Russian cloud Yandex says drone attacks on its datacenters caused data loss

Now enables backup by default and hints a little on-prem infra never hurt anyone

Russian cloud operator Yandex has admitted to data loss after a drone attack on one of its datacenters.

The attack, which Ukrainian press said was ordered by Kyiv, happened in early October and caused a fire and subsequent outage at Yandex’s ru-central1-b availability zone. Subsequent strikes targeted more Yandex datacenters and disrupted more of the company’s cloud and payment services.

On Tuesday, Yandex posted an update on its recovery efforts, which it spun as something of a triumph because it restored over 97 percent of customer data. Of course that also means the company lost 2.84 percent of customer data, which it blamed on “critical hardware damage and a lack of backups on the platform.”

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It’s unclear if Yandex’s use of the phrase “on the platform” indicates it doesn’t keep backups of its own cloud, if whatever resilience techniques it employs don’t create multiple copies of customer data, or if clients didn’t protect their data.

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Whatever happened, Yandex has decided to enable backups by default for all VMs customers create in its cloud.

That decision will mean customers will consume and pay for more Yandex resources, unless they opt out of the automated backups.

Given that drones damaged three Yandex locations, and the war with Ukraine continues, users have good reasons to consider alternatives to its services.

Indeed, Yandex’s announcement of its recovery efforts links to a page extolling the virtues of a hybrid cloud when devising data protection strategies. That page also mentions Yandex’s own Stackland product, which brings its stack on-prem, as an example of a hybrid approach.

On Wednesday the company also launched a new availability zone named ru-central1-f. Yandex didn’t say where it’s located, other than to say it’s in “a new location.” Interestingly, Yandex has imposed quotas that limit the amount of resources users can access in the new availability zone and says it can’t yet handle traffic to private endpoints at the new facility.

Many nations have imposed sanctions that restrict sales of technology products to Russia. It’s therefore unsurprising that Yandex might struggle to provision enough infrastructure to allow untrammeled access to a new availability zone. ®