shareometry

> A great example of how working people have more power than they think if they're willing to risk dollars and cents for matters of right and wrong.

I believe this is key. If more folks at more organizations were brave like this and willing to take the risk, a good chunk of the problems our civilization is facing might be greatly improved.

You are right about the Google blog content itself not indicating three days of outage. Turns out they just forgot to mark that particular issue as resolved on Friday, as you point out. This is my mistake. I would update my comment to reflect this, but it doesn't seem to allow an edit at this point.

The items I put down in my comment are based largely on user reports, though (there isn't much else to go on). And I mean these items as questions (i.e. "is this accurate?"). Folks here on HN have definitely been reporting ongoing problems and seem to be suggesting that they are not resolved and are actually larger in scope than the Google blog post addressed.

Someone from Google commented here a few hours ago indicating Google was looking into it. And other folks here are reporting that they don't have the same problems. So it's kind of an open question what's going on.

I'm in the evaluation phase too. And I've found a lot to like about GCP. I'm hoping the problems are understandable.

I am currently evaluating GCP for two separate projects. I want to see if I understand this correctly:

1) For three whole days, it was questionable whether or not a user would be able to launch a node pool (according to the official blog statement). It was also questionable whether a user would be able to launch a simple compute instance (according to statements here on HN).

2) This issue was global in scope, affecting all of Google's regions. Therefore, in consideration of item 1 above, it was questionable/unpredictable whether or not a user could launch a node pool or even a simple node anywhere in GCP at all.

3) The sum total of information about this incident can be found as a few one or two sentence blurbs on Google's blog. No explanation nor outline of scope for affected regions and services has been provided.

4) Some users here are reporting that other GCP services not mentioned by Google's blog are experiencing problems.

5) Some users here are reporting that they have received no response from GCP support, even over a time span of 40+ hours since the support request was submitted.

6) Google says they'll provide some information when the next business day rolls around, roughly 4 days after the start of the problem.

I really do want to make sure I'm understanding this situation. Please do correct me if I got something wrong in this summary.

My understanding (from working with lawyers in the past) is that it is enforceable in some states and unenforceable in others. I'm not a lawyer, though, and so don't really know first-hand.

I have never understood why employees accept the restrictive clauses which assign ownership for any side projects to the employer. I am not a lawyer, but this has always struck me as amounting to a type of serfdom. If you are seen as a 24/7 unit of the company, and anything at all that you creatively produce can be claimed by the company, then your working capacity and creative capacity is essentially owned entirely by the company while you are employed there. You are not being paid just for your time and the work product you produce during that time. Rather you are literally selling an aspect of yourself. Does that sound reasonable at all? (of course, California has some protections against this. but that's just one state)

I would really like to see people rallying against many more things like this.

I use DuckDuckGo as my default. The only time I ever have to revert to Google search is when I'm searching for things indexed within the past year. This is a pretty crucial feature when searching for technical items (ensures a good number of search results while also being relatively current). For some reason, DDG only lets you search up to the last month. If they added the ability to search within the past year, I probably wouldn't need to use Google search at all.

I also think there is a need to figure out how to enable community-controlled SaaS platforms in addition to this. LibreOffice, for example, has essentially released an online office suite. But it has decided not to actually operate and offer this suite to the public in ready-to-use fashion. From what I understand, it is just too difficult and resource-intensive to do that. So it's up to companies running paid platforms to do it (or you can spin it up on your own server/instance and run it yourself). There's nothing inherently wrong with this. But it seems to me that there's a "next step" to take by figuring out how to enable fully community-controlled platforms so that a project like an open source G Suite (running at scale with an iron-clad privacy guarantee that is backed by community audits) that you can just go create an account on could become a reality one day. This seems like it would require a non-profit organization akin to Mozilla. How great would it be to have a community-controlled non-profit organization operating a trusted cloud platform, perhaps even audited by a group like the EFF? Very challenging, for sure. But it seems humanly possible.

I still don't quite understand why Docker Swarm is so overlooked. It essentially offers easy-to-manage orchestration while providing most of the core features that many people are looking for. It even makes use of compose files, which many developers are already writing. Given that most of the complaints about Kubernetes relate to its complexity and the need for a Kubernetes "expert" to look after said complexity, I'm somewhat baffled by how many people just totally overlook Swarm as if it wasn't an option.

I strongly disagree with your second point. There are quite a few very successful entrepreneurs who have started companies while being mired in terrible financial circumstances. In fact, it's very common for these circumstances to be the stimulus that gets people moving in the direction of their own company. There are many, many stories of this, to the point that it's a cliché.

I myself started my first business at a time when I had virtually no money in the bank, and my car was literally repossessed one month before my business became profitable. If I had stopped and said "I can't afford this" and just given up and gone to get a job, I would have never seen the success that came later.

Also, you point out particular entrepreneurs who came from rich families. You completely leave out the wide array of entrepreneurs who did not. John Paul DeJoria, for example, was living on a friend's property because he was homeless and had almost no money. He started his business in those circumstances. He's estimated at somewhere in the ballpark of 3 billion net worth presently. There are quite a few stories of people with virtually no money building empires out of the rubble.

While I agree that there are a number of factors that feed into whether a startup is successful or not, I would kindly submit to you that one's attitude towards whether or not it can be accomplished is a very massive part of the picture. It takes focus and determination to get most businesses off the ground. Once you begin listing the reasons you can't accomplish it, you've begun setting up the circumstances such that you won't.