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

111–120 of 278 posts

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

#111

Post by jacquesm »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #102
js2 wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

You know, I don't really care that mortgages get sold, but the fact that I need to go out of my way every time to make sure I update my information in their system is astounding.

Technically that shouldn't even be your problem.

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

#112

Post by RedShift1 »

thelittlenag wrote: post #74

I've seen better communications around company-internal services that have been deprecated and for which a replacement exists that we need to migrate to. Heck, I've seen this a couple of times. We had even tried out Influx a few different times. It was always ok, but never quite good enough. Now with this, I think, this seals the deal on me ever considering Influx either as a product or as a service.

What did you choose over Influx?

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

#113

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Hi Paul, email is one-way communication and not guaranteed to be delivered. At a minimum you should have monitored who did and did not respond to the email with some kind of action and those that did not should have more effort expended to be able to reach them. Finally, you should have kept the data for a reasonable amount of time (say 90 days) post shut-down so users that did not get the notification could download it. What you've done is super rude and if I were still a customer in an unaffected region it would definitely be reason enough to leave because it's pointless to sit and wait to see how you'll deal with my data when the time comes. Better to preempt that and leave while I still have control.

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

#114

Post by dawnerd »

jacquesm wrote: post #108
irjustin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was like: you guys should've FedEx'd me this in the first place. For all they knew, I wasn't getting their emails or letters in the first place because nothing had been sent signature required. I love the scream test, but the analogy you bring up actually - this seems unfair. The cost of Fedex'ing everyone is astounding (for many businesses). But I like the concept. Definitely a sort of "shut off the server for l…

When you buy a large, registered debt such as a mortgage the cost of Fedex'ing everyone should be factored into the sale. If that's too much money you shouldn't be buying such assets. Notifying those that are affected properly would seem to be the least you can do in such situations.

Exactly and they’re find sending junk mail all the time and FedEx isn’t that expensive for large businesses like that.

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

#115

Post by jacquesm »

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

No, you're legally obliged to keep the service running. They are paying customers and even if you can't reach them through email there are other means of communications. If a business fails on account of your one-sided deleting of the data then you're going to be in for a very hard time, for instance a damage claim for gross negligence and breach of contract. This isn't just going to blow over. The onus for reliable communications is on you and if the channel you've got fails then you seek another one.

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

#116

Post by xyst »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #66
imglorp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I went to a conference in 2018, gave out my work email. Still get pestered by them

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

#117

Post by zuppy »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #107
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.

At my company we used to only ask for email address. No names, no phone numbers, no mailing addresses. Because we understood that technical people don't like spam and don't like to give out their data. So we don't ask for them. We also didn't send any reminders for them to check whether their email address was up to date. No account update reminders. To prevent annoying people with spam. So other than sending emails…

> So other than sending emails and hoping that they read it, there was nothing else we could do.

but there are other ways. you can put a big red popup that can only be dismissed by typing "i agree" when the customer logins, you can put the service into read only mode, even with email you can send daily reminders for the last 30 days with a subject like "your data will be deleted in 21 days", etc there are so many things that could have been done.

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

#118

Post by Rebelgecko »

irjustin wrote: post #81
js2 wrote: post #34

Earlier 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 was like: you guys should've FedEx'd me this in the first place. For all they knew, I wasn't getting their emails or letters in the first place because nothing had been sent signature required. I love the scream test, but the analogy you bring up actually - this seems unfair. The cost of Fedex'ing everyone is astounding (for many businesses). But I like the concept. Definitely a sort of "shut off the server for l…

>I love the scream test, but the analogy you bring up actually - this seems unfair. The cost of Fedex'ing everyone is astounding

I wouldn't be surprised if the cost difference is negligible, maybe a couple bucks per mortgage? FedEx bulk discounts can be pretty massive

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

#119

Post by law_enforcement »

jacquesm wrote: post #110
pmh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scream test I didn't realize there was an actual name for this, so I'll add another for the thread that I haven't seen brought up: email is evil in operations (EIEIO, like the nursery rhyme)

I think the analogy is to station people at various floors in a big office building while you disconnect (unmarked) cables in a legacy patch panel to see who starts screaming. Then you plug it back in and label the cable...

Or the more general version, where you shutdown a server/service and see if anyone screams. If it's still silent after $days, you can decomission it.

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

#120

Post by Rebelgecko »

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.

>After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss

This is going to sound counterintuitive, like the Birthday Problem or Bayes Rule but at least for me it's true: most of the spam that gets into my inbox is from vendors I have a relationship with. Email isn't always ideal. Did you consider doing any other methods, like turning off writes a day or so before reads were disabled? That would trigger a much more immediate "oh shit" response than an email (unless the subject line is super clear and informative, and the email doesn't go to my span folder)

Post reply on HN