Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email only is not even close to best effort. I know it’s standard to only do email for tech companies, but all other types of companies usually do physical mail and phone calls on top of emails for important notifications. I am not a customer, but it’s really annoying me how tech companies repeatedly think sending emails is somehow anything but the absolute minimum, most lazy option.
We get an email address because we need to contact our customers. After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I realize that shutting down a region isn’t good. It’s not what we would have preferred, but we had to do it for the business. And we made an honest effort to contact all customers to help move them.
- they do soft-deletes before hard
- have robust access control systems and partitioning - so we don't have to give access to everyone in the org to object model with full r/w
- don't instantly nuke the account if a payment goes astray or delayed - try to reach out before to a point of contact before pulling the plug, payment systems can be messy for all sorts of reason, ask before assuming the worst.
- customer managers who can connect couple of times a year which usually benefits the vendor as upsells happens on good % of those connects.
- also small things like training, certification
- Deprecation of service is handled slowly(1 Yr would be expected) and in multiple phases with multiple modes of communication.
Not all companies can move fast to plan and execute a major change in location like this in 4 months, bare minimum you would have to consider
- End customers (your customer's customers) may need to be notified and may need to sign off
- Compliance and GDPR DPA changes - both end customers and internal ones
- DR, BCP concerns have to be planned for , not all GCP regions are equivalent.
- Documentation and certifications like SoC, ISO, PCI, HIPAA etc usually mean ton of paperwork to modify
- SRE/Devops may have to move other services along with telemetry on InfluxDB, may need network whitelisting from their customers, things typically break when moving, need to plan dry runs, rollbacks and so on.
You can definitely do better than shutting down service and deleting data at the same time .
[1] I would do this for internal customers let alone external paying ones
[2] You could have even charged for this to offset any costs, most customers wouldn't have a problem paying if they really needed it.
[3] Not trying to imply InfluxDB is doing these things, or isn't a good vendor, these are some criteria I have come to measure new vendors by.