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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

#171

Post by valyala »

RedShift1 wrote: post #156
willvarfar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

It's unusual to read that InfluxDB is fast and efficient. Did you try VictoriaMetrics? It usually needs 10x less RAM than InfluxDB for the same workload, especially when the number of active time series is high. It also uses less CPU and disk space on the same production workload. [1]

[1] https://valyala.medium.com/insert-benchmarks-with-inch-influ...

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

#172

Post by RedShift1 »

valyala wrote: post #171
RedShift1 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's unusual to read that InfluxDB is fast and efficient. Did you try VictoriaMetrics? It usually needs 10x less RAM than InfluxDB for the same workload, especially when the number of active time series is high. It also uses less CPU and disk space on the same production workload. [1] [1] https://valyala.medium.com/insert-benchmarks-with-inch-influ...

I've heard of VictoriaMetrics before but haven't had time to play with it. InfluxDB is also now ingrained in a production system so replacing it is not straightforward. The query language is also different meaning everything that uses it will need to be updated too, and coming from a mainly SQL background, PromSQL/MetricsQL looks oddly weird.

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

#173

Post by dmurray »

sokoloff wrote: post #159
jacquesm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#174

Post by FooBarWidget »

zuppy wrote: post #117
FooBarWidget wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

What we sold was software that customers deploy locally. We don't have any of their data. But the software would stop working if their license is no longer valid, resulting in downtime. That already made people angry enough.

Now we have changed it so that the software never turns off even if license has expired (though it will continue to nag an email address). Updates also cannot be installed.

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

#175

Post by wongarsu »

ghaff wrote: post #31
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.

However, tech companies will often not have your physical address--unlike your bank. And I'd probably block phone calls from some tech company I was a customer of.

If they want business customers in Europe they need to create proper invoices, which contain the physical address.

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

#177

Post by acatton »

mrweasel wrote: post #135
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…

> Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading. If that's the case, these companies/people have no business using cloud services. Fair enough that you might not understand the ramification, in that case you contact support. If you don't see those email... that's on you. We operate out of a number of datacenters, they all communicate via email, giving us one…

> > Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading.

>

> If that's the case, these companies/people have no business using cloud services.

Cloud services are responsible for this. I've signed up to many cloud services where I purposefully unchecked all the newsletter/updates/... notifications.

But I still receive notifications for stuff unrelated to what I use. These emails are full of marketing/PR jargon, where it's unclear whether I'm affected by the change or whether there is even a change!

Cloud services are lazy, don't look at their customer use, spam everybody, and blame their customers when they missed an important update due to noise-fatigue.

This is the main reason why I stopped using SaaS.

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

#178

Post by o1y32 »

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?

I guess you have never directly worked with a client and hope it stays that way.

This kind of attitude will ensure you lose your customers.

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

#179

Post by jmaker »

What a terrible start for InfluxDB 3. And that incomprehensible justification on their side… what a disappointment… I’ve been anticipating InfluxDB 3 going GA later this year and was just about to subscribe to their cloud offering since they’re making it available only over there presently. And I was going to migrate more workflows to the TICK stack. But they’ve just nuked their credibility in my eyes. Hope they can still recoup the dev costs for InfluxDB 3, but I’m now going to be very cautious about that company going forward. Hope Influx OSS remains viable. Inconceivable…

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

#180

Post by XCabbage »

The link to Slack in this post by "developer advocate" Jay Clifford is a rabbit hole worth diving into a bit: https://community.influxdata.com/t/getting-weird-results-fro...

Find your way into that Slack workspace via https://www.influxdata.com/blog/introducing-our-new-influxda... and you'll discover some interesting things:

* That the only reason being given in that thread for the shutdown is "The region did not get enough usage or growth to make it economically viable to operate, so it became necessary for InfluxData to discontinue service in those regions.". i.e. there's no regulatory issue here like other answers speculated - just pure cost-cutting.

* That on July 5th, a couple of hours before they started shutting everything down (based on the shutdown timeline at https://status.influxdata.com/), that same "Developer Advocate" announced that they were suspending their live "office hours" sessions for July.

* Multiple people are asking for help after finding that they can't connect and getting ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the way of support from the company. It's literally falling to _other users_ to tell them that all their data is gone.

* One person chiming in, Matthew Allen, DID have a colleague who saw the notification email, but notes that...

- it was a pain for him to migrate has data to a different region due to InfluxDB Cloud's rate limiting, but that he did it anyway

- ... but that the documented migration process doesn't seem to have worked properly anyway (given that some of his data points have ended up as nulls)

- plus on top of all of THAT, even after doing everything he was supposed to do, he still can't log into influx cloud after the migration because when he logs in he gets automatically redirected to the no-longer-existing cluster and hits an error screen

What a clusterfuck. Shame on everyone from Influx who had a hand in this - the CTO Paul Dix who's turned up here on Hacker News to blame his customers for Influx's negligence, Jay Clifford the Developer Advocate for a spectacular failure of developer advocacy, and anyone else on the team who was close to this and didn't push for brownouts, blog posts, a mention in the newsletter, retention of data for some window after the final shutdown date, or any of the other obvious measures that could've made this less of a catastrophe. The multiple people noting that they were able to receive the company's newsletter but did not receive the notification that it was about to delete all their data tell me everything I need to know about this company and its priorities. I will never willingly do business with them again (although we used them at a startup I worked at once) and will advocate against any time I hear a colleague suggest using them.

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