This kind of shit will only increase as more of these companies believe they can vibe-code their way out of paying software devs what they are worth.
Why do we place so much reliance on one mega company? This level of importance. It should be seized by the government.
Do you really want someone like the magahats having control over something like that?
Why do we place so much reliance on one mega company? This level of importance.
Because it’s cheaper and (in broad terms) more reliable than everybody having a data centre.
It should be seized by the government.
Oh yeah, what could possibly go wrong if the US government owned Amazon!
Best alternatives is making Amazon something owned by the people and not any corporation/government but who knows if that would ever happen
So, you changed one cloud provider to another…
But let me rephrase: cloud can be significantly cheaper - if you know what you’re doing and what you’re putting on the cloud.
I’ve been to data centres that cost as much as a decade of cloud hosting the service they were supporting (and that’s without operational costs).
Cloud is especially great for small businesses where you have two alternative options: either build your own data centre which you absolutely cannot afford (or risk making it barely operational and unreliable) or host your company at someone else’s DC - which is what cloud is, but worse (because nobody can set up so much resiliency and have so many DC techs/admins as Microsoft or Amazon).
There absolutely are situations where self-hosting is preferable, and even cheaper, but wondering “why do we place so much reliance” on cloud service providers just shows that people have no clue what cloud actually offers.
Leta give it to Trump and Elon Musk, they will take good care of it… Lol.
Trump will isolate aws to America only, claiming other countries are ripping him off.
Aws becomes American Web Services.
Put tariffs on everybody who doesn’t host US data on their own cloud services.
Yeah. :) 100% tariffs on data transfers out of American Web Services…
It should be seized by the
governmentpeople and mercilessly decentralized.Agreed same for Facebook then call it Readabook
Agree
AWS aggressively pursues high priced and years-long spending commitments with large customers, and they incentivize it with huge discounts for doing so.
And when AWS does this they intentionally incentivize these large customers to migrate existing workloads away from other cloud service providers as well, going so far as to offer assistance in doing so.
And when they hit their end inevitable enshittification, what then?
That’s next quarter, after I’ve got my bonus for all these savings.
At that point you’re completely invested in their ecosystem and it’ll cost you triple to get out.
IbM has entered the chat
Way above my pay grade! I would never suggest or support making such agreements, but I also don’t want to be in a position where I’d even be asked, so I’d just sit back with a bowl of popcorn
God no, not the government!
They couldn’t organise a paper bag party
That’s largely because one half of the elected officials are dedicated to defunding and deconstructing government organizations, so they can then point at those same organizations and go “look, the government doesn’t work! We should stop funding it!” The government is actually great at organizing a lot of things. But they’re all so engrained in society that you don’t even think about them as being organized by the government. Systems that just work, reliably, all the time.
The government’s job is stability and reliability, not being as efficient as possible. Where a corporation may only have one person doing a job, the government will have four or five. Those people aren’t bloat; They’re on the payroll because the government is expected to keep functioning during emergencies. People would lose their minds if the streets department (responsible for clearing downed trees out of public roads) shut down after a bad storm rolled through, just because a few government employees had a tree branch fall on their house. What if firefighters stopped working because a local wildfire burnt a few firefighters’ houses? What if the city water department shut down because three or four city employees’ water supply was affected? What if the health department shut down during a pandemic?
The people who work in government also live in the same areas they serve. Which means that they are affected by the same emergencies. The government needs enough redundancy to be able to continue functioning, even after those employees are affected by the same emergencies as the general public. If some emergency affects 75% of the public in a given area, then 75% of the local government employees are likely going to be affected. So if the government doesn’t have enough redundancy to be able to redistribute the work, people will see their government shutting down in the wake of the emergency. And to make matters even worse, during (and in the wake of) those emergencies, people look to the government for help. Which means that’s the most critical time for the government to continue functioning.
I say all of this because the same is true for the infrastructure that runs critical government systems. The government expands and implements things slowly by design, because everything critical has to go through multiple levels of design approval, and have multiple redundancies built in. If the government has updated a critical system, I can guarantee that new system has been in the works for the past two years at least. That process is designed to ensure everything works as intended. I wouldn’t want my city traffic lights managed by a private company, because they’d try to cut costs and avoid building in redundant systems.
I wouldn’t want my city traffic lights managed by a private company, because they’d try to cut costs and avoid building in redundant systems.
While they aren’t run by private companies, the traffic lights at the entrances to most housing estates are procured and installed by the developer, at least in Australia. Without fail, about 12-24 months later, the red and green LED lights will have half a dozen or more dead pixels on them. Meanwhile, newer LED lights installed by the roads department are still going strong years later.
Large corporations and oligarchs are better? I’ll take the government. At least we can vote on them.
