Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

community.influxdata.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 278 posts

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#51

Post by SkyPuncher »

pauldix wrote: post #33
chillfox wrote: post #30

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.

Wow.

You've literally just told the world "you shouldn't rely on us for your data. When our business needs to drop you, we will and you might not receive notice."

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#53

Post by qaq »

pauldix wrote: post #33
chillfox wrote: post #30

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.

Well I guess all the bad publicity was worth it for the "business"

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#54

Post by SkyPuncher »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #35
chillfox wrote: post #30

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.

Why do customers believe that they don’t need to read their emails?

I get slammed with emails. In fact, nearly all of my email is automated content or junk. I would hope that these emails would catch my attention, but I can easily see how'd I'd miss them.

Further, they might be going to some alias/group that's not frequently monitored. If a vendor is going to delete all of my data, I expect way more noise than 3 random emails blasts.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#55

Post by SkyPuncher »

fbdab103 wrote: post #32
linsomniac wrote: post #28

I like Influx, and have been using it for all our TSDB needs for ~7 years. It sounds like there have been a lot of shake-ups internally, all their hopes for Flux (the InfluxQL language) have been aborted. I'm wondering about how they're doing. This situation doesn't seem like it is specifically them doing anything wrong, if indeed they did send out multiple notifications over 6 months. It sounds like it's caught many…

3 emails over six months is pretty lousy notification rate. At minimum, something sent the month of the shutdown would be appropriate. More ideally, would be an aggressive notification push of increasing frequency the closer to the shutdown period. Was there any notification of the shutdown in the admin panels? The person with the ability to migrate data may not be the person receiving the messages. EDIT: Also, does…

I would be expecting hourly notifications for the last 7 days if traffic is still detected.

I literally get more notification for DNS expirations (and those are scheduled and predictable).

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#56

Post by SkyPuncher »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #40
noveltyaccount wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao are you serious? What about emails buried in spam? What if contact x left the company and the emails are black holes? There are a million valid reasons for emails to go poof. "But we emailed you" is weak.

You actually need to read your spam to check and if a company didn’t bother transition an employee out properly (i.e figure out what their email address was attached to), why is that on the supplier? Why do they need to move mountains so that you can avoid any seriousness about your own operations?

If a vendor can't properly notify me of major changes, I'm going to find a different vendor.

I have far bigger fish to fry than monitoring my inbox for shitty practices.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#57

Post by cfeduke »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #14

Wow, the incredibly callous 3-word explanation of the issue by pointing to a docs link with no other context. Really gives off "it's your fault for not reading the wiki." Is this how InfluxDB treats their customers? Incidentally at work we've been evaluating a new hosted observability provider, looks like we can rule out Influx as an option.

I used Influx Enterprise at a previous startup. Support was so bad after our first year we switched back to the OSS Influx and added HAProxy with manual replication and round robin load balanced. Was so much smoother, wish we had done that from the start since that was our original plan.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#58

Post by StopHammoTime »

It seems this probably happened due to some regulation or other. The sunset date for the service should have been a month prior so that influx could have kept the data legally until the 30th in case of this situation happening.

They wanted to have the euros flowing in right until the last minute.

1. Flash messages on all user facing consoles. 2. No new resource able to be created for 6 mo this. 3. Emails. 4. Service end date should have been at least a month prior to mandatory shut down. 5. Any people still running workloads in May should have had aggressive contact attempts made to ensure they were aware. 6. The console in the region should have switched to a final backup that can be exported by the user or moved to another region. This should have been available for 30 days.

You don’t do this because it’s fun, you do this because you need to save reputation. If I can’t trust you with business critical data then why would I use you for my critical business?

Also, as someone who works for a large enterprise, if you really believe email is the way to inform them of these changes, well I’d reconsider your beliefs.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#59

Post by goodoldneon »

pauldix wrote: post #33
chillfox wrote: post #30

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.

> ... if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss.

You're hurting your company's reputation by denigrating your customers like that

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#60

Post by mlhpdx »

pauldix wrote: post #29

Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influx…

Contrary to the majority of the thread here, I find this to be an architectural issue. For whatever reason the system was designed without a way to communicate important service and maintenance issues to the customer. That’s part of the good architectural design of a system – it must include human factors, communication among them.
Post reply on HN