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
Show threadDavid Fleetwood

@threatresearch To add a little context to this, I was working for Amazon in the Kindle division between 2011-2017. We were going to do a full launch in Russia back in 2014 and were putting a ton of work into that launch. Then they invaded Crimea and everything was put on hold. After a year the pause, and all the money/effort spent on it, was scrapped.

I can't claim it was for altruistic reasons, management there does not know the meaning, but it was the right decision.

Dec 15, 2022 at 9:40pmWeb