Lights? Where we're going we don't need lights... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
And now I want to watch Event Horizon
Hmm...isn't it close to a quote from Back to the Future? Is there any connection between the movies?
Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#22Answering from the cloud perspective. While I have seen some cloud infrastructures running on life support with minimal supervision for years, AWS tends to shut down, deprecate or migrate backing services every now and then. ASGs stop autoscaling. RDS forces version upgrades. EBS volumes go poof. Kube APIs vanish. Upstream AMIs, docker images or apt packages get moved to different repo URLs. Sooner or later some auto…
This. There is constant maintenance work needed to keep things online even in a steady product state.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#23Lights? Where we're going we don't need lights... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
> FANUC, a Japanese robotics company, has been operating as a lights-out factory since 2001. Robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time. "Not only is it lights-out," says Fanuc vice president Gary Zywiol, "we turn off the air conditioning and heat too." Enslave them, treat them badly and leave them alone for weeks at a time with t…
Username checks out
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#24ive often wondered toungue in cheek if google data centers are fullof dust,cobwebs,mummified remains, and a rackfarm humming away keeping the [lights] on, according to a cost-benefit curve analysis, labour efficiency algorithm. /s
Come on, there are very few mummified remains at most Google data centers. I did the last count, and it was barely 40%.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#25Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#26I'd expect between a week and a month of operation before one of our central systems clogs. After that, many services would still respond to requests but provide stale data. Further two months I'd assume billing issues would bring most everything down.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#27I work in oil and gas production. It's actually a very interesting question. We could possibly operate without a single bit of human input for a couple of weeks if everything goes well. I'm not sure how much electrical grids are reliant on human input, but there's no reason our gas supply would necessarily disappear immediately.
It really makes me think that apocalypse / societal collapse scenarios are likely to be more survivable than we think, particularly in Year 1.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#28I work at Amazon. The internet would be in trouble. I know very little about the fulfillment side of things, but I would expect things to stop there pretty much immediately. There is of course automation, robots, etc. but also many people in the loop and once they vanish I'd expect things to enter some kind of passive failure mode. Hopefully these failures would be isolated from the rest of the services.
The more interesting question is how long AWS and retail services would continue running and how they would fail. I don't think anyone could say. All people worldwide vanishing in an instant isn't a realistic scenario to plan for—if it happens, then the world has bigger problems and in any case, who would be around to execute the recovery plan?
Still for the sake of the thought experiment...I'm assuming in this scenario the world sees fit to keep supplying the data centers with power and other utilities, but no one has access to the buildings, tries to get in, bomb them etc. In this case, I would expect things to fail gradually, then suddenly and catastrophically, in the period of a few days to a few months. Failure should happen mostly independently by availability zone.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#29Answering from the cloud perspective. While I have seen some cloud infrastructures running on life support with minimal supervision for years, AWS tends to shut down, deprecate or migrate backing services every now and then. ASGs stop autoscaling. RDS forces version upgrades. EBS volumes go poof. Kube APIs vanish. Upstream AMIs, docker images or apt packages get moved to different repo URLs. Sooner or later some auto…
> AWS tends to shut down, deprecate or migrate backing services every now and then
Fairly rarely. For Azure that might be a week, not months.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#30Well I pride myself by creating self healing, easy to operate kubernetes clusters. Soooo as long as the hoster provides me VM's or Nodes and would not kick me out because of the invoice, i recon until a critical system update is needed.
So maybe 2-5 years? :D
with k3s the cluster iself can autoupdate and with the right settings it can update the system too.
PS: running does not mean its secure, just means that it wont die right away :D