AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran. In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the update says. "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region." After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to migrate their workloads to other Regions. The company said most did so before further attacks disrupted a second Availability Zone in April and rendered the entire Region unavailable. AWS has reached a similar conclusion about one Availability Zone in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saying it cannot re-establish access to the resources and data hosted there. The affected Zone, mec1-az2, is one of three in AWS's UAE Region. Two AWS facilities in the country were hit by drones back in March as Iran retaliated against US-Israeli strikes on its territory. AWS says it continues to work on recovering resources in the Region, including some hosted in the other affected Availability Zones (mec1-az1 and mec1-az3). It adds that "most customers" have been able to restart operations in other AWS Regions by restoring from backups or copying any data that remained accessible. The company says its support teams remain available to help customers move their applications to alternate Regions. The Register asked AWS to comment, but the company declined to add to the information on its Health Dashboard. In AWS terminology, a Region is a geographic area containing multiple isolated Availability Zones. Each Zone consists of one or more discrete datacenters with independent power, cooling, and network connectivity. AWS recommends distributing applications and resources across multiple Availability Zones to withstand the loss of a single location. That approach cannot protect against a Region-wide failure, however. Workloads that must survive such an event require a disaster recovery plan involving another Region. AWS and several other tech companies advised customers after the first strikes to recover whatever resources they could and replicate them in alternate Regions, ideally in Europe, rather than wait for services in the Middle East to return. That advice appears to have been well-founded. AWS said at the time: "Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions." ®