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arXiv moving from Cornell servers to Google Cloud
- progbits 2y agoI'm sure many are going to hate on this, but a simple k8s setup (just container+deployment+ingress) is going to be good for preventing vendor lock in. Too bad it's US only, devops is actually a good role for full remote setups. If you can't make it work asynchronously across timezones you are doing it wrong :)
- dvrp 2y agoYou deal with emergencies with international on call rotation?
- jen20 2y agoI actually can’t think of a better way to do so.
- progbits 2y agoNot just emergencies but good timezone coverage is nice for oncall, nobody likes getting woken up by a page at 3am. But I meant things like having good and automated tests, deploys etc so everyone can be productive on their own without multiple people getting involved ("hey can you please deploy X for me when you are here?").
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago"Follow the sun" rotations are a common way to handle 24h oncall rotations. Three regular shifts (8 hours of work plus some lunch break that gives you time for a short overlap at the beginning/end of the shift) during that region's local daytime hours, in three different regions with time zones roughly 8 hours apart. That way nobody has to work nights and you still get 24/7 coverage.
- Spivak 2y agoYou have to get management to get over themselves and the stupid office policy to make it happen though. Synchronous collaboration isn't all it's cracked up to be.
- orochimaaru 2y agoHiring and payroll can be a complete nightmare especially with publicly funded organizations and initiatives like arxiv. Also plenty of North Korean bad actors masquerading as US remote workers. I’m betting as European remote workers too. I like remote work but shit like that is why we can’t have good things. https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-north-korean-workers-infiltrated-110000417.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-north-korean-workers-in...
- jeffbee 2y agoJob opening for the rare perl+latex hackers.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rahen 2y agoPerl is becoming rare, but is LaTeX also falling out of use for technical papers? Most of the scientific and CS papers I’ve seen lately still seem to use it, even those coming from Microsoft. That said, it's often generated via Org-mode or WYSIWYG tools these days.
- toxik 2y agoIt’s still 100% LaTeX in my fields (AI, ML, robotics, telecom).
- KeplerBoy 2y agoLaTeX is alive and well. I absolutely don't have the feeling that's going to change anytime soon. All the conferences I'm looking at have word and latex templates. Word clearly isn't going to replace LaTeX for many reasons. Truth to be told: As long as you're given a template and have to stick to that template, LaTeX is all you could ever want. With overleaf there's barely a tooling learning curve either.
- bluenose69 2y ago
- dvrp 2y agoHope they stay vendor unlocked though
- throwaway81523 2y agoCrap, there goes privacy.
- einpoklum 2y agoCan you elaborate regarding the privacy concern? arXiv content is public, isn't it?
- Tepix 2y agoGoogle will likely see who accesses which papers
- dewey 2y agoThey could already just look at Google Search popularity if that would be so interesting.
- Tepix 2y agoGoogle already has large scale surveillance of large parts of the internet thanks to their tracking cookies that are used for google analytics. They can track individual users, not just get some statistics.
- surajrmal 2y agoPeople seem to generally confuse the ability to do something with the actual doing of said thing.
- tgv 2y agoPossibly refering to google now tracking who visits which articles.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Brosper 2y agoThey should definitely update UI of the website.
- dark-star 2y agoWhy, what's wrong with the UI?
- worthless-trash 2y agoNot react enough.
- Brosper 1y agoWhy have you downvoted the post? Because you don't like my opinion?
- dark-star 1y agoI have not downvoted anything
- jruohonen 2y agoWhy? I'd argue most users of that site like the skeleton ASCII-style UI, which is also fast (at least when compared to the today's JS-riddled sites).
- sightbroke 2y agoI am curious too as to what needs changed as well. It appears functionality efficient, well organized, and fast as you observed.
- Brosper 1y agoWhy have you downvoted the post? Because you don't like my opinion?
- Brosper 1y agoYou don't understand UX/UI at all. It's User Experience and User Interface. This service is just obsolete and unfriendly. It's not about ASCII style etc.
