7 ms·

The screwed over themselves as soon as the decided to rely on third party SaaS solutions for core infrastructure. How many more examples do we need for this to

• ishi 8y ago
  I assume that in the real world you grow your own food, generate your own electricity, dig up your own wells for water, and knit your own clothes? Companies have to rely on other companies for critical services, just like we do in the real world.
  • flukus 8y ago
    Food and clothing aren't services they are once off purchases that you own, these are more like buying the software and self hosting it than SaaS. Electricity and water are heavily regulated and often government owned, not run by Silicon Valley cowboys.
    • rcthompson 8y ago
      I don't want to make assumptions about your metabolism, but I find that I actually need to eat food on a fairly regular basis, to the point that I would not characterize it as a "once off" purchase.
      • flukus 8y ago
        When I need more food I'll make another once off purchase. If the place that had lunch today has boarded up it's windows tomorrow I'll just eat somewhere else. If I bought that food from a supermarket it doesn't disappear from my pantry when the supermarket closes down. My food supply is a self organising network that can route around any single point of failure. This is about as far removed from SaaS as you can get.
      • JackCh 8y ago
        If the company I buy food from decides to ghost all their customers with 30 minutes notice, I can walk a block in the opposite direction and buy food from a completely different company. And I can walk a block further and buy food from yet another company. Any of these companies vanishing into thin air would only cost me a 10 minutes of my time at most.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • viraptor 8y ago
      > Electricity and water are heavily regulated and often government owned, not run by Silicon Valley cowboys. Yet, you still get Puerto Rico (electricity grid recovery failures of a few levels), and Flint (no clean water for you, because no).
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • blub 8y ago
    Multiple sourcing is the key. All of the above products can be bought from multiple places, this API could be "bought" from a single vendor. Any usage kf SaaS would require a solid contract in place and a plan B (and C, and D, etc) to reach even a fraction the reliability of e.g electricity or food.
    • viraptor 8y ago
      Managing risk comes into play here. Would you spend time integrating 2 services, negotiating 2 contacts, supporting 2 providers who may change features and approaches over time, splitting a fraction of traffic to make sure both still work, limiting yourself to common feature set... Or would that cost you more to implement them a few days of (potential) complete downtime. Choosing the potential downtime is not a failure, if you considered your options.
      • sverhagen 8y ago
        You have to admit that the Smyte's customer list that's floated around, here, isn't all just some startups that can't afford to research their backups. And maybe they did, actually. Did anyone even hear if Zendesk was even affected by this happening?
  • Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Most of this has a latency that's orders of magnitude different. For electricity, those are microseconds (and for anything longer you do have UPS and generators and failover, right?), for the other things, it's days. "Half an hour" is just about the worst timeframe for a deadline.
  • PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
    Own a generator, have a stock pile of food and water, have a well I can run with the generator. Have plenty of clothing that can last many years. It isn't about being able to be self sufficient for forever, but being able to be self sufficient for long enough to weather a disaster (last time hurricane took down power for a few weeks, I only had minor inconveniences and was able to focus on helping others who weren't nearly as well prepared). Yes, it costs money and not all people can afford it, but for businesses, it should be something they do plan for.
• pmiller2 8y ago
  Well, I guess every company on AWS is screwed, huh?
  • flukus 8y ago
    Eventually yes. Fortunately there is enough demand for actual machines, but if that ever goes away and all of our compute power is owned by a handful of companies then we'll be well on our way to a scary dystopian future. At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is.
    • bartread 8y ago
      > At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is. And if that happens people (I'm looking at YOU, software and devops engineers, with your damned sketchy business cases, desperate to move projects onto AWS mostly so you can bolster your CVs) will only have themselves to blame. Fortunately I suspect there are enough of us jaded and sceptical types around to avoid it.
      • busterarm 8y ago
        Truly competent Ops folks are setting up Terraform/Terragrunt modules for multiple providers and designing with cloud agnosticism in mind. If they aren't, either they're incompetent, the CTO is, or you don't really have a company yet.
