Andrew đŸŒ» 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 threadKadin

@threatresearch Nice, although I don't really believe the "it's a point of principle" part.

Amazon has 10 billion small green reasons not to get in bed with Russia:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/28/nsa_wands_aws/

(Although I think DoD has since spread the love around to Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc.—some "hybrid cloud" concept—because you can't give away $10B without everyone who didn't win calling up their pet senators to complain.)

But we are rapidly approaching a time when technology companies will no longer be allowed to fence-sit when it comes to geopolitics. If you want to be the US government's cloud provider of choice, you can't be messing about with Russia (and presumably vice versa, although the Russians are probably more reserved with what they put onto computers).

$10b National Security Agency contract re-awarded to AWS

Microsoft won, Amazon complained. Amazon won, Microsoft complained. Amazon won... again

The Register
Dec 15, 2022 at 10:59pmWeb