I think co-ops are the way to go, but I can understand that someone “just” wanting to purchase the good/service might not see the difference between a co-op and corporation like Amazon.
I don’t think it’s a size issue really, but co-ops generally stay smaller in part due to how they are internally organized compared to a “median” corporation.
I also think that the government actually does a pretty good job at managing things; it’s just their failures are public. Private boondoggles might drive many people into bankruptcy, but they aren’t publicized any more than absolutely necessary.
We could really use an Open Source app that partners with and displays all kinds of websites/stores to buy stuff and pay from the app
Oh, don’t worry, open source (or, worse, Free Software) apps won’t be allowed on Android or Apple devices, soon. /s
It would be a more meaningful discussion if the government wasn’t controlled so much by large corporations and oligarchs.
Sorry but this is a ridiculous argument. What entity has dropped nukes on an entire population? Who is the current president of the US? Insane take.
This is literally just a US skill issue, and just so you’re aware, folks in the rest of the world do exist on the internet.
What are you actually arguing with the president thing? I literally don’t understand how that’s supposed to support your point.
Do you literally hear yourself? You think large corporate and oligarchs run insurance, tech, etc., is a better route than a public option? 💀 Jeff Bezos, Musk, Thiel, and Ellison for everything?
An idiot bought by corporations.
Oil companies are private. Wars are started for oil.
Also government distrust and heavy focus on its inefficiencies is a tried and true right wing/authoritarian tactic. The public gobble it up because they dont take 6 seconds to actually think.
Government is also the entity that will be prosecuting/persecuting you when they don’t like what you have to say.
When was the last time you heard about a large government computer outage? (I don’t count the VA because that’s broken on purpose.)
CrowdStrike, but that hit private companies too.
Launch of ACA markets? But that seemed more like the company paid to make it under sized it or just did shit code.
Which goes back to somethings shouldn’t be done for profit
Government’s also shouldn’t be incentivised to always go with the cheapest option during procurements and tenders. Price is not the only factor in a value calculation and it is insane that we just ignore that fact.
It’s wild that these cloud providers were seen as a one-way stop to ensure reliability, only to make them a universal single point of failure.
But if everyone else is down too, you don’t look so bad 🧠
No one ever got fired for buying IBM.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The state government of Queensland, Australia just lifted a 12 year ban on IBM getting government contracts after a colossal fuck up.
It’s an old joke from back when IBM was the dominant player in IT infrastructure. The idea was that IBM was such a known quantity that even non-technical executives knew what it was and knew that other companies also used IBM equipment. If you decide to buy from a lesser known vendor and something breaks, you might be blamed for going off the beaten track and fired (regardless of where the fault actually lay), whereas if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business, so buying IBM became a CYA tactic for sysadmins even if it went against their better technical judgement. AWS is the modern IBM.
AWS is the modern IBM.
That’s basically why we use it at work. I hate it, but that’s how things are.
if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business,
IBM produced Canadian Phoenix Pay system has entered the chat with a record 0 firings.
Such a monstrous clusterfuck, and you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone having been sacked, let alone facing actual charges over the whole debacle.
If anything, I’d say that’s the single best case for buying IBM - if you’re incompetent and/or corrupt, just go with them and even if shit hits the fan, you’ll be OK.
Yes but now it is nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco.
One of our client support people told an angry client to open a Jira with urgent priority and we’d get right on it.
… the client support person knew full well that Jira was down too : D
At least, I think they knew. Either way, not shit we could do about it for that particular region until AWS fixed things.
It’s mostly a skill issue for services that go down when USE-1 has issues in AWS - if you actually know your shit, then you don’t get these kinds of issues.
Case in point: Netflix runs on AWS and experienced no issues during this thing.
And yes, it’s scary that so many high-profile companies are this bad at the thing they spend all day doing
Netflix did encounter issues. I couldn’t access it yesterday at noon EST. And I wasn’t alone, judging by Downdetector.ca
Yeah, if you’re a major business and don’t have geographic redundancy for your service, you need to rework your BCDR plan.
But… that costs money.
So does an outage, but I get that the C-suite can only think one quarter at a time
Absolutely this. We are based out of one region, but also have a second region as a quick disaster recovery option, and we have people 24/7 who can manage the DR process. We’re not big enough to have live redundancy, but big enough that an hour of downtime would be a big deal.
Case in point: Netflix runs on AWS and experienced no issues during this thing.
But Netflix did encounter issues. For example the account cancel page did not work.
I would say that’s a pretty minor issue that isn’t related to the functioning of the service itself.
It’s probably by design that the only thing that didn’t work was the cancel page
That’s honestly just a tin-foil hat sort of take, that entirely relies on planning for an unprecedented AWS outage specifically to screw over customers.
What I meant by that is that they probably didn’t care if that service has a robust backup solution like authentication or something would.