- perihelions 2y agoIs this related to the federal government's vendetta against Cornell? And is there a risk Cornell becomes unable to operate arXiv because of this? https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/g-s1-59090/trump-officials-halt-1-billion-in-funding-for-cornell-790-million-for-northwestern https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/g-s1-59090/trump-officials-ha... ("Trump officials halt $1 billion in funding for Cornell, $790 million for Northwestern")
- harywilke 2y agoNo, they announced that they are starting this project back in June 2023 [0], though it is good to see Cornell suing the administration for the second time, first was back in February. And as an alum, who also had relatives up at syracuse, i appreciate the snark from syracuse.com [1] calling Cornell a 'central NY college' heh 0. https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/06/ https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/06/ 1. https://www.syracuse.com/news/2025/04/central-ny-college-sues-trump-administration-over-cuts-to-federal-funding.html https://www.syracuse.com/news/2025/04/central-ny-college-sue...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dig1 2y ago> We are already underway on the arXiv CE ("Cloud Edition") project... replace the portion of our backends still written in perl and PHP...re-architect our article processing to be fully asynchronous,.. we can deploy via Kubernetes or services like Google Cloud Run...improve our monitoring and logging facilities Why do I smell someone from G was there and sold them fancy cloud story (or they wanted VMs and reseller sold them CloudRun)? Anyway, goodbye simplicity and stability, hello exorbitant monthy costs for the same/less service quality. Would love to be wrong.
- elif 2y agoI think this is more likely a move to prevent Cornell funding from getting tied up with dictations about what gets published. But in all likelihood someone was probably just like "we're tired of doing ops on 2 decades old stacks"
- johann8384 2y agoIt sounds like they are just using GCP. It doesn't really change that.
- elif 2y agoYea but GCP was state of the art 20 years ago, php+perl was already crufty
- ordersofmag 2y agoSo state of the art it wasn't even available yet (preview launch was in 2008).
- elif 2y agoSounds about right. I remember hearing about it first in a talk being given by Doug Crockford at my university around that time. It blew my mind. I thought it was like gcc for the Internet. It's kind of wild that in the interim we have experienced the complete rise and fall of mongodb, node.js, even today the react paradigm are all expressions of this tiny little functional scripting language..
- einpoklum 2y agoAnother piece of (effectively) public infrastructure coming under the control of the mega-corporations, and Alphabet specifically.
- dewey 2y agoJust because you are hosting at a company doesn’t mean they are “controlling” it.
- johnisgood 2y agoCan't they stop providing services at a whim? Can't they do whatever with the data?
- kelnos 2y agoYes to the first, but other platforms that run k8s exist. No to the second, unless they've come to some sure of agreement with Cornell that lets them.
- johnisgood 2y agoThe first is already awful. Without notice?
- surajrmal 2y agoGenerally speaking all companies are capable of stopping services at a whim, unless there are contractual obligations for otherwise. Singling out Google here isn't helpful unless there is a unique provision in their contract that others don't have. Also worth noting that gcp has over a decade of continuous service with no indication to think it should disappear any time soon. It's not clear why Google's consumer product strategies can be used to infer how their cloud products are run.
- johnisgood 2y ago
- nsibr 2y ago[dead]
- cruzcampo 2y agoMore capitalist capture of the commons - another day in america.
- andyjohnson0 2y agoLooks to me like their motivation was largely down to skillset issues and recruitment. If this is motivated by the prospect of being menaced by the current US government then, while Google might be a safer home, arXiv is still vulnerable to having its funding disrupted by malicious actors.
- x_may 2y agoIt may be that it was time for the hardware that was previously running Arxiv to be retired and this is just another Capex -> Opex decision being made by so many tech companies. I'd like to know if GCP is covering part of the bill? Or will Cornell be paying all of it? The new architecture smells of "[GCP] will pay/credit all of these new services if you agree to let one of our architects work with you". If GCP is helping, stay tuned for a blog post from google some time around the completion of the migration with a title like "Reaffirming our commitment to science" or something similarly self affirming.
- flakiness 2y agohttps://info.arxiv.org/about/supporters.html https://info.arxiv.org/about/supporters.html Our Supporters ... Gold Sponsors Google, Inc (USA)
- khuey 2y ago> If GCP is helping, stay tuned for a blog post from google some time around the completion of the migration with a title like "Reaffirming our commitment to science" or something similarly self affirming. "Google pays to run an enormous intellectual resource in exchange for a self-congratulatory blogpost" seems like a perfectly acceptable outcome for society here.
- stonogo 2y agoIt wasn't when it happened to Usenet.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoFrequent backups to the Internet Archive for rehydration when needed. RIP Dejanews. Hopefully we’ve learned from past experience.
