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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.

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: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"?

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: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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