Item — HN Reader

Common sense and obvious. In the 1980s I worked on a large DARPA project where a huge hit was taken because our admins never tried to restore from backups. It is the kind of lesson that is (hopefully) learned with just one bad experience.

This is another reason why I like EC2 deployments: it is fairly easy to take your backups (automated deployment scripts, application, data) and spin up another copy of your whole system (except for flipping the DNS). Make sure those EBS-backed EC2 AMIs are really bootable and functioning :-)

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What happens if Amazon runs out of machines, has a system-wide corruption that was noticed too late or decides to be dicks about something or other?

Good questions.

I would think that if they are making money with AWS then they will keep buying more servers.

I usually trust S3 for backups and restores but periodically back my own data off of AWS to local storage.

I expect both Amazon and Google infrastructure services to experience outages from time to time. However, they have far more resources and expertise than I do to provide scalable services for a low cost.

I was thinking about making a set up where my S3 backups are automatically mirrored to rackspace or something like that. That would be a really neat setup.