Half an hour of warning, to screw over all of these?
They broke npm's user sign-ups, and publishing of packages, with half an hour of warning.
I can't imagine the havoc over at Zendesk either.
That is not 'winding down'. That's ghosting.
Tbh that has always frustrated me though. I should be able to pipe those requests and just add an X-Forwarded-For header.
Is there any indirection that would avoid having to walk the traffic over my own network?
Obviously you then pay the bandwidth, but it’s likely negligible compared to your app traffic. As a bonus you’ll probably circumvent adblockers.
If you want to avoid traffic forwarding, but keep flexibility over the endpoint, you can override the init of the sdk to first query your server for which endpoint to use. That way if the third party service goes down, you just need to change the config on the server.
I wonder how much Twitter is going to pay on top of the acquisition cost of what I can only imagine constitutes breach of contract with all of these companies. (If it doesn't, why even bother having a contract with a duration?)
Acquirers usually prefer asset deals for this reason as it allows them to leave unpleasant liabilities behind. There's generally some sort of shell left that goes through wind down but it has few/no assets attached. In this case you can try to go after the original investors including founders or other shareholders (the IRS may do this if there tax issues) but since there's nobody home you are less likely to get much out of a favorable judgement.
Moreover recovering damages in this kind of case is time-consuming, doubtful, and too late to fix anything. (Like closing the door after the horse is gone.)
What's left is reputation--the names of the founders of Smyte are listed at https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/smyte. I would have some pretty hard questions if they ever showed up in a deal or looking for work.
p.s., According to the Techcrunch page "Smyte stops bad actors on marketplaces and social networks." You can't make this stuff up.
I expect one or more lawsuits to emerge, maybe as a class action. It might not come to trial and simply wash up as a settlement.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a lawyer.
Self-service web services on the other hand generally come with take-it-or-leave-it conditions of use. When's the last time you redlined Github terms of use when starting a project? ;)
Per the article, they did at least have long-term contracts locked in with Smyte. That's not the same as control over the feature, obviously, but plenty of companies do business on the strength of contracts instead of vertically integrating their entire product.
Obviously we don't have many details yet, but I think there's a real difference between simply using a third party API that works for the moment, and buying a service from a third party. If Twitter/Smyte simply broke contract with all their existing customers, that's very much their responsibility.
Unless you're advocating against any kind of *aaS, this is kind of a silly argument.
A lot of these services are not "a few days of development" worth of work. The value in these is that they have dedicated teams of people who's entire job is to run that specific targeted thing. Unless you're willing to also invest in major development, it's going to be difficult to match that functionality.
Obviously when you make your product/company depend upon these things, you're taking a risk that they could go away, but you protect yourself against that by having robust contracts.
Outages are different, but for a significant outage you expect to see some kind of RFO and explanation of how they're going to mitigate it.
Deliberately withdrawing service for all customers with 30 minutes notice? That's entirely the fault of whomever is in charge at Smyte.
Even 30 days, while it'd probably ruin some existing plans, would at least allow people to have a chance to migrate without things just breaking.
For the cases I was involved in, there were options of buying the service but hosting it internally with some update pipeline. So even if the updates were suddenly turned off, you have a far longer time to swap to a different system. Generally deploying these aren't to much time, but what is really the issue to me isn't that the options that were chosen were the ones which were chosen, but that the process of choosing them did not evaluate the risks of creating such a strong external dependency at all. Its one thing if it is a risk taken with full knowledge of the potential costs and benefits, it is another when people do it because they think there is no possible downside.
No. Delegation is the cornerstone of civilization. Trying to build everything yourself is a terrible idea.
* No website or app should ever call out to any third party API
* Every single piece of functionality a website or app has should be developed in-house
* The functionality third party APIs provide would often take "a few days" to reproduce in-house
Definitely. Your website and app should only call your APIs. Your API can then call the third party API from the server. It's a lot easier to change something on the server than having to update the app.
It's not really addressing the whole issue of depending on third party APIs if your API is calling on them, but you are technically correct, which I've heard is the best kind of correct.
Twitter owns Smyte. When you buy a company, you acquire all of its responsibilities. There is no longer a Smyte to point the finger at. It's all Twitter.
I’m actually surprised that it was done in this manner, as many startups have a “business continuity” section in whatever contracts are drawn up with customers, detailing the specific steps and timeframe of retiring a particular service. I would have thought this is standard practice for a SaaS company.
Twitter owns this now and the way to ensure it's their reputation that is affected over the long term is by correctly calling this a "Twitter" failure.
Would Smyte's rating have cut it for people?
The problem is, if all suppliers use the same contract clauses you may not have a choice.
and how would their credit rating be affected if they pay all their bills but just reduce the number of bills gradually over time?
2. If it's that critical, you have redundancy (an alternative provider, or a naive implementation that maybe causes more false positives but that will cover you during an outage)
And no, I wouldn't have an alternative provider. It would not make sense to, if I'm paying a company to provide a service. Why should I pay another to do nothing?
I've been a senior developer in an organization and known that a solution isn't perfectly robust. Clearly I want to fix it because I (like most other developers) like building robust solutions, but I have six weeks of tasks to finish in two weeks, and that isn't one of them. What do I do?
You might say "do it anyways" and, if so, that's a junior developer attitude. I'd strongly urge you not to do that as shipping big projects is really more about choreography than engineering.
Or, you might say "fight for permission" and that's not a bad idea, as long as you accept that you'll likely lose.
You'll likely lose for business reasons. On some level, we all know that a SAAS on a critical path is a bad idea, but we do math. Our SLAs are not 100%, but we can accept a few hours of downtime a year. And, the probability of a service you've seemingly vetted being acquired and shutting down this quickly is low. Is the probability of a shut down like this high enough to justify adding and testing redundancy?
The math usually works out in favour of bug fixes and new features > redundancy.
It is extremely irresponsible to forward sensitive user data and site interactions to a third party, even if it is in the name of spam/abuse/scam filtering. That its implementation brings down production websites in the case of service failure only adds insult to injury, originally caused by plain-awful product design.
If there's one thing that you should be doing in-house when you run a large online community of privacy-conscious users, it's the kind of service that Smyte provided. If sound business reasoning had prevailed, npm would have suffered no downtime.
I don't agree that it's irresponsible to forward sensitive data to third parties. Rather, I believe that intelligent companies have intelligent policies around sharing data with third parties. Some third parties provide an amazing service that would be extremely expensive for companies to mimic in-house. And, you cannot convince me that the probability of a well vetted service shutting down as fast as Smyte did is high enough to justify bringing this in-house when you have other things to work on.