        • jjeaff 8y ago
          What part of terraform is cloud agnostic?
          • workinthehead 8y ago
            Uh, the whole thing? Do you need a link to the documentation or something?
• laumars 8y ago
  You're getting downvoted but if people look past your inflammatory tone there is a good argument to be made. Back when it was more traditional to buy a software licences and self-host rather than pay a rolling subscription to an XaaS, a service going dark just meant that you were shut out of updates but not the software itself. Sure you'd still eventually need to migrate away but at least you could then do it on your own terms.
  • bartread 8y ago
    > Sure you'd still eventually need to migrate away but at least you could then do it on your own terms. I think people often underestimate the value of being able to manage their own destiny. They key point here is "manage" though: you have to actually do it - it's an active process. If, on the other hand, you simply stick your head in the sand and ignore the situation it will eventually get to the point where it becomes extremely difficult and expensive to deal with due to a variety of factors such as no clear migration path, loss of institutional knowledge, and so on. I name no names, but worked for one UK company in particular with form here. I'm not making an argument against SaaS (we use a few of them), but it's important to understand the trade-offs you're making in terms of ceding control.
    • x0x0 8y ago
      Sure, but a service like Smyte requires significant expertise to make work well and run. Pretending you can snap your fingers and implement a Sift Science or Smyte is ludicrous. Further, some of the biggest value they will provide is being able to see transactions between vendors. So eg calculating an IP address reputation score by seeing bursts of fraudulent purchases. That is impossible to do in house only.
      • bartread 8y ago
        > Pretending you can snap your fingers and implement a Sift Science or Smyte is ludicrous. But that's not what either I or the GP were talking about: we were talking about hosting a product that you'd purchased from another vendor on your own infrastructure.
• justwalt 8y ago
  Does this argument apply if there was a signed contract with years remaining?
  • flukus 8y ago
    It really depends on the circumstances but often a contract makes no difference. If the service provider disappears (bankruptcy, acquisition, natural disaster) and there is no one to sue then the contract is irrelevant. If it's core functionality and you go out of business then being able to sue but having no money to makes the contract irrelevant. If the provider can absorb the cost of a lawsuit because you're their only customer and it's cheaper to drop you then a contract could be irrelevant. If the provider want's to launch a competing service and breaching the contract is just a cost of doing business then the contract is irrelevant. Contracts can be valuable but often they are over valued.
    • tinus_hn 8y ago
      Contracts don’t disappear on acquisition, of course. The new owner takes on the responsibilities of the acquired company, as well as its assets. Companies also are not physical items that can disappear due to natural disasters. The only ways they can disappear is by closing down, and that does mean honoring contracts, and by going bankrupt and that means using all leftover assets to satisfy all the parties whose contracts you’re breaking. And no, you can’t just transfer all assets away and leave a shell to go bankrupt because that is fraud and the judge can nullify the transfers.
  • PeterisP 8y ago
    Evaluating the business viability and solvency of any important suppliers is something that you should be doing yourself even if you have a years-long contract. Also, such risks can be insured. Also, such risks can be mitigated in various ways - I recall having a contract where the source code of any product version delivered to us would be held in escrow at a third party, and in case the supplier went out of business or a bunch of other conditions, we'd get their code and legal rights to use/modify/maintain it ourselves or through some contractor. A contract is between you and some entity - if you want to protect yourself against that entity "dying", then that can be done by a contract with someone else (e.g. insurer, escrow, etc) who can make you whole even if that entity is dead.
• AznHisoka 8y ago
  I am not 100% familiar with exactly what Smyte does but if it uses heuristics to determine if a comment is spam/harassment, then thats not really core infrastructure. Your company isnt going to die without it (its not like Hootsuite losing access to the Twitter API or Heroku cut off from aWS) But it might be more effective with it.
• s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Just like all those people that screwed them over by depending on 3rd party CPUs instead of creating their own?