6 ms·

I believe this is called "technical marketing" Does Facebook still want to launch an own AWS clone?

nautilus12 5y ago
Not sure if they did who would end up being the bigger asshole. My opinion of AWS is already at an all time low, but my opinion of Facebook has always been low too. At least it would introduce some competition for AWS.
- adflux 5y ago
  Some competition for AWS? Seems like Azure and GCP are competing pretty hard don't you think?
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    I know many people who won't dare touch GCP with a ten foot pole simply because they're afraid of Google's random banning AI wiping their digital lives. Azure is a minefield that's only worth it when on a .NET stack.
    - verst 5y ago
      Re Azure, what makes you say that? Can you be specific?
      - peteretep 5y ago
        Recently I tried to set up some pretty basic Office 365 stuff, and in the end I had to pay someone from Upwork to run a bunch of PowerShell commands because the admin UI simply ignore or timed out when I tried to set stuff. Between that, the absolutely dreadfully confusing product URLs and so on, the chances of me ever trusting MS enough to run servers for me is slim.
      - jiggawatts 5y ago
        I recently built a bunch of stuff on Azure, and the product limitations are absolutely insane. I came up with a new term in the aftermath of this project: "Almost Minimal Viable Product" (AMVP). It's like an MVP, but not quite. Just in the last few weeks I hit these fun "broken by design" issues: Availability Sets decrease your availability because they force big-bang changes for the member VMs. They flat out prevent one-VM-at-a-time changes for large categories of settings, such as SKU family, Accelerated Networking, and Proximity Placement groups. VMware had similar features yet no such limits over a decade ago. Speaking of availability sets, you can create one with the number of fault domains set to "1", which makes sure that your critical servers are all plugged in to the same power rail and will fail together, ensuring disaster. You can't change this parameter. Oh don't worry, their doco helpfully tells you to work around these glaring issues by deleting the VMs and recreating them. Except that this wipes out a bunch of settings and data that can't be recreated. Data loss is their official solution! Speaking of data loss: You can't move a VM from one Recovery Vault to another without permanently deleting its backups first. Other than that, Recovery Vault is a great product with only a few small feature gaps, such as the inability to back up Ultra SSD disks. You know: the type used for the most important VMs! They NAT IPv6. I still can't get over that. You can't do anything if you enable IPv6 anywhere. For example, they just released Virtual WAN, but it has exactly zero support for IPv6. It just flat refuses to work with it. Ditto for NAT Gateway, which will refuse to NAT IPv4 if you have IPv6 enabled. Speaking of IPv6: They generously hand them out in blocks as large as 16 addresses at a time. You get a whole /124 range all to yourself! Stopping a VM can take up to half an hour, sometimes 2-3 hours. I hope you weren't making those aforementioned big-bang changes! They have Gen 2 images for Windows, but not Windows + SQL Server. In fact, SQL Server has a random subset of the images you'd expect it to have, with gaps all over the place. You can enable OS-level ("Guest") metrics, but you can only see them one VM at a time, not in any multi-VM view. You cannot imagine how fiddly this is to enable through any kind of automation. Recently, Log Analytics randomly stopped collecting IIS logs world wide. The fix is to restart the service manually. This went on for like a week. Some of their managed certificates are validated based on the "TLD" name, not the DNS zone name. So if you have "dev.myapp.dept.org.megacorp.com", then you have to figure out who receives these emails at the head office. In a different time zone. PS: They've never heard of you, and this looks 100% like a phishing attempt. PPS: This is totally broken for some domains, it goes to the wrong one by design. Look, I could go on, but listing all of the showstopper issues I encountered while doing rather trivial stuff in just the last few weeks would require several hours of typing, and I'm tired because I was up until 9:30pm waiting for Azure VMs to take their sweet time to reboot.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        I had to spend literal weeks back and forth with Microsoft for getting my MPN account running - the end result was to go somewhere deep in PowerBI to unlock some random DNS setting. No I'm not kidding - I have kept all that stuff in my Twitter DMs with their support. Utter nightmare.
        verst 5y ago
        What is MPN? That's not a core product or service I recognize.
    - danpalmer 5y ago
      For any companies in retail, using AWS can be a hard sell because of Amazon being a competitor. GCP/Azure are much easier for them. As for Google banning accounts, that is not a thing past a certain level. They would be in breach of contract – past a certain point the business has a contract, it's not a personal GSuite account paying by credit card, it's a business account with a more substantial contract, SLAs, etc. Turning off a whole service for a company violating terms of service (like what happened with AWS+Parler) is another case.
  - antihero 5y ago
    Until there's something like CDK for Azure and GCP I am hesitant to try it. Being able to leverage a mature language (TypeScript)'s completions and type system to code up an infra is absolutely wonderful. The docs are lacking a lot of examples, mind.
    - adflux 5y ago
      Pulumi?
    - nuker 5y ago
      Cloudformation is a better tool for infra.
- unixhero 5y ago
  AWS all time low? What planet are you getting your insights from? Because down here on earth they are making billions of dollar. AWS is an absolute juggernaut. AWS and we as users get an insanely well made product. I just delivered an analytics solution built with AWS components and its frigging great to work with. Maybe with one exception; IAM.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Meanwhile I'm sitting here after 4 visits to every dashboard I can find deleting and turning things off, and I still can't figure out where the fuckers are charging me from, because they don't care to improve that.
  - nautilus12 5y ago
    I'm talking about their moral/ethical compas.
    - dsyrk 5y ago
      Do they lie, cheat, steal, or could you elaborate on problems with their moral/ethical compass?
      - nautilus12 5y ago
        Oh my...so much to learn...