What’s the general plan of action when a company’s base region shits the bed?
Keep dormant mirrored resources in other regions?
I presumed the draw of us-east-1 was its lower cost, so if any solutions involve spending slightly more money, I’m not surprised high profile companies put all their eggs in one basket.
I presumed the draw of us-east-1 was its lower cost
At no time is pub-cloud cheaper than priv-cloud.
The draw is versatility, as change didn’t require spinning up hardware. No one knew how much the data costs would kill the budget, but now they do.
I love the “git gud” response. Sacred cashcows?
It is still a logical argument, especially for smaller shops. I mean, you can (as self-hosters know) set up automatic backups, failover systems, and all that, but it takes significant time & resources. Redundant internet connectivity? Redundant power delivery? Spare capacity to handle a 10x demand spike? Those are big expenses for small, even mid-sized business. No one really cares if your dentist’s office is offline for a day, even if they have to cancel appointments because they can’t process payments or records.
Meanwhile, theoretically, reliability is such a core function of cloud providers that they should pay for experts’ experts and platinum standard infrastructure. It makes any problem they do have newsworthy.
I mean,it seems silly for orgs as big and internet-centric as Fortnite, Zoom, or forturne-500 bank to outsource their internet, and maybe this will be a lesson for them.
It’s also silly for the orgs to not have geographic redundancy.
No it’s not. It’s very expensive to run and there are a lot of edge cases. It’s much easier to have regional redundancy for a fraction of the cost.
The organizations they were talking about and I was referring to have a global presence
Plus, it’s not significantly more expensive to have a cold standby in a different geographic location in AWS.
universal single point of failure.
If it’s not a region failure, it’s someone pushing untested slop into the devops pipeline and vaping a network config. So very fired.
Apparently it was DNS. It’s always DNS…
Well companies use not for relibibut to outsource responsibility. Even a medium sized company treated Windows like a subscription for many many years. People have been emailing files to themself since the start of email.
For companies moving everything to msa or aws just was the next step and didn’t change day to operations
People also tend to forget all the compliance issues that can come around hosting content, and using someone with expertise in that can reduce a very large burden. It’s not something that would hit every industry, but it does hit many.
They zigged when we all zagged.
Decentralisation has always been the answer.
yeah, so many things now use AWS in some way. So when AWS has a cold, the internet shivers
sidekicks in '09. had so many users here affected.
never again.
A single point of failure you pay them for.
I hate how Signal went down because of this… Wish it wasn’t so centralised.
My friend messaged me on Signal asking if Instructure (runs on AWS) was down. I got the message. That being said, it’s scary that Signal’s backbone depends on AWS
Why is this scary? That’s what e2ee is for, so that no one besides your recipient can view the contents of a message. It does not matter which server is used. If anything for a service like Signal, you want a server with high availability like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Cloudflare.
Scared because it’s centralized. If Amazon decides that it wants to shut Signal down, they can. Nobody can spin up a Signal instance and help out.
I would be surprised if Signal didn’t have a contract with another cloud provider as well, incase of this sort of thing.
I hope they consider other ways of doing things after this incident.
Willing to bet a lot of companies will be considering that now lol. Will it actually happen though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have been able to use Signal like any other day. I haven’t seen any disruption in sending or receiving.
For me it was not possible to send or receive messages for a couple of hours.
Signal’s love affair with big tech is deeply disturbing.
Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.
Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.
Hey, note that you can use mautrix-signal to access your Signal account within Element on this phone.
@MrMcGasion @Sunny Come to the dark side (xmpp, and jmp.chat) and get decentralized messaging and SMS support with that data-only sim!
Matrix is way more dark side in my opinion (this is a joke about how often it fluffs up, leaving you in the dark).
@Sunny@slrpnk.net already has an XMPP account, as that is included in every slrpnk.net account automatically. It is very easy to set that up for most Fediverse software, and the user id is identical between Fediverse and XMPP.
Oh damn i did not even know about this! I will defo have a play around with this tomorrow, how very neat!
However, it isnt me im really worried about in the grand picture, its family and friends. It was already difficult enough to convert them to using Signal.
according to that page the issue stemmed from an underlying system responsible for health checks in load balancing servers.
how the hell do you fuck up a health check config that bad? that’s like messing up smartd.conf and taking your system offline somehow
If your health check is broken, then you might not notice that a service is down and you’ll fail to deploy a replacement. Or the opposite, and you end up constantly replacing it, creating a “flapping” service.
Well, you see, the mistake you are making is believing a single thing the stupid AWS status board says. It is always fucking lying, sometimes in new and creative ways.
I mean if your OS was “smart” as not to send IO to devices that indicate critical failure (e.g. by marking them read-only in the array?), and then thinks all devices have failed critically, wouldn’t this happen in that kind of system as well…
This gif is audible
The one that hits us in self hosted is https://auth.docker.io/
You guys don’t selfhost a registry?
