This article has ZERO information about Parler or it's tech stack. Total clickbait. Yet it still has 100+ upvotes and has generated 100+ comments.
Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
121–130 of 141 posts
Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, the amount of incompetence in Parler's case is just mind-boggling. Their failure to make it cloud agnostic being 1 (even though they claimed before they went down that their app could run without AWS without issue). Their failure to be incapable (still) to get it running again on non-cloud hardware.. And of course their inability to, as you suggest, move the frontend routing to a CDN/Cloudflare/DDosguard type se…
Maybe they didn't think they needed to. Before a few months ago, you didn't yank someone off your network because you didn't like their politics. (yea yea, terms of service something or other)
> Before a few months ago, you didn't yank someone off your network because you didn't like their politics.
AWS dropped WikiLeaks as a customer back in 2010 for political reasons, and apparently this was announced by a US senator even before AWS did so themselves:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/12/01/wikileaks.amazon/index....
Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to hide one's presence from the datacenter by a shell company and a CDN.
Ultimately you can't hide IP addresses - an app or website will be making requests to or served from an IP address, which is physically traceable to the IP/data center. Then either a subpoena or publicity against the ISP will force them to do disclose who the customer is and/or remove them.
You'll be hitting the CDN, not the actual server.
As for the subpoena, you can make it harder to find you by spreading your addresses across multiple jurisdictions. Put the company that owns the IP in one country and make it rent them to another company in a different country who owns the servers and the website and rents the domain name from a third company in yet another jurisdiction.
Eventually they'll find you (there aren't many ways to escape a government forever), but this game can buy you enough time to move someplace where extradition is unlikely.
Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to hide one's presence from the datacenter by a shell company and a CDN.
How? It would take one minute for a dude with some sniffer on his wifi to find the DNS entries and CDN used. Go to the press with "Parler is being hosted out of domain Foo w/ CDNfront" and viola.
And, say, your CDN would not comment on their clients.
Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
That and their hardware footprint seemed ridiculously overprovisioned. You can serve content to millions of people per day with fewer boxes than they were using. I always try to design a "degraded mode" read-only into my apps that covers maintenance windows and unscheduled outages. That is usually easier to lift and shift than the full app and can even be hosted someplace else if you don't mind it lagging behind the…
One can only assume that 90% of their hardware was doing something much heavier than “microblogging”. I’m guessing e.g tons and tons of media processing like video transcoding. Would be interesting to hear how much it costs Twitter to have video features. If I was Parler right now I’d just switch off media and throw up a very lean MVP version with just text. Even with millions of users Parler has the luxury of almost…
I'm thinking more about sentiment analysis and profile enrichment.
Remember they are (or at least were) funded by the Cambridge Analytica folks.
Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, the amount of incompetence in Parler's case is just mind-boggling. Their failure to make it cloud agnostic being 1 (even though they claimed before they went down that their app could run without AWS without issue). Their failure to be incapable (still) to get it running again on non-cloud hardware.. And of course their inability to, as you suggest, move the frontend routing to a CDN/Cloudflare/DDosguard type se…
Maybe they didn't think they needed to. Before a few months ago, you didn't yank someone off your network because you didn't like their politics. (yea yea, terms of service something or other)
Not that my company will produce anything as controversial as Parler but I now use this example to explain why we go the extra mile with things (e.g. scrubbing headers). Sometimes the worst-case scenario really does come true.
Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#127I grew up in an era where running your own servers was just generally accepted practice. It's been fascinating watching how dramatically that viewpoint has shifted over the years to the point where it is now a novel idea to do so.
I worked at a startup that managed its own bare metal. It was very hard and time consuming. And when things went down it was on you. You needed a really good datacenter partner to make sure that they were on top of things and could drop things at a moment's notice. But you don't know how responsive they will be until you're actually experiencing an outage. The level of convenience that cloud providers give is just or…
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Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#128This article is kind of depressing, when did hosting your own server become a lost art? One of parler’s problems was they didn’t scrub headers which made it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they were using. AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo’d their front end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on th…
AWS publishes which IPs it owns, so scrubbing headers is not enough for secrecy. (Not that doing something that relies on secrecy is a smart plan for a business, anyway.) https://isitonaws.com/
Using your own ips works against you anyway - it’s easy for someone to backlist your ip range to keep people from seeing content that they don’t agree with. However blacklisting all of AWS, GCP, or Cloudflare breaks so many things that nobody does it - and that would be the same for any large CDN. DNS is still an issue but increasingly less so since all the work being done to bypass censorship by authoritarian regimes (aka keeping people from blocking internet ads) works just as well for controversial content.
Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have worked for companies in the past with horrible datacenter partners (one of them did not know that one of the two switches they routed our traffic through was completely dead), so I definitely agree with you on that. On the flip side, I wonder how much better the support from a cloud provider is if it's an isolated problem and not something that's setting twitter aflame. If it takes a cloud provider in the orde…
You make me feel so underpaid, is 300k the going rate for being a DevOps Engineer that knows the old ways of CGI/LAMP and can leverage running Exchange/IIS nowadays? I don't even know if these salaries are truthful now.
Usually the high DevOps salaries like that are for roles that involve high scale, or trying to fuse old tech with new infrastructure.
Those are certainly in range for DevOps people at the higher end of the scale.
Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
4chan has survived the wannabe-stasi deplatform mob all these years simply by hosting the servers in the admin's basement.
Like 4chan, Gab also survived the de-platforming witch hunt and are self-hosting almost everything.
To Downvoters: So the above statement is somehow 'false' and 4chan and Gab are NOT self-hosting and are in the same situation like Parler which is still down?
Does anyone have concrete evidence that contradicts the parent AND the grandparent statements? Or is it just the emotional reaction to two websites that one just felt the need to downvote a fact without reason or counter evidence?
Let's not get any form of irrationalities in the way of the actual facts and the truth.
Explanation? (With evidence of course)