utterly categorical communication failure. wow.
InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
261–270 of 278 posts
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been self-hosting InfluxDB in the hundreds of GB range for several years. I wouldn’t say I’m super happy with it, but… let’s say we’ve reached an understanding, the software and I. We’re on the latest patch of 1.8 and content to stay there. I agree with GP about storage efficiency, which is superb. Query performance is good as long as a single query doesn’t deal with more than ~dozens of series. And $deity help…
I have pretty much exactly the same experience. However, I do feel that they are trying to really do the right thing with the new 3.0 architecture, addressing the deficiencies (most importantly performance and full-fledged SQL) while keeping the stuff that works (InfluxQL for simple and legacy queries). Also leveraging open-source projects and contributing to their upstream is a plus. Thus I’m hoping for them to succ…
Agreed, embracing battle-hardened open source tech will be a win for them and for customers.
However, once your storage layer is parquet and your query layer is SQL, well... DuckDB is also basically parquet+SQL, and it won't be long before there's a nice Postgres wire protocol adapter in front of it. What's the advantage of continuing to use InfluxDB if you don't need clustering or HA?
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given they shut down (sorry, duscontinued) both Belgium DCs and Oceania DCs, I'm guessing "cost". I know ap-southeast tends to be pricier, I'm assuming Belgium was the same.
There's a small increase in cost compared to the cheapest US regions, but the European regions are still significantly cheaper than the expensive Australia/Brazil regions. https://www.concurrencylabs.com/blog/choose-your-aws-region-...
Yeah, for AWS, but the European region they closed down was GCP, I'm not sure how the pricing compares.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
We get an email address because we need to contact our customers. After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I realize that shutting down a region isn’t good. It’s not what we would have preferred, but we had to do it for the business. And we made an honest effort to contact all customers to help move them.
> After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I can empathize with this, but also would expect a good product organization to consider failure modes here and work around them. Did anyone consider that bob@company.com left months ago, but since autopay still works, no one considered potential problems? Did anyone consider Bob in accounting is paying…
> Did anyone consider that bob@company.com left months ago, but since autopay still works, no one considered potential problems?
Everyone knows it happens, meanwhile every single company with high turnover is like this (those I've had personal encounters with):
Datadog: our domain has changed, but I cannot change my login. I've changed the email address in my profile, but I'm not sure if my login (which is an email address) is just a name or it may be used as an email address in some context.
Intuit: good luck changing your name
Apple Developer: still addresses the account as Bob No-Longer-Working-Here. It's not very clear how to change that name.
Apple ID: no, you cannot change the email address that had been primary back when you created it. And it better be a valid email address.
Orange: my address has changed twice, they are aware of that, they swore they updated my address everywhere; the invoices are coming with my old old address in their headers despite everything. Good thing they are sending them electronically at least so at least I receive them.
You likely can change the data there if you really need to, but it's very involved.
Someone should tell the IT/CRM drones that sometimes people not only leave the company, but also get incapacitated or die. In their Teletubby universes it doesn't seem to happen to anyone ever.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#265I received a response from their support and it’s hillarious. TLDR: “We don’t plan to delete your data again in the forseeable future” Full quote: “You can sign up for a new account here InfluxDB Cloud using a different region. We want to assure you that there are no more scheduled shutdowns planned. Therefore, once you have created the new account and begin writing to it, we do not foresee any data loss going forwar…
This is just unbelievable. And plans do have a habit to change unexpectedly. There are certain red lines that a data storage company should never cross. Total loss of credibility going forward, at least until fresh, unaware users flock in. Anyway, I’m migrating all workloads from the TICK stack, for I can’t fathom the consequences for InfluxDB OSS, particularly if they now lose some of their funding, given their expenditures on the rewrite for InfluxDB 3, for example. Lightbend Akka caused enough trouble already.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#266The 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…
Don't blame the developer advocate for the company's mistakes. Developer advocates rarely have any part in these kinds of decisions, but are left holding the bag whenever they go badly.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ignore for a moment what you think your customers should have done, and look at the actual outcome. Some customers did not know about the shutdown and deletion, and have now lost data. You telling them "well you should have read your email" is not going to satisfy them, even if you think it should. All you've done is told your customers that their data isn't safe with your service. This was an easily-avoidable "own g…
> All you've done is told your customers that their data isn't safe with your service. And not only Influx's current customers, but also their future customers. I really like Influx for my homelab. But with this attitude, I would be really hesitant for a real world production deployment.
What future customers? After seeing this astoundingly terrible behaviour for a company with "DB" in their main product's name, I can't imagine anyone ever making the decision to trust InfluxData again. I know I certainly won't, nor will any company I work for.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Auto migrating data to the closest region cannot be done without legal implications if that region is another country.
99% of cases there are no legal implication of moving data in another country inside EU. Amsterdam is the closest in Geographic and Political sense. These are cloud data. already subject to EU Policy and not country specific. Those that really have the country condition can not even use a cloud provider but need to rent/collocate servers (not services) in the country.
Last time I checked, Sydney is not in the EU.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#269Hi, 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…
Paul, are you actually for real right now? Did you really just say "We deleted all your data, and its your fault. We did whisper into the wind three times, you should have heard it. No, there is no chance of recovery"?
You might have literally deleted people's whole businesses, companies, who employ real people, who have families, now need to figure out how to continue. Not least of which, your own. If the company survives until Christmas I will be shocked; no one can trust your company ever again - your core business is storing other people's data, and you deleted it, for many, completely without warning.
I guess people still use Mongo even after finding it doesn't achieve any property of the CAP theorem, maybe some people will keep using a database provider with a track record of intentionally deleting their paying customers' data.
There just aren't enough adjectives for astonishment to adequately describe this situation.
I hope you offer Jay Clifford some support, he's clearly been put in the awful situation of having to explain the decisions of others and deliver the awful news. If I were him, I would be in need of serious mental health support, this is an absolutely awful thing to have responsibility for without any ability to rectify.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do customers believe that they don’t need to read their emails?
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