- mistrial9 2y agomirrors, please
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- darkoob12 2y agoFantastic. Now countries like Iran are going to be blocked. Internet is not a public network anymore It is owned by mostly American cooperation and they will decide what content to show and which group of people can access it.
- whygcp 2y agoThat's true. I recently had to move a VM from gcp to hetzner because gcp would silently drop all packets to some countries, Iran included. And a Stack overflow question was the easiest way to learn about it, not gcp docs.
- Orygin 2y agoI have looked at it recently and it seems Iran is blocking GCP, not the other way around. Not sure if Google keep a doc up to date with who blocks them.
- whygcp 2y agoWhy do you think it's Iran doing blocking? That's not what Google says: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2891389?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/2891389?hl=en
- surajrmal 2y agoWorkspace is not gcp.
- sciurus 2y agoFrom my past experience, I can say that Google Cloud services (e.g load balancers) by default blocked traffic from ITAR sanctioned countries. Not just blocking people in those countries from becoming customers of GCP, but blocking them from accessing content hosted on GCP. I didn't know how that situation had evolved since I last used GCP.
- infecto 2y agoIs it not ideal to block Iran?
- gcr 2y agoCornell is currently in hiring freeze. These roles will not be filled. Source: I applied to a Cornell-related lab in March. A week after submitting my application the role was rescinded and my contact emailed me explaining the situation.
- quantumHazer 2y agoIs it related with policies from the US administration?
- trop 2y agoFrom 3/17/25: > Together with all of American higher education, Cornell is entering a time of significant financial uncertainty. The potential for deep cuts in federal research funding, as well as tax legislation affecting our endowment income, has now been added to existing concerns related to rapid growth and cost escalations. It is imperative that we navigate this challenging financial landscape with a shared understanding and common purpose, to continue to advance our mission, strengthen our academic community, and deepen our impact. [0] [0] https://hr.cornell.edu/2025-hiring-pause https://hr.cornell.edu/2025-hiring-pause
- mindslight 2y ago[flagged]
- quantumHazer 2y agoI’m not American and American politics is not at the center of the world. I’m just asking.
- wyclif 2y agoIt looks like the links are broken to the software engineer and DevOps open roles.
- harywilke 2y agoThis is something that started as far back as march 2023. https://investinopen.org/blog/ioi-partners-with-arxiv-to-develop-its-new-strategic-blueprint/ https://investinopen.org/blog/ioi-partners-with-arxiv-to-dev... https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/06/12/arxiv-is-hiring-software/ https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/06/12/arxiv-is-hiring-software/
- bustling-noose 2y agoMy theory : Engineers rented servers and maintained them with software and packages and infrastructure scripts / code etc. Then this moved to cloud VMs cause it became easier for higher availability and sometimes cheaper too. Then VM costs started rising and cloud providers started offering tempting prices to use some of their services instead that integrated well with their VM infrastructure. Simultaneously engineers started to cost more money to maintain these systems and more people trained in 'cloud' became available for relatively cheap. So people moved their infrastructure to cloud offerings. Now both engineers and cloud services cost a lot of money. But now engineers who can maintain such infrastructure are far and few in between and also cost a lot of money while cloud offerings became turnkey literally. So costs went from $80k an engineer a year maybe a decade ago with a few thousand to servers to $200k an engineer which you would struggle to find or $100k for a 'cloud engineer / architect' plus $100k to a cloud provider. This sounds great in theory. Except that cloud providers are messy and once vendor locked in, you are in a big spiral. Secondly the costs can be hidden and climb exponentially if you don't know exactly what you are doing. You might also get into weird bugs that could be solved by a patch over a Monday to some package you could just update which might take months or never happen on a cloud provider. The reality of moving to cloud is not as rosy as it sounds. Universities used to be the birth place of big projects that were created to solve problems they ran into hosting / running their own infrastructure. I hope that is still true.
- sppfly 2y agoI'm wondering who will pay for the service fee to Google. arXiv will still be free right? That would not be just 88,000/year...
- Funes- 2y agoGreat, more self-reliance instead of playing into the hands of giga corporat... ah, shit.
- kiproping 2y agoI recently read about arxiv, it's history and all the mini-drama's around it https://www.wired.com/story/inside-arxiv-most-transformative-code-science/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-arxiv-most-transformative.... I wonder if Ginsparg is finally retiring and relinquishing access.
