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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

#191

Post by flagrant_taco »

kawsper wrote: post #183
sofixa wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And now they've released 3.0.0 in their cloud, which they claim is backwards compatible, but lets see. I sometimes wonder if vendors realize that they put their customers into a buying mode when they do this, when our options are: - Upgrade to the new version of product X. - Change to vendor or tooling completely as we're already changing everything. We might pick another system if we feel like it is more stable.

If it's backwards compatible why would they bump the major version?

Either there should have been a breaking change in there or they don't understand symantic versioning

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

#192

Post by sofixa »

gtirloni wrote: post #186
sofixa wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 I still remember this. We were ready to standardize on InfluxDB when we got a taste of their business practices.

Same, we were just about to choose InfluxDB, and ended up using it only for a niche low criticity scenario (VMware vSphere metrics, mostly for troubleshooting). We were never going to purchase Enterprise though, so they haven't lost anything outside of mindshare and champions, which can be evaluated to between 0 and infinity.

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

#193

Post by Aeolun »

fastball wrote: post #106
SkyPuncher wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

From the sounds of it, it was impossible for them to keep data after the 30th of June, so not sure a soft-delete at the deadline would work. Of course the better option probably would've been a soft delete before the deadline, but you know that some customers would've said "why'd you do this before the deadline, you could've waited an extra month!"

I’m certain they wouldn’t. They have no influence over it anyway. The only thing they can do is migrate.

Many people don’t have that option now since their data is dead and gone.

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

#194

Post by d33 »

dangoodmanUT wrote: post #189

It should not be understated how bad this is. Your #1 expectation as a cloud database provider is to keep data safe and recoverable. I hope for at least their sake they took a backup of everyone's DB that could be restored in another region, but based on the fact that they didn't do a scream test, I doubt they thought about this either. This must have been forced upon by upper management, because there is no way some…

In case anyone else is wondering:

> The Scream Test is simple – remove it and wait for the screams. If someone screams, put it back. The Scream Test can be applied to any product, service or capability – particularly when there is poor ownership or understanding of it’s importance.

https://www.v-wiki.net/scream-test-meaning/

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

#195

Post by quicksilver03 »

bombela wrote: post #122
ssd532 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I has an almost identical experience with https://virmach.com/ . I will never recommend them. After 5 years, they deleted everything 2 weeks after the first payment failure. Sure it was the cheapest VPS. But still, you don't just delete your customers' data. I was away from emails and the service during those two weeks. As far as I can tell it might have been some race condition in their payement processing system. T…

It doesn't look too far fetched from their point of view, they saw a payment failure and they may have assumed that you decided to stop paying and didn't bother to send a cancellation request.

It looks like you had your own backup, which is always a good idea, hopefully you were able to restore your data elsewhere.

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

#196

Post by jkaplowitz »

dangoodmanUT wrote: post #189

It should not be understated how bad this is. Your #1 expectation as a cloud database provider is to keep data safe and recoverable. I hope for at least their sake they took a backup of everyone's DB that could be restored in another region, but based on the fact that they didn't do a scream test, I doubt they thought about this either. This must have been forced upon by upper management, because there is no way some…

I agree with your comments about how Influx handled this shutdown.

The several things you might mean by self-hosting have their own pros and cons. The right choice is very context-specific, and assuming that it’s always the right choice is wrong. It certainly can be, though.

As for ClickHouse, that mention seems like a throwaway comment, unless you are advocating a boycott of even the open source InfluxDB due to its corporate author’s behavior and view ClickHouse as the closest alternative.

This incident has nothing to do with the comparison of the open source InfluxDB vs the open source ClickHouse, nor would it impugn the viability of InfluxDB hosted by a more responsible data custodian than Influx the company.

And GCP hasn’t done any similar inadequately notified shutdown of service with immediate and irreversible data loss, as far as I know.

(Disclosure: I have worked for Google in the past, including GCP, but not in over 8 years. I’m speaking only for myself here. I’ve never worked for Influx ClickHouse.)

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

#197

Post by Aeolun »

ghaff wrote: post #43
throwawaysleep wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I missed an email that a train I was scheduled for had changed schedules on a trip earlier in the year. Why? Because Eurostar sends me maybe weekly email marketing messages that get filtered to one of my Google tabs because I maybe take them every couple years. It's probably unreasonable to expect that I'll see a reasonably last minute update though I'm not sure what a good alternative is. I get probably 100+ emails…

At least you got a notification your schedule had changed… I was just 5-6 hours late.

Had the same issue with amazon though. In the flood of “Information about your order” emails one had some slightly different content (but the same subject): “We haven’t received your entire return. Please contact us in 14 days or we’ll trash it and charge you.”

When I contacted them a month later I was not very pleased.

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

#198

Post by rvba »

dmurray wrote: post #173
sokoloff wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The consumer doesn't bear 100% of the costs though. If mortgages cost $1mm to buy, they wouldn't cost $1mm to originate. They'd cost a little extra by being illiquid - the same amount as if they cost $2mm to buy.

The consumer nearly always bears 100% of the costs - because most companies sell at a profit.

The final price is a combination of all costs incurred + a profit percentage imposed on the consumer.

If all customers would receive fedex mail, then the costs of this fedex would be pushed on them somehow. Probably by making them pay slightly higher interest rates or by introducing some one off handling fee.

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

#199

Post by steveBK123 »

miyuru wrote: post #137
EdwardDiego wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given they shut down two DCs half a world apart, it's not regulations. It's cost.

But its a paid service right? Is it a pricing issue? If it is, isn't it better to increase the price?

You wonder if we will see more of this from all these high burnrate SaaS startups right? It saves money to shutdown even paid services if they are cashflow negative. The difference between paid services and unpaid only matters if costs are below prices they sell the services for..

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

#200

Post by santafen »

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…

You could have just responded with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and saved a lot of typing.
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