RE: asynchronous nature of geo-replication could have led to data loss
One of the reasons I am anti-cloud is the above. The engineers in this particular case thankfully prioritised customer data integrity over other agendas, but if other decision-makers were to have chosen a different priority then who knows what could happen to data. Customers of cloud services have no say in such decision-making.
Databases are particularly vulnerable to this kind of data loss. In the case of an on-premises outage a skillful systems person could stitch things back together again, having direct access to the actual underlying files: Not easy, but arguably doable. But if you are prodding a database engine remotely, with the potential that engineers at the cloud end are also working on data recovery (which you have no knowledge of, or control over), the difficulties are a lot greater.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
