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They’re saying it’s a surprise to hear that Dropbox doesn’t know what QC and order acceptance means. And it is, I agree. That you spent the time investigating i

They’re saying it’s a surprise to hear that Dropbox doesn’t know what QC and order acceptance means. And it is, I agree. That you spent the time investigating it, implying those servers were in production, is a shibboleth to those of us that know what we’re doing when designing hardware usage that Dropbox doesn’t. It is, however, your self sourced report and we don’t have an idea of scale, so maybe they do and you’re just unlucky. And no, operators don’t disassemble to perform QC. And no, I could hire an entire division of people buying servers at Best Buy, and disassembling them, and stress testing them, and all of that overhead including the fuel to drive to the store would still clock in under cloud’s profit margin depending on what you’re doing. You’re of course entitled to develop your cloud opinion from that experience. That’s like finding a stain in a new car and swearing off internal combustion as a useful technology, though, without any awareness of how often new cars are defective.

jeffbee 4y ago
Many hardware problems do not surface at burn-in. Even at Google, the infamous "Platform A" from the paper "DRAM Errors in the Wild" was in large-scale production before they realized it was garbage.
- jotterbrain 4y ago
  Filings from the chassis stamper, which yours certainly were given the combination of circumstances and vendor, are present when the machine is installed. If you’re buying racks, your integrator inspects them. If you’re buying U, you do. It’s a five minute job to catch your thank-God-my-career-was-short story before the machine is even energized, which I know because I’ve caught the same thing from the same vendor twice. (It’s common; notice several comments point to it.) Why do you think QC benches have magnifiers and loupes? It’s a capital expenditure and an asset, so of course it’s rigorously inspected before the company accepts it, right? That’s not strange, is it? You can point at Google and speak in abstracts but it doesn’t address the point being made, nor that your rationale for your extreme position on cloud isn’t as firm as you thought it was. Is Dropbox the only time you’ve worked with hardware? I’m genuinely asking because manufacturing defects can top 5% of incoming kit depending on who you’re dealing with. Google knew that when they built Platform A. The lie of cloud is that dismissing those problems is worth the margin (it ain’t; you send it back, make them refire the omelette, and eat the toast you baked into your capacity plan while you wait).

jeffbee 4y ago

Many hardware problems do not surface at burn-in. Even at Google, the infamous "Platform A" from the paper "DRAM Errors in the Wild" was in large-scale production before they realized it was garbage.

jotterbrain 4y ago
Filings from the chassis stamper, which yours certainly were given the combination of circumstances and vendor, are present when the machine is installed. If you’re buying racks, your integrator inspects them. If you’re buying U, you do. It’s a five minute job to catch your thank-God-my-career-was-short story before the machine is even energized, which I know because I’ve caught the same thing from the same vendor twice. (It’s common; notice several comments point to it.) Why do you think QC benches have magnifiers and loupes? It’s a capital expenditure and an asset, so of course it’s rigorously inspected before the company accepts it, right? That’s not strange, is it? You can point at Google and speak in abstracts but it doesn’t address the point being made, nor that your rationale for your extreme position on cloud isn’t as firm as you thought it was. Is Dropbox the only time you’ve worked with hardware? I’m genuinely asking because manufacturing defects can top 5% of incoming kit depending on who you’re dealing with. Google knew that when they built Platform A. The lie of cloud is that dismissing those problems is worth the margin (it ain’t; you send it back, make them refire the omelette, and eat the toast you baked into your capacity plan while you wait).