. That the event made it impossible for the company to resolve the issue.

War in the region is as you say rather common unfortunately. The fact that AWS is used by the IDF (https://www.972mag.com/cloud-israeli-army-gaza-amazon-google...) should be considered a factor whether or not their data centre became a more likely target or not. What remains is the ability or not for AWS to do multi-location reduncancy.

As someone who ran a tech company in Northern Ireland at a time when violence was much more common than it is today, I can tell you that our force majeure clauses always disclaimed liability for "riot, violent disorder, civil commotion, and acts of unlawful civil unrest and terrorism".

How could it be otherwise - do you expect AWS to have its own army and missile defence system?

The difference between you and Amazon is hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations and lobbying. Amazon certainly has the political connections to make defense of its datacenters a national security priority of the strongest military on earth if it made it a priority.

This

A lot of powers are devolved away from England to each other country in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_in_the_United_Kingd...

Each country also has their own Public Health bodies, so pretty much everything related to health is devolved

Yes, that's what I said - each is named "NHS [country]" (National Health Service [England | Scotland | etc]).

Splitting hairs, but the public health bodies are separate from the National Health Services (so there exists Public Health England _and_ NHS England). Public health is slightly different to healthcare, but of course they work together.

Oddly, Public Health Scotland is part of NHS Scotland; but Public Health England is not part of NHS England, it's a parallel department.

You give them the keys, then they go to the site to collect your item.

They can turn your alarm off while they're fetching your pills.

"In this model, mice lived in specially designed cages where food was accessed through a hinged, weighted lid. To eat, the mice had to lift the lid while wearing a small shoulder collar, causing a squat-like movement that engaged the muscle contractions people use during resistance exercise. The load was gradually increased over several days, mimicking progressive strength training."

So the study doesn't really show that weighlifting per se is beneficial, but putting food behind weighted hatches is?

"Voluntary wheel running (EEX) was conducted as previously described in single-housed mice with access to voluntary running wheels and food and water ad-libitum,"

And the runners could each as much as they liked?

Sounds like bunk.

This is great news if you're a mouse with diabetes.

As a mouse with diabetes sometimes you have to wonder how did I get here?

This doesn't even have sufficient controls to demonstrate that.

This title could have been called 'mice like to run more than they like to lift weights'

But do you know why mice is often used instead of says, cat?

Selection bias. The average scientist doesn’t write oversimplified popsci articles that go viral.

The editor nearly always chooses the title when an article is published.

It drives engagement. That’s the metric for why this gets posted.

Yes, and just yesterday a passenger train was routed into the path of a freight train due to some points failure. It does make you wonder. https://www.railmagazine.com/news/points-failure-results-in-...

The trains heading for each other was not a direct result of the points failure but a direct result of the manual operation of the points after the failure. Everything was on go-slow so no risk of collision. This was human error.

A bit part of education is (should be) independent learning with textbooks and reading. You don't need to be "tutored".

Tutors should be able to approximate the ZPD better than any student can. Most students lack intrinsic motivation and it's a tutor's job to help them get started.

    > Most students lack intrinsic motivation

Woah, this a wild claim. Plus it is on a spectrum per subject. Do you have any evidence to support your bold claim?

Okay, I was generalising from experience; most students I've met lack intrinsic motivation. School systems typically encourage students to depend on extrinsic motivation.

When I was 8, I could use the Internet at school but every website was whitelisted.

I'm probably going down a conspiracy theory, but it's notable when all the Five Eyes countries seem to start talking about the same problem and pushing through legislation. The US would probably do the same if not for the constitution.

Not sure how closely you follow US news, but a majority of Americans feel that the current US administration is not all that concerned with the constitution, so that not really a blocker.

I think there's some sort of 'social pressure' between nations. Policies during the COVID-19 era come to mind.

It's called lobbying.

Of charges, not arrests.