S3 as an Eternal Service | Hacker News Reader

S3 as an Eternal Service

lastweekinaws.com

38 pointskiyanwang10 comments

> I sometimes think about the fact that Amazon S3 effectively has to exist until the heat death of the universe. Many millennia from now, our highly-evolved descendants will probably be making use of an equally highly evolved descendant of S3

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

> Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Are you referring to the universe or to S3? Corey and I were chatting a few weeks ago during his most recent visit to Seattle and I shared my thoughts with him while we were cooking and eating homemade pizza.

Welcome to the "mic drop" portion of the comment stream.

> So long as the bill gets paid (and for an absurdly long time, even when it doesn’t), your data is treated as “this cannot be lost under any circumstances.”

Does anyone have experience with unpaid AWS S3 bills? I can imagine the work to delete some buckets is greater than traffic served.

Historically nothing happens with unpaid AWS bills. At one point I was receiving delinquent bill notifications from a previous client who went out of business for several years before they stopped.

Active services like EC2 instances will be stopped within months, but data at rest is likely to last many many months if not over a year. My information is several years old.

I had a client who was delinquent on every single AWS bill and went at least six months without paying at one point and their services went untouched.

Business will stop existing, websites will disappear. In the era of people not paying their AWS bill, we as the human race will somehow survive. Sorry OP, I'm almost certain there is no S3 bucket worth keeping eternally.

Watching Corey's LastWeekinAWS Youtube channel (criminally underviewed and not actually weekly) simultaneously makes me chortle (for a former sysadmin he's a pretty good comedian) and become a little sad about about being reminded about how much time I've lately spent wrestling with the complexities and idiosyncrasies of AWS instead of actually building stuff.

It's well known, at least internally, that there are "data isolates" throughout AWS. Like some have said, it does preserve privacy. It also is hard to figure out what do with it after time. Do you hold? Do you delete? Is delete soft or hard? Is delete based on metadata? If yes, do you share the metadata that was used in the delete vs. no-delete decision? It's a hard problem. So, "data isolates" it is.

How much data was lost because people stopped paying their AWS bills?

And how much end-user privacy was thereby saved?

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