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Fuck the Cloud (2009)

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Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#171

Post by matwood »

fixermark wrote: post #168
matwood wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not alarmism at all. All it takes is a single pissed off employee or a single fat fingered command and an entire business can be wiped out. Coming from the database world it the saying was there are people who are crazy about backups and there are people who have not needed their backups...yet. For some reason everyone ends up having to learn the hard way. I also not advocating against the cloud, just that a si…

In all fairness, you need more than just off-cloud backups to guard against a single pissed off employee (make sure you're locking S3 and your local backups with different credentials, and the credentials to read the backups can't be gleaned from the credentials that write them) or a single fat-fingered command (kingdomofloathing.com once blew away N days of user progress by accidentally running a backup script in th…

Of course! Offline backups are only one of the many things that need to be done. S3 versioning can help with fat finger errors, credential management helps with rogue employees, bucket policies can copy files to off to private buckets/glacier, etc...

There is no single perfect solution, so like security you layer your disaster recovery.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#172

Post by jacquesm »

ajross wrote: post #167
Domenic_S wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 3-2-1 rule is a rule for a reason. 3 copies 2 formats 1 copy off-site The cloud is a great place for that 1 off-site copy.

No argument at all about the last sentence, but you should have skipped the first four lines as wildly premature optimization. The vast majority of the world would be much better served by (to appropriate your jargon) a 2-1-1 rule, because it's a straightforward treatment for a straightforward problem that is easily implemented. Yes, "format skew" and double-failure of backup solutions does indeed happen, but at a mu…

I think the 'three copies' rule refers to cyclic backups, not necessarily three copies of the one piece of data.

This protects against data corruption that is not detected immediately.

Another common way of doing this (and one that I prefer) is one where you rotate out a backup medium with ever larger intervals. So one gets set aside per week, then one gets set aside per month and so on. That gives you a series of snapshots in time that will allow you to pinpoint with some accuracy when an event happened. Longer ago you'll have less accuracy but this can help a lot in trying to triangulate who or what messed up. Just being able to answer the question of whether or not 'x' happened before 'y' was hired or after can help in narrowing down the number of suspects in case of a breach or other nastiness. It also prevents against back-ups for whatever reason not wanting to be reloaded (and you should guard against that by loading your back-up immediately after you make it, even so, the medium might fail the next time you try a read).

Better still if there is a streaming log of everything but only very few companies can afford that sort of solution for all their data. Those can be hard to restore from (by replaying) so there too a snapshot system can help.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#173

Post by PhasmaFelis »

nsfyn55 wrote: post #152
jacquesm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, I'm not your 'bro'. And what do you mean a DOX, you yourself wrote that on this very site. Or are you saying that you consider yourself anonymous from hereon in and therefore get to spout whatever nonsense you feel like and invite people to do dumb stuff 'because you said so' and we should ignore this in the context of your other postings? I'm responding to you the way I do because you run (or apparently,…

Bro was a pejorative friend. To be clear I never attacked you. Not once. I called your arguments into question, but that is what we are doing here. I believe your reasoning to be specious. >I'm a piece of shit because you disagree with me, but it just so happens that you've been all over this thread with a continuous stream of purposeful mis-understandings and/or downright trolling. This is just not true. I called yo…

> Bro was a pejorative friend. To be clear I never attacked you. Not once.

I find this especially hilarious. "I just insulted you! I never insulted you!"

(I preemptively decline to get in an extended semantic argument about whether insulting someone is an "attack".)

