This is so true, I wish there was a way to make this more noticeable (flashing red lights on the order forms, regular email warnings about the single point of failure,etc.). This simple fact is taught in entry level system administration courses (RAID, Disaster Recovery Plans, Replication, High Availability, Fault Tolerance, etc.) but in reality some seem to not plan for it when moving to cloud services. I always suggest people set their apps up to be able to run out of multiple availability zones in case one goes down if it is very important to them. For those that are not able to I will suggest they at least setup replication to another server within the same data center and an offsite location in case their server has hardware failure, an account gets locked or other possible situation to help take of the just in case scenarios that occur to everyone.
Yep, somehow cloud customers have decided that by being in the cloud everything is redundant and durable and has several other magical properties.
At one of my positions we had stupidly put too many eggs in the basket of a single physical machine. Its disk controller failed in a way that it trashed the data volumes. I was unable to convince anyone that "move to Amazon" was not a one-step solution to "how do we make sure this never happens again".
>somehow cloud customers have decided that by being in the cloud everything is redundant and durable and has several other magical properties
To be fair the point of the cloud is that they deal with redundancy, HA, distributing to multiple datacenters, etc. through their services - but you need to use and understand implications of said services to leverage that.
If your server does something weird and corrupts the filesystem, you still have access to it. That can be a huge difference when it comes to restoring the most recent data.
