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 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 and some Asian region 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?
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 three emails. 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:
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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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For anyone who thought this was purely incompetence: no. They just wanted to save money :
Plenty more rage in the thread. Meanwhile, on their forums, a developer advocate defends his piggy's actions;
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.
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Cloudcucks deserve worse.
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Context