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> At Cloudflare's scale, I would not be surprised if they require three consecutive events to trigger an alert.

Sorry but that’s a method you use if you serve 100 requests per second, not when you are at Cloudflare scale. Cloudflare easily have big enough volume that this problem would trigger an instant change in a monitorable failure rate.


Let's say you have 10 million servers. No matter what you are deploying, some of those servers are going to be in a bad state. Some are going to be in hw ops/repair. Some are going to be mid-deployment for something else. A regional issue may be happening. You may have inconsistencies in network performance. Bad workloads somewhere/anywhere can be causing a constant level of error traffic.

At scale there's no such thing as "instant". There is distribution of progress over time.

The failure is an event. Collection of events takes times (at scale, going through store and forward layers). Your "monitorable failure rate" is over an interval. You must measure for that interval. And then you are going to emit another event.

Global config systems are a tradeoff. They're not inherently bad; they have both strengths and weaknesses. Really bad: non-zero possibility for system collapse. Bad: Can progress very quickly to towards global outages. Good: Faults are detected quickly, response decision making is easy, and mitigation is fast.

Hyperscale is not just "a very large number of small simple systems".

Denoising alerts is a fact of life for SRE...and is a survival skill.


You seem to insinuate that the correct pricing is using a 3 year commitment. That seems very much not logical to me considering the original promise of the cloud to be flexible, and to scale up and down on demand.


You're also getting pretty stale instances by the end of the 3 years.

At two difference companies, I've seen a big batch of committed instances finally go off contract, and we replaced them with more modern instances that improved performance significantly while not costing us anything more or even letting us shrink the pool, saving us money.

It's a pain, but auto scaling groups with a couple different spot instance types in it seems to be quasi necessary for getting an ok aws compute value.


You'd have the same problem if you bought your own hardware. You don't throw it away and replace it until it's been amortized.


Elasticity is very expensive, in practice people only use it for one-off jobs, preferably using the cheaper unreliable "spot" instances (meaning the job must support being partially re-run to recover, which implies a complex job splitting and batching platform).

For traditional, always-on servers, you should reserve them for 3 years. You still have the ability to scale up, just not down. You can always go hybrid if you don't know what your baseline usage is.


Should you be designing for a single server to exist for 3 years when you have such elastic compute? Why not design for living on spot instances and get savings lower than hetzner with better performance? What about floating savings plans? There’s a ton left on the table here just to say ‘aws bad’ for some views


The biggest cloud detractors are often the most ignorant about how to run things effectively in the cloud. They try to use the same patterns that they have used for the last 20 years on-prem and are all confused as to why it's more expensive. It's the exact same tired arguments over and over again. They don't want to learn how to do things in a new way.


If it’s in any way owned by a US entity, then no, then it’s just smoke and mirrors.


Actually you want 3 nodes for high availability, two will do you nothing good


I took and ID3 for a test drive, an accidentally activated the speed limiter on the highway. That got quite scary, and it took ages to realize I had to swipe on one of the fake buttons to disable it.

Compared to ID4, ID3 has another epic cost saving measure: They removed the two switches for the rear windows from the driver door, and replaced it with a toggle switch that decides whether the switches for the front windows really control the front windows, or the rear ones. So in total they saved one physical switch, but made the user experience much worse.

I also skipped the entire ID-family due to that. At least the Enyaq (Skoda's ID4) has a much better setup with physical buttons on the steering wheel, and more physical buttons for the console.


Same. Rented an ID3 for a weekend. Will never drive one again. Almost lethal design decisions on that car.


Those files are user data, not part of the software package.


I would disagree, files that the user cannot edit or should not edit should not be going into their home directory. Things like cache files should go into a system wide cache directory instead.


Cache files might contain user's sensitive data. Makes sense to keep in them in the user's home directory in those cases.


File permissions?


There's no other path that the user is guaranteed to have write permissions to (except maybe /tmp, I guess).


Isn't that very anti-linux though, to have a directory owned by root but populated with subfolders owned by other users? /home is the only exception I can think of that does this.


Anti-linux I don't know, but it was not uncommon in unices to have home directories in /usr/home.

