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This last week, gmail failed to filter as spam an email with subject "#T Anitra", body, > oF1 d 4440 - 2 B 32677 83 > R Teri E x E q > > k 50347733 Safoorabegum and an attachment "7330757559.pdf". It let through 8 similar emails in the same week, and many more even more egregiously gibberish emails over the years. I'm not pleased with the quality of gmail's spam filter.
I absolutely love Fastmail. I moved off of Gmail years ago with zero regrets. Better UI, better apps, better company, and need I say better service? I still maintain and fetch from a Gmail account so it all just works seamlessly for receiving and sending Gmail, so you don’t have to give anything up either.
The only things I wish FM had are all software:
1. A takeout-style API to let me grab a complete snapshot once a week with one call
2. The ability to be an IdP for Tailscale.
Would be interesting to know how files get stored. They don't mention any distributed FS solutions like SeaweedFS so once a drive is full, does the file get sent to another one via some service? Also ZFS seems an odd choice since deletions (esp of small files) at +80% full drive are crazy slow.
The open-source Cyrus IMAP server which they mention using, has replication built-in. ZFS also has built-in replication available. Deletion of files depends on how they have configured the message store - they may be storing a lot of data into a database, for example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To avoid sysadmin tasks, and keep costs down, you've got to go so deep in the cloud, that it becomes just another arcane skill set. I run most of my stuff on virtual Linux servers, but some on AWS, and that's hard to learn, and doesn't transfer to GCP or Azure. Unless your needs are extreme, I think sysadmin'ing is the easier route in most cases.
For so many things the cloud isn't really easier or cheaper, and most cloud providers stopped advertising it as such. My assumption is that cloud adoption is mainly driven by 3 forces: - for small companies: free credits - for large companies: moving prices as far away as possible from the deploy button, allowing dev and it to just deploy stuff without purchase orders - self-perpetuating due to hype, cv-driven develo…
Also a huge element of follow the crowd, branding non-technical management are familiar with, and so on. I have also found some developers (front end devs, or back end devs who do not have sysadmin skills) feel cloud is the safe choice. This is very common for small companies as they may have limited sysadmin skills (people who know how to keep windows desktops running are not likely to be who you want to deploy servers) and a web GUI looks a lot easier to learn.
Such an awesome article. I like how they didn't just go with the Cloud wave but kept sysadmin'ing, like ol' Unix graybeards. Two interesting things they wrote about their SSDs: 1) "At this rate, we’ll replace these [SSD] drives due to increased drive sizes, or entirely new physical drive formats (such E3.S which appears to finally be gaining traction) long before they get close to their rated write capacity." and 2)…
To avoid sysadmin tasks, and keep costs down, you've got to go so deep in the cloud, that it becomes just another arcane skill set. I run most of my stuff on virtual Linux servers, but some on AWS, and that's hard to learn, and doesn't transfer to GCP or Azure. Unless your needs are extreme, I think sysadmin'ing is the easier route in most cases.
Its an arcane skill set with a GUI. It makes it look much easier to learn.
in case you want to ballpark-estimate your move off of the cloud
Bonus points: I'm a Fastmail customer, so it tangentially tracks
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Quick note about the article: ZFS encryption can be flaky, be sure you know what you're doing before deploying for your infrastructure.
Relevant Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/1f59zp6/is_zfs_encrypt...
A spreadsheet of related issues that I can't remember who made:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OfRSXibZ2nIE9DGK6sww...
Yeah, Cloud is a bit of a scam innit? Oxide is looking more and more attractive every day as the industry corrects itself from overspending on capabilities they would never need.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To avoid sysadmin tasks, and keep costs down, you've got to go so deep in the cloud, that it becomes just another arcane skill set. I run most of my stuff on virtual Linux servers, but some on AWS, and that's hard to learn, and doesn't transfer to GCP or Azure. Unless your needs are extreme, I think sysadmin'ing is the easier route in most cases.
For so many things the cloud isn't really easier or cheaper, and most cloud providers stopped advertising it as such. My assumption is that cloud adoption is mainly driven by 3 forces: - for small companies: free credits - for large companies: moving prices as far away as possible from the deploy button, allowing dev and it to just deploy stuff without purchase orders - self-perpetuating due to hype, cv-driven develo…
Many people largely got a lot of things wrong about cloud that I've been meaning to write about for a while. I'll get to it after the holidays. But probably none more than the idea that massive centralized computing (which was wrongly characterized as a utility like the electric grid) would have economics with which more local computing options could never compete.