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I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting the
by aahortwwy 6y ago
I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event.
That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.
- rodgerd 6y agoGiven that he initially represented that they had no real hard dependencies on AWS, I assume that the Mercers quickly lost patience when it became clear that they were locked into AWS, with no contingency.
- chubs 6y agoMaybe the problem is that no other capable provider was willing to take them in?
- rodgerd 6y agoIn which case you'd need to moderate your content to match your providers' T&Cs, or you'd need to moderate your ambitions to match your choice of providers. But telling your owner that you can meet their desire to allow people to breach T&Cs, and that you can scale to the size of their ambitions, means you're either lying or don't understand the problem that you're solving.
- edbob 6y agoIt sounds like they had prepared to move from AWS to another mega-provider like GCP or Azure. The site is too large (and probably poorly optimized) to just spin up a few DO droplets.
- dilyevsky 6y agoGoing with another major scale cloud provider was definitely poor planning there
- edbob 6y agoI get that everyone just wants to shit on Parler, but AFAIK they didn't host any content that wasn't present in far greater quantity on Facebook and Twitter. It would have been reasonable to expect to have access to the same platforms as those companies.
- dilyevsky 6y agoThe difference here is both your examples have their own DCs ;)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lasagnaphil 6y agoHowever, given the predictable circumstances they might be in , they should at least expect every cloud provider to pull the plug at them, and should have gone the route of self-hosting. Instead, they have created a social media website out of Wordpress (out of all things), that performs ridiculously slow and eats up all of their maintenance budget, on AWS. It’s baffling how the right populists cannot find or hire any competent engineers; heck, on the leftist side people do far better with much less money (for example, look at Extinction Rebellion, where they manage to self-host their entire communications system: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11008-server_infrastructure_for_global_rebellion#t=3388 https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11008-server_infrastructure_for_...)
- edbob 6y agoI'm baffled by their choice of WordPress. No wonder they need so many servers. I don't understand why they should have expected everyone to deplatform them. Facebook hosts the same content in far greater quantity and has clearly demonstrated that they can't moderate effectively, but there's no bulls-eye on them over that. What's different about Parler besides the ownership?
- 6y ago
- jcampbell1 6y agoI wonder if employees left. Working for Parler past January 6th is going to be radioactive on a resume.
- mlinhares 6y agoFolks will have pretty long sabbaticals that just happened to end on January, 2021 :D
- echelon 6y agoThis is why you should build for bare metal. It's fine to use k8s and containers, but don't lock yourself into Lambda, SQS, etc. You should be able to spin up anywhere.
- cwyers 6y agoIf Parler did that, how does that affect their time to market? Their ability to scale with growth? Maybe if they did that, they would still be operating, because they would have never hit critical mass to the point where anyone cared about Parler.
- yellowapple 6y agoYou say that like it would've been a bad thing.
- cwyers 6y agoNo, I just think "always build for bare metal" is bad advice.
- FireBeyond 6y agoThey may even have built effective moderation tools, instead of having a backlog of 26,000 requests!
- pocw 6y agoThat works until your colo provider tells you to take a walk. Your landlord evicts you from warehouse where you host your backup datacenter space, your ISP cuts you off. It's almost like everybody drew the line at openly planning insurrection. Maybe they could have tried not doing that?
- yellowapple 6y ago4chan, Stormfront, Gab, and plenty of other sites are alive and well, so I don't even buy the "what if datacenters and ISPs ban us?" argument.
- klodolph 6y agoThey had a backup plan for getting kicked off AWS, supposedly, but the backup plan terminated their relationship with Parler before AWS did. I can imagine Parler also might have some problems attracting the kind of talent needed to run a site like that.
- dilyevsky 6y agoTheir linkedin employees page didn’t have that many infra people which is not surprising for a stack so heavily leaning on managed infra. Just hiring/contracting that expertise in such a short time would be monumental task. Guess they’re one of the unlucky ones who learned the value of infrastructure team (the hard way)
- pocw 6y agoHuh, it's almost like no provider in America is cool with your platform being used to plan an insurrection. Or open calls for violence against and murder of elected officials.
- dunce2021 6y agoAnd yet Facebook is still standing.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoexcept, Twitter?
- dboreham 6y agoSuspect there are hosting providers in other countries.
- mountainb 6y agoLike Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Parler was a scapegoat to deflect attention from the rest of this category of software.
- seabrookmx 6y ago
- babelfish 6y agoMost Silicon Valley darlings run disaster recovery exercises simulating setting up a datacenter from scratch in less than 24 hours (not that Parler should be compared to any of these companies, clearly)
- sroussey 6y agoThis. Absolutely this. We used a second location and provider.
- pocw 6y agoYeah but that usually means switching from AWS to GCP not, build a data center from scratch oh and by the way nobody from electricians to truckers will work with you because your platform was used to plan a violent attack on America.
- ghayes 6y agoRight, so step #1, don't plan a violent attack on America?
- bassman9000 6y agoBroad accusations aside, don't shift the goalposts. No one can setup basic infrastructure beyond the datacenter in 24h.
- pbourke 6y agoYeah, all those liberal electricians and truckers.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paxys 6y agoThey don't have to build a data center from scratch. Plenty of hosting providers (yes even "cloud" ones) in the country or outside it would take their business in an instant.
- randiantech 6y agoNot entirely sure if its a comparable case, but first thing that comes to my mind is 2011 PSN outage[1]. I guess any change of that magnitude should take an unprecedent effort to resolve. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outag...
- pocw 6y agoThey had months of warning from AWS too. "Hey guys, content calling for violence is violation of our TOS, you should make a plan to keep that off your platform", yeah yeah whatever man.
- vmception 6y agoAre the permissionless decentralized tools really not prepared for any level of throughput yet? Genuine question Are there any tools for hosting large volumes of user generated content in a decentralized permissionless way? Even if you have to pare down the front end and reduce reliance on some infrastructure concepts, is there any way to do it right now?
- fooey 6y agoNot if you want anyone to actually use it or if you want to be able to monetize it.
- bawolff 6y agoHonestly they seem to have a captive audiance, who feel they are being censored. If anyone remotely mainstream could succesful transition to being hosted on tor, it could probably be them (not that tor is decentralized.)
- fooey 6y agoSocial media like Parler and Twitter are largely fueled by notoriety and attention though, so I don't think decentralized anonymity is a good fit for the audience.
- thinkmassive 6y agoGab is a fork of Mastodon and it’s still running
- riffic 6y agoGab doesn't federate with the rest of the activitypub ecosystem.
- wmf 6y agoAre the permissionless decentralized tools really not prepared for any level of throughput yet? Nope. Since Web browsers don't speak any fancy decentralized protocols you either need a centralized/censored gateway like ipfs.io or everyone has to install client software which kills adoption.