[HN Gopher] Pijul - Datacenter on Fires
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       Pijul - Datacenter on Fires
        
       Author : pcr910303
       Score  : 85 points
       Date   : 2021-06-04 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (pijul.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (pijul.org)
        
       | djhaskin987 wrote:
       | I've never heard of etcd being described as a "leader election
       | tool." I'm sure it works, just not sure that's why it was written
       | or how that might even look.
       | 
       | Also, as pleased as I am that pijul exists and as grateful as I
       | am for the tireless efforts of the author of the post in trying
       | to bring it about, I am less than enthused that an i3
       | notification bar and a laptop is a major contributor in the
       | supply chain of backups for a server that people are supposed to
       | trust as the final resting place of their code. There are several
       | free-ish tools out there that allow this type of automation to
       | take place that are more reliable, e.g. CircleCI.
        
         | jldugger wrote:
         | I mean, that's kinda what RAFT fundamentally is, right?
        
         | pmeunier wrote:
         | As noted on the blog post, it's also instantly mirrored to the
         | cloud with Restic, in addition to being replicated multiple
         | times live. The i3 notification is meant to keep a constant eye
         | on the thing, to make sure it does happen every day.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | ljm wrote:
         | Meh, if it's that small, then it's wasteful to start setting up
         | infra around PagerDuty or New Relic or Slack or what not.
         | 
         | That would come later if the whole thing takes off.
        
       | jeffbee wrote:
       | "OVH, the largest cloud provider in Europe"
       | 
       | I wonder if this is a factual statement or just blathering. OVH
       | had EUR600 million revenue in its last full year. AWS had $45370
       | million. If even 2% of AWS revenue is from Europe, then AWS is
       | larger.
        
         | bayindirh wrote:
         | However, Amazon is a US company. So while it may be bigger,
         | it's not in Europe "per se". OTOH, OVH is a European company
         | since it was found inside EU borders.
         | 
         | So, OVH may be the biggest cloud provider in Europe, since it's
         | a European company.
        
           | bastardoperator wrote:
           | I would argue that OVH is not a cloud provider and instead
           | just an average run of the mill webhosting company similar to
           | Godaddy. If anything:
           | 
           | "lo barato siempre es mas caro"
           | 
           | The cheap is always more expensive.
        
             | bayindirh wrote:
             | I have no experience working with them. I just wanted to
             | clarify how OVH is considered European and AWS is not since
             | I work in EU projects and I'm familiar with the perspective
             | and thinking.
        
             | jonathantf2 wrote:
             | They have a full on Public Cloud available but their main
             | business is still selling dedicated servers. This makes
             | them a competitor to AWS.
        
           | qznc wrote:
           | Hetzner and SAP also provide cloud services and it is
           | probably impossible to tell how much of their revenue it is.
        
             | bayindirh wrote:
             | I think SAP, Dassault and like give these services to test
             | their capabilities and beta test their services in a
             | somewhat lower risk environment. They also charge for it,
             | so it's a win-win for them.
             | 
             | A slightly more advanced version of old MyRealBox, which
             | was Novell's e-mail server public beta test. It was free
             | and was working with 99.99% uptime from my experience.
        
         | Negitivefrags wrote:
         | Are you sure that AWS don't just charge 75x more for the same
         | service?
         | 
         | They probably don't, but then again....
        
           | pmeunier wrote:
           | OVH is the largest European cloud company. Amazon, Google and
           | Microsoft don't count as European.
           | 
           | As a user of both, the price different may not be 75x, but I
           | wouldn't be surprised if it were in the 10x-20x range. The
           | polish is also quite different, and is consistent with the
           | price difference.
        
             | garmaine wrote:
             | Amazon runs data centers in Europe. They are therefore "in
             | Europe."
             | 
             | The distinction you are looking for is "European owned," I
             | think.
        
               | pmeunier wrote:
               | Thanks, that's actually why I wrote "European" rather
               | than "in Europe", both in the blog post and in my
               | previous comment.
               | 
               | I'm glad to know that you agree with that distinction.
        
               | jeffbee wrote:
               | I mean, "in Europe" is a direct quote from your blog
               | post.
        
               | garmaine wrote:
               | FYI your blog post says: "OVH, the largest cloud provider
               | in Europe."
        
               | littlestymaar wrote:
               | The author (which is also the GP, btw) explicitly talks
               | about what "in Europe" vs "not in Europe" means in the
               | context of this post:
               | 
               | > In our case, we have a number of requirements linked to
               | the fact that we host user-generated content, and we know
               | our users may not want to be subjected to censorship by
               | other countries or organisations. Since 2018, the CLOUD
               | act directly enables the US administration to enforce US
               | law onto data stored in any other country, whenever the
               | hosting company is registered in the US.
               | 
               | Amazon's server are physically located on the European
               | continent, but there are under the American jurisdiction
               | which is the problem the author talks about.
               | 
               | Btw, did you know that there are in fact no data center
               | at all on Europe[1].
               | 
               | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)
        
               | edoceo wrote:
               | That's Europa, it's a moon.
        
       | 1MachineElf wrote:
       | This is a wonderful story of how Pijul and Nest worked hard to
       | overcome challenges brought about by the OVH data center fire
       | earlier this year.
       | 
       | Also, I really like this footnote:
       | 
       |  _The realisation that naming things is a discipline of its own
       | has probably even been one of the greatest discoveries of the
       | 20th century. Cantor probably started that, by rebuilding
       | foundations for mathematics (definitions were particularly fuzzy
       | before him), Wittgenstein established a link with philosophy,
       | blurring the distinction between mathematics and philosophy. Kuhn
       | even established a distinction between the scientists who name
       | things (whom he called "revolutionary") and the others (the
       | "normies"). Deleuze restated the role of the philosopher as a
       | creator of concepts (which also applies outside of science), or
       | in other words, as a professional namer. And by the way, the
       | history of Computer Science is full of such half-philosophical,
       | half-mathematical discoveries, where naming is almost everything:
       | Turing machines, Communication Complexity, Yao's principle..._
        
         | cannam wrote:
         | Seconded - this is probably the most philosophically
         | interesting outage-post-mortem I've ever read.
        
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