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"our datacenter vendor in NJ decided to shut down that location, and we needed to be out by July 2025." Ah, so you're saying that going "on-prem" does not in f

"our datacenter vendor in NJ decided to shut down that location, and we needed to be out by July 2025." Ah, so you're saying that going "on-prem" does not in fact give you total control over the situation? How peculiar! Has AWS ever shut down an EC2 region and forced everyone out?

adityaathalye 1y ago
They are saying that "on-prem" does not give the website's Private Equity owner full financial control over the situation.
senko 1y ago
That's a red herring: unless you generate your own electricity and have at least a few uplinks, you're never going to have "total control over the situation". On-prem still may be preferable to cloud for some use cases.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  The amount of petty bullshit a "repatriation" shop has to endure is multiples of what cloud customers would put up with.
adamcharnock 1y ago
I think this is more akin to shutting down an AZ, rather than a region, which certainly does happen. Except AZ lettering is randomised per AWS account, so your 'us-east1-a' isn't my 'us-east1-a'. Which means AWS can migrate people away, over time. I believe older accounts which still use the old AZ are given notice that it is closing. Plus, there was the whole closure of AWS EC2 Classic, replaced with AWS VPC. This another reason why deploying over multiple AZs has its benefit. Not just for technical failure, but it means you can still move should one region close down. I suppose an interesting questions is: would I prefer to move a single-AZ deployment such as this in the cloud, or in the real world? And honestly I can see the pros and cons of each. In the cloud it involves a bunch of engineering time (possibly minimal, likely a lot more given reality). In the real-world it involves a temporary fibre connection to the next DC over, and a gradual or rapid move of hardware with the help of some specialist contractors (for example). But at least the state and implementation quirks move with the compute. I can see it either way, but I can feel myself wanting to believe in the latter. There is something about trucking servers across town that appeals me.
shrubble 1y ago
But they now have even less control. Previously they could drive to place their hands on the drive or server. Now they can touch nothing.

adityaathalye 1y ago

They are saying that "on-prem" does not give the website's Private Equity owner full financial control over the situation.

senko 1y ago

That's a red herring: unless you generate your own electricity and have at least a few uplinks, you're never going to have "total control over the situation". On-prem still may be preferable to cloud for some use cases.

jeffbee 1y ago
The amount of petty bullshit a "repatriation" shop has to endure is multiples of what cloud customers would put up with.

adamcharnock 1y ago

I think this is more akin to shutting down an AZ, rather than a region, which certainly does happen. Except AZ lettering is randomised per AWS account, so your 'us-east1-a' isn't my 'us-east1-a'. Which means AWS can migrate people away, over time. I believe older accounts which still use the old AZ are given notice that it is closing. Plus, there was the whole closure of AWS EC2 Classic, replaced with AWS VPC. This another reason why deploying over multiple AZs has its benefit. Not just for technical failure, but it means you can still move should one region close down. I suppose an interesting questions is: would I prefer to move a single-AZ deployment such as this in the cloud, or in the real world? And honestly I can see the pros and cons of each. In the cloud it involves a bunch of engineering time (possibly minimal, likely a lot more given reality). In the real-world it involves a temporary fibre connection to the next DC over, and a gradual or rapid move of hardware with the help of some specialist contractors (for example). But at least the state and implementation quirks move with the compute. I can see it either way, but I can feel myself wanting to believe in the latter. There is something about trucking servers across town that appeals me.

shrubble 1y ago

But they now have even less control. Previously they could drive to place their hands on the drive or server. Now they can touch nothing.