Comment by StopHammoTime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StopHammoTime | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It seems this probably happened due to some regulation or other. The sunset date for the service should have been a month prior so that influx could have kept the data legally until the 30th in case of this situation happening.

They wanted to have the euros flowing in right until the last minute.

1. Flash messages on all user facing consoles. 2. No new resource able to be created for 6 mo this. 3. Emails. 4. Service end date should have been at least a month prior to mandatory shut down. 5. Any people still running workloads in May should have had aggressive contact attempts made to ensure they were aware. 6. The console in the region should have switched to a final backup that can be exported by the user or moved to another region. This should have been available for 30 days.

You don’t do this because it’s fun, you do this because you need to save reputation. If I can’t trust you with business critical data then why would I use you for my critical business?

Also, as someone who works for a large enterprise, if you really believe email is the way to inform them of these changes, well I’d reconsider your beliefs.

There's no regulatory consideration involved as far as I can tell. On Slack at https://influxcommunity.slack.com/archives/CH8TV3LJG/p168894... they explain the shutdown thus:

> "The region did not get enough usage or growth to make it economically viable to operate, so it became necessary for InfluxData to discontinue service in those regions."

So it's worse than you believe. Yes, the handling is a scandal for all the reasons you say. But they weren't even pushed into this by some regulatory issue; it's pure cost-cutting.

Given they shut down two DCs half a world apart, it's not regulations. It's cost.

But its a paid service right? Is it a pricing issue? If it is, isn't it better to increase the price?

You wonder if we will see more of this from all these high burnrate SaaS startups right? It saves money to shutdown even paid services if they are cashflow negative. The difference between paid services and unpaid only matters if costs are below prices they sell the services for..

It's a cost-cutting measure that reeks of a company trying to cut costs as fast as possible.

They still should have at the very least done a backup of each customer DB in those regions and created an option to download and/or restore to a new region and kept those for at least 30-90 days.

A scream test would have been a better option in addition to the above.

And make no mistake some people will still miss the notification after all these warnings

Perhaps service shutdown is also the only valid case where it can be okay to intermittently fail API requests?

companies generally want to be paid for their costs of holding your data liabilities, yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com