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Unyielding :soyjaktantrum:whining:soyjaktantrum: from rentcels :marseyblops2cel: as :landlordlove:CTO:landlordlove: kills service :marseyrope: with no warning :gigachad4:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36660481

Context (for nerds)

This happened yesterday. For those unaware, InfluxDB is some database offering no one cares about. Unfortunately that's not true because some people care about it :marseyconfused2: People cared so much that InfluxData (the developing company), about a decade ago, jumped in the SaaS game and made their own cloud offering to host InfluxDB instances. For some reason, this was considered a good idea and people used their service.

Quite suddenly, some European region :marseyflagpoland: and some Asian region :chiobu: containing InfluxDB instances were shut off. Normally, deprecation of services are well advertised by a vendor. This isn't the case here and it's why I posted this: the CTO jumped in on HN to try to do some damage control. He is also a co-founder, according to his HN profile and by his own admittance. What does he have to say?

:marseychad: Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influxdata.com.

Drama

To summarize why this is r-slurred: Paul here notified his customers that they would permanently shut off products they pay for by sending only :marseybrainlet:three emails:!marseybrainlet:. In enterprise, this is supremely r-slurred: emails are likely to be caught by a spam filter or never read.

HN agrees and gets angry:

:soyjaktantrum: This is insane.

...

This screams either gross incompetence or straight up negligence. This is such a solvable problem (as many here have already mentioned various solutions), but I'm honestly just flabbergasted that this is a problem that is even being discussed here right now.

As a DBaaS, the data of your customers should be your number one priority. If its not, y'all need to take a hard look at what the heck your value proposition is.

We weren't impact by this directly, but you can be sure that this is going to be one of the topics for discussion amongst my teams this week. Mostly how we can either move off InfluxDB Cloud or ensure that our DR plans are up to date for the rug being pulled out from under us from you guys in the future.

\

:soyjaktantrum: Paul, are you actually for real right now? Did you really just say "We deleted all your data, and its your fault. We did whisper into the wind three times, you should have heard it. No, there is no chance of recovery"?

\

:soyjaktantrum: Hi Paul, email is one-way communication and not guaranteed to be delivered. At a minimum you should have monitored who did and did not respond to the email with some kind of action and those that did not should have more effort expended to be able to reach them. Finally, you should have kept the data for a reasonable amount of time (say 90 days) post shut-down so users that did not get the notification could download it. What you've done is super rude and if I were still a customer in an unaffected region it would definitely be reason enough to leave because it's pointless to sit and wait to see how you'll deal with my data when the time comes. Better to preempt that and leave while I still have control.

For anyone who thought this was purely incompetence: no. They just wanted to save money :marseycapitalistmanlet::

:marseychad: We get an email address because we need to contact our customers. After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I realize that shutting down a region isn’t good. It’s not what we would have preferred, but we had to do it for the business. And we made an honest effort to contact all customers to help move them.

Plenty more rage in the thread. Meanwhile, on their forums, a developer advocate defends his piggy's actions;

:marseynpc: Hi all, I am ever so sorry the closure of these clusters has unexpectedly hit you. To confirm the information given by support. Communication was delivered in the following ways;

The UI was updated with a closure message for these regions.

The https://status.influxdata.com/ website also provides the notification.

We sent out emails on the following dates:

Feb 23, April 6, May 15.

We understand that a scream test would have been another form of communication that we overlooked. Some of the reasons for the closure of been outlined here: [some Slack link]

Conclusion

It's pretty rare to see cloudshit companies implode like this, and even more rare for representatives to directly engage in communities that would assuredly shit on them. Thus, this is funny. :marseyjerkoffsmile:

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trolling idea: let's start a DBaaS company :marseyra#pscallion:

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Based and "I'm holding Your Company Hostage"pilled

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Drama Bussy as a Service?


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:#capyexcited: :#capyexcited: :#capyexcited:

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Follower of Christ :marseyandjesus: Tech lover, IT Admin, heckin pupper lover and occasionally troll. I hold back feelings or opinions, right or wrong because I dislike conflict.

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nah I'm with the CTOchad on this. If your database host / any major supplier is getting caught in your spam filter you're too r-slurred to be allowed to own a business. Basically, stop using salesforce. Everyone currently using salesforce should immediately desist so that we as a species can move on.

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Do you know how many vendors most companies have and how much spam these vendors produce? You're insane if you think that's manageable. When I was a vendor manager, not only was I doing this for every single vendor, but also I was automating purchasing systems while simultaneously forecasting the IT OpEx budget for a billion dollar company. It's not reasonable for somebody to do all that and also expect them to keep on top of every single vendor email. People burn out that way

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:soycry: noooooo I'm going to burn out!!!

literally just click 'unsubscribe' holy shit lmao

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i burn out from doing the bare minimum the job asks of me

If you’re “vendor manager” you better be on top of every email they send you.

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That would be really dumb. You think vendors should send me every license key any employee orders and I try to hunt down which of the several thousand employees it belongs to so that I can forward it to them? That's completely r-slurred

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I’m not saying you have to act on every email, but you should make sure you don’t need to act on it.

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If I get too much work to reasonably handle in 40 hours, that's not my problem unless my company is paying me well enough that I don't mind putting in extra work. That's management's problem.

