I left AWS before Aurora was introduced, but I suspect it's similar to how S3 fulfills a similar promise. From the S3 FAQ[1]:

> Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, and Amazon Glacier storage classes replicate data across a minimum of three AZs to protect against the loss of one entire AZ. This remains true in Regions where fewer than three AZs are publicly available.

Italic emphasis is mine.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/

I'd be interested in a project like this if it was targetting FreeBSD.

Glacier in particular seems to attract the speculative fascination. Do people not realise the name is not in jest, it really is done with graphene-doped room-temperature ice crystals and laser interference lithography?

We used to joke among ourselves that actually it was done using vinyl records. Have you seen how many vinyl records you can fit into a single rack?

Added bonus, 9 out of 10 customers actually preferred the feel of their data when it is restored.

I liked the story that the truck-mounted Snowball came from Glacier tech. Amazon has been putting data on a truck and then driving it around Virginia. The delay in reading it back is the time it takes for the truck to arrive at a datacenter and plug in. :)

It's not publicly available, but it was an internal AWS talk and very-deep-dive on the design & implementation of S3. A real eye opener for what it meant to build at global scale.

It's worth joining a global-scale tech company (AWS, Google, Azure, Facebook) just to have your mind blown by some of the internal materials.