Post B8202Ts0zl2qeRPdQm by jaj@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by jaj@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #B816y42PbOUVte9m8u by stefano@bsd.cafe
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I managed an e-commerce server for about ten years. It grew from a small local shop into a major national business, even handling international orders. They expanded to the point where they reduced their local brick-and-mortar store hours because the bulk of their revenue was coming from online sales.Then one seller came along and convinced them that switching to Shopify would be the key to growing even further. Apparently, their €130/month bare-metal redundant setup - which boasted a calculated uptime of 99.995% over 10 years - just wasn't cutting it anymore.They’ve been on Shopify for about six months now, and every now and then, I still get the alerts. I left the monitoring active via Uptime Kuma and ran the numbers. Over the last six months, their uptime dropped below 98%. In other words, in just six months, they’ve been down for almost as many hours as they were during the entire previous decade.I contacted the client - not because I want to take over the hosting again, but just to understand what on earth happened (we're on excellent terms). Their response was: "We don't know, but if it happened on Shopify, it means it was bound to happen anyway."As long as we keep swallowing the lie that "the cloud" and "tech giants" are always the right solution for us, we completely deserve the cloud and the tech giants.#IT #SysAdmin #OwnYourData
(DIR) Post #B8202Ts0zl2qeRPdQm by jaj@mastodon.social
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@stefano I feel that the main problem is that new engineers learn nothing else in school. So when you ask them to deploy something on premise they look at you as if you are asking them to do black magic
(DIR) Post #B8202UMr95iOC5qGVE by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
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@jaj @stefano it’s not as if university absolvents were ever ready for dayjobs in IT, programming, administering or anything really. It’s CS, theory, after all.Vocational school absolvents are often seen as lower (grr, but hey, I can at least go into a room full of Dipl-Ing and Dr-Ing and M.CS and fix the network… not that school or job training helped with thar, but I had lots of time to learn myself, from magazines, books/docs, experimenting, and reading code). The average one does more well in Windows stuff though. But these are at least willing to learn, not assuming they studied enough.
(DIR) Post #B821tvXcwdtXm2vQQq by stefano@bsd.cafe
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@david_chisnall I totally agree. I think it's related to scale (how many techs per server/datacenter?) and complexity. In my experience, (unnecessary) complexity usually lowers the uptime.
(DIR) Post #B821tzon2m052QzBjs by stefano@bsd.cafe
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@wronglang @david_chisnall in today's world? Adding complexity, definitely.
(DIR) Post #B821uf3PjJ3kvf8wj2 by travis@nodespace.social
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@david_chisnall @stefano People just don’t seem to care anymore. They’ll happily pay double or triple for worse service from a big name. Companies like mine that provide personal service get the shaft because we’re not screwing people over I guess.
(DIR) Post #B821uhMHA9Ks4jz2P2 by stefano@bsd.cafe
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@jerome Total outsourcing on a proprietary platform, with a complete loss of control over the very platform your livelihood depends on. If Spotify were to increase its prices tenfold tomorrow (Broadcom-style), you'd be trapped. If a government decided to block services to specific foreign countries tomorrow, your livelihood would be compromised.There may be reasons of convenience, I don't doubt that. But in my view, at least for that specific client (and many of mine), the disadvantages and risks far outweigh the benefits.
(DIR) Post #B821xJYG8FB96optZY by failedLyndonLaRouchite@mas.to
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@stefano If they are a major biz, 130 euros or pounds a month is an expense so small as to be insignificantso there must have bee some reason that the management saw, good or badso what was that reason ??
(DIR) Post #B821xKUkcly02ECbk8 by domi@c.im
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@failedLyndonLaRouchite @stefano Guessing: Got suckered in by promises from a sales guy. Something, something, ai, analytics, customer tracking, big data, blabla. Bosses were too incompetent to ask OP to build those promised features instead (or didnt want to take his 'no' for an answer because the features were stupid).
(DIR) Post #B821xKgntxbkdbqEWu by stefano@bsd.cafe
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@domi @failedLyndonLaRouchite exactly, that's the reason. The salesman convinced them that if they want to grow, they need those "business grade tools" that only platforms like Shopify can provide.The fun fact is that salesmen lie, but tend to believe to other salesmen' lies
(DIR) Post #B8223RvntBnkpsm41o by firebreathingduck@vivaldi.net
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@stefano It's cover-your-ass engineering. When dealing with a technical task, instead of asking the question, "What's the best option?" you ask the question, "Which option is least likely to get me blamed if something goes wrong?"At my job, we're dealing with this by proxy because of our customers. They put language into our service contracts requiring us to use Amazon Web Services.
(DIR) Post #B8227Heg2PW87gakNM by surfsup31@vivaldi.net
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@stefano I already put in a request for them to delete my data and account. Several sites would auto fill my information into Shopify and I’ve learned to check out much more carefully. Something I didn’t know to be careful of when I got rid of Amazon.
(DIR) Post #B822I7afnXba5rt2Qq by m104@mastodon.social
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@stefano Relately, I worked at a name-brand tech company that used a reliable SaaS vendor for years, only to switch to a newer, less feature-full, less reliable competitor without any engineering discussion.The reasoning was "we'll be the new vendor's biggest client, so they'll *have* to respond to our requests, whereas the current vendor can ignore us because they have bigger clients than us."Can't make this up: about a year after this switch, the new vendor was acquired by an AI company