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Given 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 th
by rodgerd 6y ago
Given 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?
- throwaway19937 6y ago> What's different about Parler besides the ownership? Facebook is 233x larger, profitable, and self-hosting - they don't have to keep their cloud service provider happy. Parler was dependent on AWS for services but didn't comply with their terms.
- Applejinx 6y ago
- wmf 6y agoProper planning would have been what, coloing hundreds of servers worth millions of dollars as a DR plan? And having no guarantee that the colo provider wouldn't also deplatform them?
- dilyevsky 6y agoHow much do you think their aws bill was per month for hundreds of servers? Their traffic bill alone was probably worth it already. Don’t contract this work to ibm or deloitte or something and you’ll be fine
- wmf 6y agoI'm not talking about cost. I'm saying that surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.
- dilyevsky 6y agoYeah except you did talk about cost. Cost is not the issue here. > surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge. Somehow the internet is full of websites (some of which probably had much higher traffic) that did just fine though
- hundreddaysoff 6y agoI do agree with parent that this is an interesting political hypotheical though. There was so much media focus on Parler for a while and ultimately AWS was exonerated as the good guy in the mainstream narrative. If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?
- dilyevsky 6y agoColo facility or your transit provider doesn’t have a brand name it has to protect. You can look at gab, 4chan, tpb etc for counter examples. I’m actually fairly certain they would be fine on oracle, tencent or alibaba too
- 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.