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

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

#151

Post by raverbashing »

StopHammoTime wrote: post #58

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…

And make no mistake some people will still miss the notification after all these warnings

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

#152

Post by mst »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #18
SSLy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you start with reliability brownouts. first fail 0.1% requests, then after a week 1%, then after a month 5%.

Much better is to stop the service but add button "Resume" that re-enables service for two more weeks with no data loss. That way you give users opportunity to gracefully migrate away. Stopping service and immediately delete data is just callous.

When ovh sunsetted a class of VPSen and I'd completely failed to notice they were going to do that, I asked nicely in the support ticket I'd sent in and they turned it back on for a few days while I shifted the data to a replacement (which was still an ovh VPS, it had been Just Working long enough that I didn't feel like I'd been mistreated, more lulled into complacency by the lack of problems).

I think requiring a ticket might be a worthwhile trade-off compared to just adding the button, because that allows you to engage with customers to make sure they can (in a case like this) migrate to a different region of your own service, and the activation energy of sending a ticket means a customer's less likely to click 'Resume' and then forget about it again until it's too late.

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

#153

Post by willvarfar »

RedShift1 wrote: post #112
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?

(not GP)

I've been bitten by the old Influx and had to migrate to something we could trust... (Influx basically tacitly admitted that the original architecture was pretty poo and they've since swapped out the engine (twice?), but it smells a bit like mongodb trying to reinvent itself and distance itself from all the early web-scale claims, so I'm kinda skeptical).

So I've rolled our own with MySQL+tokudb, but that's not a good choice for a new system as tokudb is disappearing. When I tried to migrate to MyRocks we discovered the newer kids like MyRocks don't really work nearly so well for specifically this kind of use-case.

Something I haven't personally tried, but have heard rave reviews of, is Timescale. Its a special storage engine for Postgres and it has a lot of nice features like auto-maintained rollups. And they have lots of deep technical blogposts that I find myself agreeing with, so it must be good! :D

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

#154

Post by cobbaut »

ssd532 wrote: post #69
manquer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 war…

> Hetzner deleted my server just one week after my payment due date.

Strange. I've been at least eight days late with a VPS payment at Hetzner (3 euro) and the server is still up.

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

#155

Post by rvba »

windmark wrote: post #123
manquer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good customer service costs money. It takes years to build a good reputation and minutes to destroy it.

In this case we’re talking minutes to destroy your reputation for all current and future customers. That must be considered worth it.

The comments made by the company CTO here like opposite of good crisis management.

"We did our best - we have sent 3 emails". I wonder how shitty the product was when sending few emails is their best.

The guy either sounds like a full fleged VC psychopath, or someone very unexperienced.

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

#156

Post by RedShift1 »

willvarfar wrote: post #153
RedShift1 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you choose over Influx?

(not GP) I've been bitten by the old Influx and had to migrate to something we could trust... (Influx basically tacitly admitted that the original architecture was pretty poo and they've since swapped out the engine (twice?), but it smells a bit like mongodb trying to reinvent itself and distance itself from all the early web-scale claims, so I'm kinda skeptical). So I've rolled our own with MySQL+tokudb, but that's…

I use Timescale and I can recommend it. The reason why I'm still using influx too (1.7) is because it's unmatched in its data storage efficiency and query performance. You can get close with Timescale, but its main power is having the query power of PostgreSQL, if you have room for the extra hardware resources it requires.

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

#157

Post by schoolornot »

SentinelRosko wrote: post #64
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…

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…

It seems a banner was added to the UI: https://community.influxdata.com/t/getting-weird-results-fro...

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

#158

Post by valyala »

sofixa wrote: post #131
galleywest200 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We self host influxdb, never had this problem.

Which problem? Of the massive breaking changes between 0.8 and later, and then between 1.x and 2.x? Not to mention InfluxQL to Flux? Also, they did remove clustering in the open source version which was a very poor move from a PR perspective. And in my view, they have never recovered from it - years ago it was Prometheus vs InfluxDB for (non-SaaS) observability metrics, nowadays the only question is which backend for…

Which Prometheus backend would you recommend?

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

#159

Post by sokoloff »

jacquesm wrote: post #146
rvba wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day you are the one who pays for the fedex though.

Not really, no. Mortgage payments are interest and principal, not administrative fees beyond what you paid when you signed the original contract.

Whatever costs are imposed broadly an industry are covered by customers of that industry. If mortgages are more costly to buy, they’ll be more costly to originate.

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

#160

Post by flangola7 »

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?

This attitude you have is not appropriate for a vendor. Clients do not care that you think your substandard practices are fair, they will find someone else with actual "seriousness."
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