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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

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Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#321

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> You don't need a cloud to efficiently develop software. I've worked in companies that were running kubernetes on prem. It was a PITA for kubernetes ops but from a developer perspective it wasn't much different than using the cloud in a large company. EC2 servers and Kubernetes are a very small part of what is necessary to run complex applications. > Cloud is very flexible for very small orgs that have little proces…

>Friends working at banks have to make formal requests for new versions of Python that months to be accepted. And I have been asked by my manager to help a different team and I am still waiting 10 days later to get access to the necessary AWS account. These kinds of problems are organizational, not technical. Thinking cloud solutions solve organizational issues magically is naive and delusional.

> These kinds of problems are organizational, not technical. Thinking cloud solutions solve organizational issues magically is naive and delusional.

We actually agree on this point.

Using OpenStack is actually not a silver bullet and won't solve this problem. This is an organisational problem.

So my point still stands that OpenStack is lacking in services and is not fit for complex applications if you do not want to reinvent the wheel every day.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#323
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem Hod do you handle multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience? What are you using instead of IAM policies that cover every resource? (Asking unironically, would just like to know. I worked at cloud-centric companies for last 15 years or so.)

I guess the same as people have always done. You have more server rooms on ideally different networks and grids. That can be a rented room/ rack in a bigger DC, your own if you have a big factory with subsidiaries etc. The IAM etc. will probably done by a combination of technical on organizational measures. You will have certain people doing certain things at least before the solution is ready for IaC. People will cr…

Thanks, this makes sense!

I mostly thought about the software infrastructure side. With thousands and even mere hundreds of servers over several locations you already want some uniformity. Would you run k8s? Nomad + Consul? MinIO or Ceph? MySQL + Galera? Would OwnCloud scale to many hundreds of users? How would you unify or integrate access control to all that?

Nothing unsurmountable here, just interesting how it's done in real big on-prem installations.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#324
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem Hod do you handle multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience? What are you using instead of IAM policies that cover every resource? (Asking unironically, would just like to know. I worked at cloud-centric companies for last 15 years or so.)

Many users don't need multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience. Having a good (and tested) DR plan might be enough.

This is correct. The original comment was about having basically anything AWS has to offer run on-prem, assuming that these things are actually needed.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#325
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem Hod do you handle multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience? What are you using instead of IAM policies that cover every resource? (Asking unironically, would just like to know. I worked at cloud-centric companies for last 15 years or so.)

For AWS we rely almost entirely on backup/restore and database level log shipping on prem this is is in some cases argumented by storage level(netapp and previously hpe 3par) replication but this is going away for cost reasons. Given that my experience with AWS is to use the same application level cross region resilience techniques im used to on prem(i have worked with high end unix boxen most of my carear) im genuin…

Thanks! Certainly multi-AZ setups are not magical. I just wanted to know how it's now done on-prem, what are the tools, solutions, approaches. Doing this in a cost-effective way for 1000 servers likely takes different tools than doing this at a major cloud provider scale.

One thing that's more "magical" in AWS is S3. Their architecture is impressive, see e.g. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/04/s3-strong-consi...

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing. While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits). You could make the a…

Hmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre. Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing…

On top of that, Onedrive is the worst of the lot at handling collisions in files. I routinely find that files I work on using two machines in my office (gbit uplink) get garbled. To the point where neither has the latest changes, they’re just gone. Absolutely terrible.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#327

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Would you like to see your house burn completely to the ground? Would you know how to deal with a car wreckage? I don’t, I’m grateful for those people existing. Regarding safety regulations, those were most often driven by tragedies that occurred prior to those regulations being in place. I prefer being alive over saving money

You’ll almost certainly get outvoted by the lower housing cost crowd, considering the usual comments on HN for these topics.

well its been 5 hours and it doesn't seem like it has happened (yet).

But trust me, I understand the sentiment. Housing becoming increasingly unattainable is a issue on many levels, I just think that there are other, worse, contributing factors to the overall situation. Compromising on fire safety or other reasonable safety factors effectively won't help anybody when there still is an ever increasing amount of institutional investment hiking prices on the market.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing. While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits). You could make the a…

Hmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre. Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing…

Confusing to the points where I had (university) students that told me "I _only_ have the file in Excel [and therefore can not share it with you]". That statement confused me until I left academia and was forced to work with MS Office for the first time. Having files in 4 different locations really does not help.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you consider ideal conditions, but we do it all the time. It's pretty common for me to be reviewing a document and see the avatars of other people who are simultaneously reviewing and editing it. I've been doing this for years and have yet to have a problem. Sharing multiple copies of the "same" file is where the problems come in.

There are multiple issues. [1] If you drag/drop or upload the file to Teams, it creates a copy and shares it via Teams SharePoint? [2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access". [3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are…

Below are snippets of MSFT's documentation of what happens when you upload a file to a Teams channel. I BOLDED the confusing parts and added ???.

> All files that you upload, create, or share in Teams can be found in the ONEDRIVE??? icon app on the left side of Teams for desktop.

> Files that you upload to a channel are stored in your team's SHAREPOINT???folder. These files are available in the Files tab at the top of each channel.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/file-storage-in-m...

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the alternatives. Like, really. I get it: Hetzner and OVH exist. But what are the alternatives to AWS, GCP, Azure?

Scaleway is a great alternative to AWS. A lot cheaper too! And API compatible.

Thanks, looks interesting.
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