I know this is selfhosted so most people here are hobbyists, but it’s a ton of work to selfhost in enterprise setting. I’d wager 90%+ of people using image registries are using Docker Hub, GHCR, or AWS ECR.
For your personal use, you don’t need an enterprise setting. It’s just a simple compose file that you run.
You can host a registry in pull through mode, so you still have all the images you use locally, but if it’s not in your registry yet, it pulls it from docker hub or whatever.
The only pain point is that a single registry can’t do both. So if you want to push your own docker images AND have a “cache” of stuff from docker hub, you need to run two registries in two different modes. And then juggle the url’s.
Pretty sure you could run Pulp in pull-through mode and add your local Forgejo/whatever registry as a remote, which would at least give you a unified “pull” URL. Then just use Forgejo actions to handle the actual build/publish for your local images whenever you push to main (or tag a release, or whatever).
Pulp might actually be able to handle both on its own, I haven’t ever tried though.
I hadn’t actually considered that before. What’s your preferred way to do that?
Harbor
I have just this (which ironically won’t work now cause docker hub is down)
services: registry: restart: always image: registry:2 ports: - 5000:5000 dns: - 9.9.9.9 - 1.1.1.1 volumes: - ../files/auth/registry.password:/auth/registry.password - registry-data:/var/lib/registry environment: REGISTRY_STORAGE_DELETE_ENABLED: true REGISTRY_HEALTH_STORAGEDRIVER_ENABLED: false REGISTRY_HTTP_SECRET: ${REGISTRY_HTTP_SECRET} REGISTRY_AUTH: htpasswd REGISTRY_AUTH_HTPASSWD_REALM: Registry Realm REGISTRY_AUTH_HTPASSWD_PATH: /auth/registry.password # REGISTRY_PROXY_REMOTEURL: "https://registry-1.docker.io/" volumes: registry-data:I don’t even remember how and when I set it up. I think it might be this: https://github.com/distribution/distribution/releases/tag/v2.0.0
Recently somebody has created a frontend, which I bookmarked but didn’t bother to set up: https://github.com/Joxit/docker-registry-ui
How does using Podman help when the registry is down?
mirror.gcr.io is google’s public mirror of dockerhub.
Yeah I ran into this as well. Wondered why it needs a call to auth for public container images in the first place.
Oh god, that just 404s for me
Who wants to bet Amazon gave AI full access to their prod config and it screwed it up.
Or some engineer decide today would be a great day to play with BGP
That’s a good theory haha
that is an understatement 😂
A bad day for Jeff Bezos is a good day for all of us
That explains why my Matrix <-> Signal bridge was complaining about being disconnected.
Does this break all the various security features that are the reason to use Signal in the first place?
The Matrix server is a normal Signal client that can encrypt/decrypt messages from your account.
Assuming you trust your server, no. I would not use it on a third party Matrix server.
You can connect Matrix with Signal?
Sure, I got all my Signal/Telegram chats synced to my Matrix server.
I think I’ll be heavily looking into this then! Thanks
Yeah, was reading about it here too
Ring doorbells, Alexa, ahh… the joys of selfhosting.
Is there no way to check the doorbell video locally?
An Amazon employee misconfigures something and now your doorbell doesn’t work
Obligatory
Oh wow their front page doesn’t mention at all that their products run locally and don’t require subscriptions.
The last time I looked at time I missed something. I want to use my existing chime and have it also use that power supply as a power source. Turns out the battery one does that! I missed that months ago! I was going to get a Ring Pro or whatever to get it to do that! This is so much better! Moving up the todo list now!
Local, private, no subscriptions, ONVIF, and no need to actually self-host anything. I haven’t found any other options with that combination.
It mentions push notifications and emails, so I guess they must require an account, or can you configure them to use SMTP directly, as with the Amcrest Pro cameras?
TBH, I’ve never used any of those features. I just used it locally and plugged it into home assistant.
But I just reinstalled their app and can confirm I can watch the feed and get push notifications without a cloud account. Haven’t tried email tho
That sounds worth investigating, thanks! Amcrest needs an account for notifications afaik, but the Pro cameras can work just on a local network.
The app for them is awful. Then they made a new version that is awful in slightly different ways, so I’m interested in new options.
I don’t have one (because of that point), so I don’t know…
Presumably the app and doorbell are hardcoded to go to an AWS URL (so it’s “easier” for consumers), but in theory the data’s all on your wifi.
I would be very surprised if there was
And I’m having a very good day now :3
Are you an IT contractor or something?
In some way, I am, but mainly I feel my need to only use selfhosteable stuff, and selfhost 90% of those services, confirmed.
Good
I’m not a was costumer. What’s their usual SLA?
