Mastodawn

Andrew 🌻 Brandt 🐇Dec 15, 2022

Just before the invasion, #Ukraine made a deal with #Amazon #AWS to create a data warehouse for its government information and infrastructure: tax and property records, bank statements, and the like. Things that an invaded and occupied Ukraine might lose if Russia got their hands on the only copies.

They literally snuck Pelican crates full of SSDs into the country and spirited them back offshore after backing up 10 petabytes of important historic and legal records.

This paragraph, second from the end, really put a fine point on why Amazon did this: They were not beholden to, nor being held hostage by, any Russian operations...because they never had any:

Amazon didn’t have to worry about its relationship with Russia on the Snowball project. It doesn’t have one. “We didn’t have anything to turn off there,” Maxwell said. “We had never invested there. It’s a point of principle.”

Truly an amazing story from the #LATimes.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-15/amazon-ukraine-war-cloud-data

How Amazon is helping Ukraine in its war against Russia by putting its 'government in a box'

Amazon is helping Ukraine transfer critical government, business and property data into the company's data cloud.

Los Angeles Times

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Jess 🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦Dec 15, 2022

@threatresearch Wow, this is really interesting. Thanks for sharing!

I wonder how many individual "Snowballs" they used. I imagine no "Snowmobiles" since thats a big, targetable truck.

It's nice to see how the cloud can effect good like this.

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llywrch

@kuxaku @threatresearch I figure if the Russians learned about this around the same time we have, then the size of the trucks didn’t matter. You can destroy something you don’t know exists. (Unless the Russians were firing shells & missiles at anything & everything crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border.)