- chubot 2y agoWow, this is a great article! (other archive link - https://archive.is/XVCi7 https://archive.is/XVCi7 ) I didn't realize arXiV was started in 1991. And then I wondered why I had never heard of it while I was at Cornell from 1997-2001. Apparently it only assumed the arXiV name in 1999. I like that it was a bunch of shell scripts :) Long before arXiv became critical infrastructure for scientific research, it was a collection of shell scripts running on Ginsparg’s NeXT machine. Interesting connections: As an undergrad at Harvard, he was classmates with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; his older brother was a graduate student at Stanford studying with Terry Winograd, an AI pioneer. On the move to the web in the early 90's: He also occasionally consulted with a programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) named Tim Berners-Lee And then there was a 1994 move to Perl, and 2022 move to Python ... Although my favorite/primary language is Python, I can't help but wonder if "rewrite in Python" is mainly a social issue ... i.e. maybe they don't know how to hire Perl programmers and move to the cloud. I guess rewrites are often an incomplete transmission of knowledge about the codebase.
- chubot 2y agoAnother tidbit: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04188 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04188 FAQ 1: Why did you create arXiv if journals already existed? Has it developed as you had expected? Answer: Conventional journals did not start coming online until the mid to late 1990s. I originally envisioned it as an expedient hack, a quick-and-dirty email-transponder written in csh to provide short-term access to electronic versions of preprints until the existing paper distribution system could catch up, within about three months. So it was in csh on NeXT. Tim Berners-Lee also developed the web on NeXT!
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- johnisgood 2y agoSo, is this good or bad news? Why?
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- kkfx 2y agoA small note the defunct ZeroNet prove to be performant enough for a distributed web, why not start to really go distributed for things where the network overhead is not so heavy? A distributed arXiv sustained by many individual peers spread all over the world is possible.
- Daviey 2y agoIf it means I can download papers without spoofing my user-agent, then I am happy!
- fc417fc802 2y agoOn the contrary, I'd expect Google to be much more proficient at blocking requests based on various factors. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if recaptcha made an appearance. By all rights arxiv should be moving towards decentralization as opposed to being picked up by one of the largest centralized players.
- paologiacometti 2y agoI would be curious if by any chance google has given a discount as long as they allow them to use latex sources of the papers to addrest their artificial intelligence models
- staunton 2y agoArxiv makes the latex source available for download since a while ago. I'm sure all of that data has long been used for training already.
- paologiacometti 2y agosarei curioso di sapere se per caso google ha concesso uno sconto purché gli permettano di usare di sorgenti latex dei paper per addrestrare i loro modelli di intelligenza artificial
- ck2 2y agoOdd but related question if anyone knows: Are all preprints on arXiv public? Or is there actually a private unlisted preprint queue? From behavior I've observed, I'm guessing maybe authors have the ability to hide papers and send private invites for select peer-review?
- evanb 2y agoPapers can be held my moderators, but as an author when you post you don't have the ability to hold or hide your paper. Postings go up once a day as a batch, so you could wait 24ish hours to see your paper appear, longer if your posting is just before the weekend.
- prof-dr-ir 2y ago> I'm guessing maybe authors have the ability to hide papers No they do not. In fact, authors cannot even delete submitted papers after they have officially appeared in the (approximately) daily cycle. You can update your paper with a new version (which happens frequently) or mark it as withdrawn (which happens rarely). But in either case all the old versions remain available.
- kevinventullo 2y agoIf funding is an issue, I’m quite certain they could set up a nonprofit to support it. I would happily donate to keep arxiv around.
- tough 2y agoits not a nonprofit (cornell, its a university) but they do accept donations https://info.arxiv.org/about/donate.html https://info.arxiv.org/about/donate.html
- ilynd 2y agoIs this why my submission has been on hold for so long..
- tokai 2y agoWould love to see arXiv set up as a consortium of international academic libraries instead. Scientific publishing is where it is today because universities and scientific societies sold off or gave their journals to private enterprises. Letting Google in is a move in the wrong direction imo.
- fc417fc802 2y agoSome sort of federated preprint protocol where anyone could stand up a node and clone the existing data would be ideal. The current centralized operator then becomes "just" a curator (and competing curators are easy to set up).
- ArinaS 2y agoAnd this is a yet another instance of Google monopolizing the web.
- musicale 2y agoRIP