I don't believe in investing much more in a company than they've invested in me. I get hired to do a job for a certain amount of pay. When more large responsibilities are added to that job, I expect more pay. If you allow managers to just walk all over you by constantly giving you more and more work without compensation, you're a kitty. Just work to the level of salary that they pay you

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People burn out that way

:#marseycapitalistmanlet:

And that's my problem, why?

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Because 90% of the productive work in a company is done by 10% of the employees and when your top employees burn out and either leave or stop giving a shit then it negatively impacts a company significantly.

This isn't about being nice, this is about rational self-interest

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ok the company will fail. :marseylibright:


Follower of Christ :marseyandjesus: Tech lover, IT Admin, heckin pupper lover and occasionally troll. I hold back feelings or opinions, right or wrong because I dislike conflict.

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I agree, and that's a good thing.

I once worked at a company like that. When I joined the stock price was like $28: when I cashed out it was close to $140.

Eventually I got a manager like you who didn't understand anything about my job and he pushed me out. The stock price dropped by about 40 points shortly thereafter.

I'm not saying that the stock price drop was all caused by me, but based on what I know of their processes it's likely that their procurement system started breaking down after I left, and that certainly couldn't have helped matters.

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:#marseyhesright:

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Rentoid cloudcels BTFO

Owned outright on-premchads stay winning

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I like it, because i wasn't personally affected

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3 emails is plenty. Lazy asses

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Do people really just not read emails at all?

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Some places have it set up so that emails goes to some AD-managed service account no one checks, or to some guy who is no longer employed with them. In the thread though, people pointed out how they ignored all of InfluxData's emails because they thought it was just marketing spam:

:soyjaktantrum: I find your tone here quite condescending. We've never received those mails you've mentioned and you make it out like it's our fault that we didn't react. I mean, you managed to send us marketing mails in april and failed to mention you're gonna discontinue the service. So much for honest effort...

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>spergs literally paid to read emails didn't read emails

Do they really think browsing reddit all day was on the job offer?

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Yeah if you work for a big company that has vendors like this, you will get about 3 to 5 emails a day, per vendor, that are nothing but ads. Every day, for years. Of course people just forward them all to the garbage

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Some companies have really strict email filters and it can be easy to miss emails if they end up automatically marked as spam / phishing attempts

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Cloudcucks deserve worse.

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online services provide comodity as everyhting in this world but they comoe at a cost of not having fullk control over dthe data bu5t hthis is no diffrerent form a large network of fungal spoires tha t communicate with ceach other when one part of the networkz gets cutoff then az se4ctiojn of it might lose contact we mhumans like too excert contreoil since it eases our anxietty babd like too think online bad and knot wownnjing bad cuase service can gho dfown and service can die but reality is the only scalable way of exapnding is interdependecne and connectedneds

the emergin properttyy of connected atoms are cells and the emergin property of connected cells are organisms and the emergin property ofd connecte gumans is a new megta kind of superhuman that acts as a hive mind. algorithms control us and decide our future but we create the algorithsm so we control and edecide our future but wcant think ,ike we cant ab and then cd and fg we only get too chose from what is given tou us by the overloard algorithm

@shun say this as a feminist ally

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https://media.giphy.com/media/MPwymGnqqBO5IGkyAF/giphy.webp

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:#marseylongpost2:

Snapshots:

influxdata.com:

/e/soyjaktantrum.webp This is insane.:

/e/soyjaktantrum.webp Paul, are you actually for real right now? Did you really just say "We deleted all your data, and its your fault. We did whisper into the wind three times, you should have heard it. No, there is no chance of recovery"?:

/e/soyjaktantrum.webp Hi Paul, email is one-way communication and not guaranteed to be delivered. At a minimum you should have monitored who did and did not respond to the email with some kind of action and those that did not should have more effort expended to be able to reach them. Finally, you should have kept the data for a reasonable amount of time (say 90 days) post shut-down so users that did not get the notification could download it. What you've done is super rude and if I were still a customer in an unaffected region it would definitely be reason enough to leave because it's pointless to sit and wait to see how you'll deal with my data when the time comes. Better to preempt that and leave while I still have control.:

/e/marseychad.webp We get an email address because we need to contact our customers. After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I realize that shutting down a region isn’t good. It’s not what we would have preferred, but we had to do it for the business. And we made an honest effort to contact all customers to help move them.:

/e/marseynpc.webp Hi all, I am ever so sorry the closure of these clusters has unexpectedly hit you. To confirm the information given by support. Communication was delivered in the following ways;:

https://status.influxdata.com/:

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That’s funny I used to used their data base at a previous job (housed on prem). I wonder if there still running it?

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idk deleting customer data entirely after three emails is incredibly r-slurred and based lmao :marseyretardchad:


Follower of Christ :marseyandjesus: Tech lover, IT Admin, heckin pupper lover and occasionally troll. I hold back feelings or opinions, right or wrong because I dislike conflict.

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Anyone running anything important on these literal who SaaS memes deserve it

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:soyjaktantrum:FRICK YOU GUYS. IM GOING TO USE PROMETHEUS.:soyjaktantrum:

How many didn't have backups or failovers?

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