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#174

Post by jacquesm »

fixermark wrote: post #168
matwood wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not alarmism at all. All it takes is a single pissed off employee or a single fat fingered command and an entire business can be wiped out. Coming from the database world it the saying was there are people who are crazy about backups and there are people who have not needed their backups...yet. For some reason everyone ends up having to learn the hard way. I also not advocating against the cloud, just that a si…

In all fairness, you need more than just off-cloud backups to guard against a single pissed off employee (make sure you're locking S3 and your local backups with different credentials, and the credentials to read the backups can't be gleaned from the credentials that write them) or a single fat-fingered command (kingdomofloathing.com once blew away N days of user progress by accidentally running a backup script in th…

> make sure you're locking S3 and your local backups with different credentials, and the credentials to read the backups can't be gleaned from the credentials that write them

This is more or less an exact copy of how I would advise companies to set this up.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#175

Post by dang »

nsfyn55 wrote: post #139

Really a DOX bro? That company went under anyway(because it was financially unstable not because I chose to use S3 to host their site), but interestingly the page you've found has been continuously hosted (without even a minute of downtime) for almost 3 years. It also hasn't seen one minute of administration time since 2013. But seriously your tact shows you are a piece of shit.

> you are a piece of shit

Personal attacks are not allowed here, regardless of how wrong you think someone is. This and other comments you've posted break the HN guidelines egregiously. We ban accounts that do this, so please stop doing this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10772561 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#176

Post by [deleted] »

nsfyn55 wrote: post #139

Really a DOX bro? That company went under anyway(because it was financially unstable not because I chose to use S3 to host their site), but interestingly the page you've found has been continuously hosted (without even a minute of downtime) for almost 3 years. It also hasn't seen one minute of administration time since 2013. But seriously your tact shows you are a piece of shit.

[deleted]

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#177

Post by [deleted] »

nsfyn55 wrote: post #115
tzudot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To put it in other words you are advocating storing your money in a mattress because you don't "trust the banks" In this case, money can't be compared to digital data. You can make multiple copies of digital data on our own but not of your money tucked away into a mattress, that would be illegal.

It doesn't share the exact same properties, but you can make the comparison with any given copy. So yes the analogy holds.

[deleted]

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#178

Post by dang »

nsfyn55 wrote: post #145

I don't think you are my bro. And I want to be clear your moded and nonsensical jabbering is not why you are a piece of shit. An attempt to call attention to my potential customers in a forum because you disagree with me is why you are a piece of shit. So its cleared up me "offering nothing but objective fact, statistical argument, and well formed conjecture" you "anecdotes, personal attacks, and general butt hurtine…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10772408 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#179

Post by jacquesm »

rodionos wrote: post #47

AWS customer since 2007. Just pulled the plug on our last EC2 instance this week having migrated our stuff to a provider offering root servers for the cost of m3.medium. Our requirements are simple and we have no need for high-load/high-end layers. We used to have 50-100 VMs depending on the time of the day, now less than 20 with the rest of the workloads migrated to Docker containers. P.S. Can't delete Glacier Vault…

> P.S. Can't delete Glacier Vaults for now as AWS enforces a cooling period.

That's a good thing. And in the case of Glaciers an excellent pun.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#180

Post by Touche »

TheGRS wrote: post #100
Touche wrote: post #36

I think this gets to the heart of "what people value" and Jason is looking at it from a perspective of a collector. I'm also a collector so I feel much like him. I wonder if there's a relationship between collecting and being an introvert. I have no evidence but feel like there is. I think most people just don't value "things" the way our types do. What most people value is their social life. They post pictures to Fa…

I really don't like to marginalize others by what type of personality they are. This is yet another way of putting people into buckets so that you can more easily go about your day without thinking about it much. Before facebook people would keep large collections of photo books so that when family and friends came over they could easily share them. It doesn't mean they valued those pictures any less because they wer…

> I really don't like to marginalize others by what type of personality they are.

Me either, I hope that's not what it sounded like.

> Before facebook people would keep large collections of photo books so that when family and friends came over they could easily share them. It doesn't mean they valued those pictures any less because they were extroverted vs. introverted. People still keep hard copies of the pictures they cherish the most, like a wedding album.

Yeah, absolutely, and I think people do still keep the photos they care most about today. I just think we overestimate how many of those photos exist. I think the overwhelming use of taking photos is for social conversation.

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