For cases like this email is not enough. You need to do trial shutdowns where you disable access to the db unless someone acknowledges via web. Do it for maybe 24 hours so you know you catch everyone.
InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
61–70 of 278 posts
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#62Hi, 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…
Wow, that's pretty pathetic and your attitude "we can't help our customers" is even more damning. Email is not reliable enough to simply rely on a few email blasts for this. I would expect: * Those 3 "email blast" notifications. I'm guessing one of two things happened here: * You sent them as an "email blast" from a marketing-type email service. These hit email filters because they came from a known spam IP. * You se…
Another problem is that service providers frequently poison the email channel with important sounding engagement dreck and we are now conditioned to ignore it.
* Important: migrate to this new feature immediately or you risk missing out!!
Vs
* Important: migrate your data immediately or you risk losing it!!
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#63It 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…
companies generally want to be paid for their costs of holding your data liabilities, yes.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#64Hi, 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…
This is insane.
> 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.
What other communication methods were attempted beyond just emails? Big, red obnoxious banners and warnings in various UIs? Phone calls?
The fact that it seems as though quite a few customers didn't get your emails, what was the thought process when looking at the workloads that were clearly still active before nuking it from orbit? Or was there no check and it was just assumed that people got the email and migrated?
Of the customers who were in that region, how many actually migrated? Was someone tracking these statistics and regularly reporting them to leadership to adjust tactics if there weren't enough migrations or shutdowns happening?
This screams either gross incompetence or straight up negligence. This is such a solvable problem (as many here have already mentioned various solutions), but I'm honestly just flabbergasted that this is a problem that is even being discussed here right now.
As a DBaaS, the data of your customers should be your number one priority. If its not, y'all need to take a hard look at what the heck your value proposition is.
We weren't impact by this directly, but you can be sure that this is going to be one of the topics for discussion amongst my teams this week. Mostly how we can either move off InfluxDB Cloud or ensure that our DR plans are up to date for the rug being pulled out from under us from you guys in the future.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#65Earlier 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?
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Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that's pretty pathetic and your attitude "we can't help our customers" is even more damning. Email is not reliable enough to simply rely on a few email blasts for this. I would expect: * Those 3 "email blast" notifications. I'm guessing one of two things happened here: * You sent them as an "email blast" from a marketing-type email service. These hit email filters because they came from a known spam IP. * You se…
Another problem is that service providers frequently poison the email channel with important sounding engagement dreck and we are now conditioned to ignore it. * Important: migrate to this new feature immediately or you risk missing out!! Vs * Important: migrate your data immediately or you risk losing it!!
You worded that better than I could have.
I ignore most of my vendor's emails because they're simply trying to spam me at this point.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#67Hi, 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…
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Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#685% interest rate is breaking the tech companies.
If you are dependent on a SAAS service for your infra, ensure that it is either
- self-hosted
- provided by a big deep-pocketed cloud infra
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As a buyer I have come to expect good vendors to design systems so mistakes (my team or yours) don't cost me sleep or you business.[3] i.e. - 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 po…
> don't instantly nuke the account if a payment goes astray or delayed
Hetzner deleted my server just one week after my payment due date. My credit card failed the payment for some reason. I didn’t notice this because I was ill with Covid. They sent me one email (or at least, I received only one email) as a warning. I only realized the server was gone when my services stopped working. I’m not sure if such a short warning time is common practice among hosting companies, or if it’s unique to Hetzner.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paul: I'm surprised you didn't do a scream test. Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading. Internally at my company we always do scream tests as part of our EOL process because we know we can't reach everyone, even our own employees. https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/microsoft-uses-a-... Fun story: my mortgage got sold last year. Not the first…
I even (sort of) do this when I'm deprecating something which my team is the only user of, because sometimes it's hard to tell if something's really unused! First shut off the VPC access while leaving all the other infrastructure and data intact, wait a week or two and see if everything breaks, then get rid of everything else
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