First: No, I do not work at Twitter.
Second: I think about his question from time to time and wonder what it is like elsewhere.
Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
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Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#2Well, production, shipping would stop. Servers/services would likely stay running as long as power was on.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#3My building uses motion-controlled lights. I think they switch themselves off after about 15 minutes of no motion... so about 15 minutes.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#4Servers run until vendor contracts get terminated.
But actual lights? In shared office bldgs it actually depends on the renter's requests to the cleaning service. I've worked many places where the crew would turn the light on/off when entering/leaving (though would be shocked seeing me working in the dark); but I've worked a place or two where they requested all lights stay on all night, because "when mgmt shows up early in the morning they can't find the light switches next to the door" (made up quote but you get it)
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#5ive 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
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#6Answering 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 upgrade or scaling group would go awry and take out a persistent data store or cause services to fail.
There’s also the possibility for an unpatched vulnerability to get exploited.
I give it about 3-6 months, depending on the architecture pattern.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#7I would add to that question: If every datacenter was power-cycled at the same time and employees were not allowed to log in, how long until customers could use your site? i.e. The Ultimate Chaos Monkey Test
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#8Lights? Where we're going we don't need lights...
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#9ive 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
I've been in a couple "lights out" datacenters and there always seem to be electrical/cooling/backups engineers in and around running regular checks. Which is great! Also services for cleaning public spaces.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#10Something goes wrong on business day 1 without anybody to respond to customer issues and touch the database.