Russia Destroys Ukraine Data Centers - The World Is Not Built with Code

Eli the Computer Guy (0:00)

Coming from CNBC, Russia targets data centers in Kiev as NATO condemns Moscow's irresponsible nuclear rhetoric. So I kind of think that this is an interesting thing to be considering as system administrators and technology professionals in the 2020s. Basically, the question of what happens when people decide to start plinking your data centers. This is something that you need to be concerned about. We've heard about this in the Middle East recently, with the war going on with Iran, that Iran has decided to start plinking AWS data centers. And apparently, literally, these data centers are essentially offline, if not permanently, basically damn near permanently, that the data centers were damaged to such a degree that the data in the data centers are irrecoverable. And so, one of the things to be considering right now is that data centers are an incredibly vulnerable target for adversaries, and the amount of damage that can be done, if data centers can be taken down, is quite significant. So, it should be expected that data centers are going to become a target in future military campaigns, military campaigns, terrorist campaigns, the whole nine yards. One of the things that I always talk about is, I traveled through India many years ago, backpacked through India for about four months, and there was an interesting empire that had been in India. It was one of the ancient empires. And the idea with that particular empire is that they decided to put their capital more or less in the middle of a desert, a very inhospitable environment. And then what they did is they created canals to bring water in to the capital. The reason that they did this is, basically, when armies would try to come in and invade the capital or try to destroy the capital, they would have to go through so much of this really bad, hot, arid terrain that it would degrade the military forces to such a degree that by the time they got to the capital, the soldiers in the capital could dispatch the enemy relatively easily. And this basically protected them for a long time.

Then, one enemy got the wise idea, basically looked around at these amazing engineering feats, and said, well, wait a minute, if the capital is able to sustain itself because it has a constant flow of water from these canals, then what happens if the canals go boom? And so basically what the enemy did is they destroyed the canals that fed water into this capital, and then the capital basically fell in on itself, because hey, when you're in an incredibly arid environment, and you no longer have any water, and you have a city there, things are not going to go very well. This is one of the things I get very concerned about, especially with the United States right now, is that our empire, we are an empire, it is very complicated. But the problem with the complication of our empire is that our empire is strong, but I would argue, brittle, right? It's kind of like iron. If you push or pull on iron, it's probably not going to fail, but if you hit it properly in the middle, it will literally shatter. And that's one of the things to be considering, right? With our current empire and our current systems, that when everything works how it's supposed to, and more importantly, when everything fails how it's supposed to fail, we have redundancy and reliability and all that kind of stuff. The question comes, though, is what happens when things start failing? In the incorrect way. That's not how it's supposed to fail, right? That's the thing to be thinking about with data centers, to be thinking about with cloud computing, right? If you look at Amazon, Amazon has numerous regions throughout the world, and as I've talked about before, when you use Amazon for your cloud services, one of the things that Amazon recommends is that your infrastructure should span multiple regions. You should be in region 1, in region 7, in region 3, in region 5, something like that, basically the data is synchronizing back and forth, that you should have replicated systems in the different regions. And the reason is because sometimes entire regions fail. Region 1, I do believe region 1 is kind of like around that DC, Virginia, that type of area, and region 1 just goes down. I don't know why, you just look in the news and like, oh look, region 1 went down again, right? But the thing is, the thing to think about with this, right, is they know that type of failure, right? There may be power failures in a region. There may be other larger infrastructure areas in a region. And so if the region goes down for some reason, right, if you've replicated your systems over to a different region, then everything should stay up and running. You know, pretty good to go. Here's the thing, though. Think about how you have designed your disaster recovery scenarios. What happens if people just start plinking AWS data center cooling towers? Right, so we saw this, it was in Arizona, New Mexico, I talked about this a few months ago, is there is a data center that went 100% down, it wasn't an Amazon data center, it was some other data center, just because their cooling went down. Right, hey, you have a hell of a lot of servers in an enclosed environment in like Arizona for some fucking reason, right? Your cooling system goes down, guess what, all the servers are going to thermal shut off. That's just how this shit works, right? And that's the thing, right? They had some weird quirk that just shut down all of their cooling, and less than fun happened after that. But think about this, you know, what happens if you have multiple people with rifles just kicking back, plinking cooling towers?