Not sure if they did who would end up being the bigger asshole. My opinion of AWS is already at an all time low, but my opinion of Facebook has always been low too. At least it would introduce some competition for AWS.

adflux 5y ago
Some competition for AWS? Seems like Azure and GCP are competing pretty hard don't you think?
- mschuster91 5y ago
  I know many people who won't dare touch GCP with a ten foot pole simply because they're afraid of Google's random banning AI wiping their digital lives. Azure is a minefield that's only worth it when on a .NET stack.
  - verst 5y ago
    Re Azure, what makes you say that? Can you be specific?
    - peteretep 5y ago
      Recently I tried to set up some pretty basic Office 365 stuff, and in the end I had to pay someone from Upwork to run a bunch of PowerShell commands because the admin UI simply ignore or timed out when I tried to set stuff. Between that, the absolutely dreadfully confusing product URLs and so on, the chances of me ever trusting MS enough to run servers for me is slim.
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      I recently built a bunch of stuff on Azure, and the product limitations are absolutely insane. I came up with a new term in the aftermath of this project: "Almost Minimal Viable Product" (AMVP). It's like an MVP, but not quite. Just in the last few weeks I hit these fun "broken by design" issues: Availability Sets decrease your availability because they force big-bang changes for the member VMs. They flat out prevent one-VM-at-a-time changes for large categories of settings, such as SKU family, Accelerated Networking, and Proximity Placement groups. VMware had similar features yet no such limits over a decade ago. Speaking of availability sets, you can create one with the number of fault domains set to "1", which makes sure that your critical servers are all plugged in to the same power rail and will fail together, ensuring disaster. You can't change this parameter. Oh don't worry, their doco helpfully tells you to work around these glaring issues by deleting the VMs and recreating them. Except that this wipes out a bunch of settings and data that can't be recreated. Data loss is their official solution! Speaking of data loss: You can't move a VM from one Recovery Vault to another without permanently deleting its backups first. Other than that, Recovery Vault is a great product with only a few small feature gaps, such as the inability to back up Ultra SSD disks. You know: the type used for the most important VMs! They NAT IPv6. I still can't get over that. You can't do anything if you enable IPv6 anywhere. For example, they just released Virtual WAN, but it has exactly zero support for IPv6. It just flat refuses to work with it. Ditto for NAT Gateway, which will refuse to NAT IPv4 if you have IPv6 enabled. Speaking of IPv6: They generously hand them out in blocks as large as 16 addresses at a time. You get a whole /124 range all to yourself! Stopping a VM can take up to half an hour, sometimes 2-3 hours. I hope you weren't making those aforementioned big-bang changes! They have Gen 2 images for Windows, but not Windows + SQL Server. In fact, SQL Server has a random subset of the images you'd expect it to have, with gaps all over the place. You can enable OS-level ("Guest") metrics, but you can only see them one VM at a time, not in any multi-VM view. You cannot imagine how fiddly this is to enable through any kind of automation. Recently, Log Analytics randomly stopped collecting IIS logs world wide. The fix is to restart the service manually. This went on for like a week. Some of their managed certificates are validated based on the "TLD" name, not the DNS zone name. So if you have "dev.myapp.dept.org.megacorp.com", then you have to figure out who receives these emails at the head office. In a different time zone. PS: They've never heard of you, and this looks 100% like a phishing attempt. PPS: This is totally broken for some domains, it goes to the wrong one by design. Look, I could go on, but listing all of the showstopper issues I encountered while doing rather trivial stuff in just the last few weeks would require several hours of typing, and I'm tired because I was up until 9:30pm waiting for Azure VMs to take their sweet time to reboot.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      I had to spend literal weeks back and forth with Microsoft for getting my MPN account running - the end result was to go somewhere deep in PowerBI to unlock some random DNS setting. No I'm not kidding - I have kept all that stuff in my Twitter DMs with their support. Utter nightmare.
      - verst 5y ago
        What is MPN? That's not a core product or service I recognize.
  - danpalmer 5y ago
    For any companies in retail, using AWS can be a hard sell because of Amazon being a competitor. GCP/Azure are much easier for them. As for Google banning accounts, that is not a thing past a certain level. They would be in breach of contract – past a certain point the business has a contract, it's not a personal GSuite account paying by credit card, it's a business account with a more substantial contract, SLAs, etc. Turning off a whole service for a company violating terms of service (like what happened with AWS+Parler) is another case.
- antihero 5y ago
  Until there's something like CDK for Azure and GCP I am hesitant to try it. Being able to leverage a mature language (TypeScript)'s completions and type system to code up an infra is absolutely wonderful. The docs are lacking a lot of examples, mind.
  - adflux 5y ago
    Pulumi?
  - nuker 5y ago
    Cloudformation is a better tool for infra.
unixhero 5y ago
AWS all time low? What planet are you getting your insights from? Because down here on earth they are making billions of dollar. AWS is an absolute juggernaut. AWS and we as users get an insanely well made product. I just delivered an analytics solution built with AWS components and its frigging great to work with. Maybe with one exception; IAM.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Meanwhile I'm sitting here after 4 visits to every dashboard I can find deleting and turning things off, and I still can't figure out where the fuckers are charging me from, because they don't care to improve that.
- nautilus12 5y ago
  I'm talking about their moral/ethical compas.
  - dsyrk 5y ago
    Do they lie, cheat, steal, or could you elaborate on problems with their moral/ethical compass?
    - nautilus12 5y ago
      Oh my...so much to learn...