And there is no written or unwritten rule about that. In fact, /home is a subdirectory of / which is owned by root.


True, but /usr/home is no longer a common place to store home directories. It used to be, particularly in Bell Labs Unix. (Does FreeBSD still do this?)

The Linux Foundation’s File Hierarchy Standard puts user homes in /home, but it’s by no means mandatory.

/home being the *nix home folder directory isn’t written in stone, but plenty of software expects it. Of course you shouldn’t hard code things like that, but that has never stopped anyone from doing it. (Not that we should reward that with de facto standards necessarily.)

I understand the various reasons why a root file system hierarchy isn’t part of the Single UNIX Specification, but it might have been nice.


/tmp


And /run/user


also mail and cron


If I uninstall ssh I still want to have have my authorized hosts. If I uninstall some firefox version firefox I want to keep my profiles. XDG defines a thumbnailing hierarchy followed by multiple libraries, uninstalling any of those shouldn't clear thumbnail caches.


Persistent user-specific state needs to live in a persistent user-specific location. You could choose not to use the concept of a home directory, but you would be doomed to reinvent it.


Why would you want that?

If you have separate partitions, would you really want user data to go to the system partition? Or a third partition?

Do you find having more places that user programs can write a benefit?


I would favor a /var/user/something directory.

The fact that nobody does that is pretty much a consequence of the difficulty of coordinating multiple projects that do not have a common authority, not because it is a bad idea.


Again, what do you prefer about that?

Maybe the reason no one does that is simply that no one shares your preference.


Having a clear separation between actual user data files / documents and stuff like cache for different reasons:

- easier to cleanup/wipe without risking deleting works/personnal files

- backup solution doesn't have to have a town of entries in an ignore/exclude file

- same as above for syncing software

- tier storage separation possibility

- disk space allocation separation depending on data vs volatile stuff


Should that count towards user disk quota?


I agree cache file should not go into their home directory, however I don't agree they aren't user data and that they would be part of the software installation.


You don't know that up front, e.g. if your plane is late and you need to hurry to a connecting flight.


You might want to read up on the Schrems II (2) case regarding the GDPR and a US company.


Yes, but this largely due to the US CLOUD act [0], and in my opinion, rightfully so. The US needs to get their privacy shit together.

Now, is it realistic that it will be illegal for EU providers to use services that are owned by US companies? Very unlikely that this will be the precedent (yes, I know, there are cases where some courts deemed Google Analytics and Google Fonts illegal).

However, I would personally also feel more comfortable using services from countries where the government can't subpeona all data at will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act


What world are we in where a guy hosting a blog needs to read about GDPR.


It's a bit like in the 1960s and '70s when musicians regularly ended up in serious tax debt because they genuinely didn't realize that they should file proper returns.

"I'm just a guy who shows up, they hand me some cash, and then I go up on stage and play my guitar. Why do I need to read up on accounting?"

Some software developers are in that state of naïveté about the data they collect about their users.

Even if it's just a blog, it may be collecting and storing data about readers in many different ways: ads, tracking pixels, comment logins, etc.


On a grand scheme, it’s also naive to think that GDPR is going to protect end-users. It’s a good attempt but really just a ‘badge’ that websites put on and a nuisance for mobile users.


A world where that person might want to track users or sell privacy intrusive advertisments on their blog.


I think realistically for a single person blog if you don’t reside in the EU you can just ignore the GPDR. What are they gonna do, sue you?


Even if you ignore the GDPR because it doesn’t apply to you it might be nice to know the company you’re buying hosting from has to comply with it.


OP is Italian, so that's not an option.

And even if you don't reside in the EU, you can reasonably believe in privacy and abide by the GDPR.


This is akin to me, at least to walking into a bar and being upset there are requirements for shoes in shirt. Nobody is forcing you on my website


No its akin to opening a bar without a sign on the outside informing you that your every word and look will be monitored, analysed and shared with big companies. But that's the great thing about GDPR. It's our rights, they apply wether you like it or not.


> they apply wether you like it or not.

The EU has ruled, now let them enforce it!


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