We need more cloud services.
It’s funny, because I’ve heard a variety of reasons why the outage happened, why it wasn’t caught in time, why it signaled a problem with hardware versus software or human error versus automation.
I think its safe to say the company is increasingly over-managed and under-staffed, no matter how you slice it. Maybe its time to just break the mega-corp up already and let some good old fashioned free market competition fix this mess.
Amazon just did more layoffs today.
some good old fashioned free market competition
This kills the billionare
this headline has mad ‘it was was in the last place i looked’ vibe.
We need to democratize the internet again, every generation there’s a ma bell pretending they own the internet. Current Gen is Google, AWS, Azure and the like, with ISPs just making sure they get their cut.
I don’t have an issue with these services existing, but in such a way that everything depends on a couple companies? Dangerous for everyone.
“There’s a monopoly” — proceeds to list 3 separate providers. Don’t forget there’s also Akami, now we’re up to 4. Oh, and Cloud Flare… so that’s 5.
The issue is more so with companies that choose to use cloud providers. They’re the ones attempting to cheap out because they don’t want to pay infrastructure costs. You also have a lack of knowledge by engineers on how to create redundant/reliable systems.
Not everything on the internet went down. There’s plenty that was just fine. So I don’t really don’t know what “democratizing” it would gain, or how.
Edit: For anyone downvoting, I’d love to hear what “democratizing” the internet means, how it would work, or be functional. Because right now it just strikes me as salty people who’s favorite site went down.
“There’s a monopoly” — proceeds to list 3 separate providers. Don’t forget there’s also Akami, now we’re up to 4. Oh, and Cloud Flare… so that’s 5.
Thats called a Cartel. and a cartel can fucking monopolize shit, dumbass.
With your personal attack your handle suits you.
Yes, yes. Go for the low hanging bait, that certainly makes you look more righter.
Democratizing the internet would mean half the known internet not hosting their infrastructure in us-east-2.
It would work and be functional exactly as the internet was designed to be, and worked and functioned for years, by hosting their own servers.
So that goes to my point that it’s on the companies that use the cloud providers. Not the cloud providers themselves.
It’s not the responsibility of the cloud providers to democratize the internet, I don’t know why you thought anyone was making that argument.
Cloud providers however are responsible for their negligence given their role in the current internet.
Fair enough there. But how do you “democratize” individual business decisions? Or are you suggesting socializing all entities?
Sounds like it comes down to money and man power, something the world is trying to do away with. As in employing actual people with skills and knowledge and investing money without seeing immediate returns. The whole world has become a cash and dash scheme and they are all just seeing how long they can get away with it before we revolt. I know where my vote lies, do you?
proceeds to list 3 separate providers
Just don’t look to hard at the market share or the client composition, sure.
The issue is more so with companies that choose to use cloud providers. They’re the ones attempting to cheap out because they don’t want to pay infrastructure costs.
I mean, do you tell people they’re cheaping out because they hire a plumber rather than spending eighteen months learning to DIY every pipe in their house? There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with outsourcing to cloud services on its face. A couple big warehouses at strategic points in town specifically designed to operate as central hubs for digital traffic makes far more sense than every single office building having a dozen different floors with two IT guys of dubious quality in a badly ventilated closet manning cobbled together rack space.
For anyone downvoting, I’d love to hear what “democratizing” the internet means, how it would work, or be functional.
One of the more successful American models for publicly owned and operated data infrastructure:
For starters: thank you for a thought out response. It feels like most people are missing the core point and just blaming the provider.
Even if there were a “public” public cloud, the underlying issue I’m getting at is with the companies that are using it. AWS has multiple regions. There are multiple cloud providers such as GCP and Azure too. Yet the companies are the ones defaulting to a single region, single provider configuration, which as we all know is still a SPOF, no matter what redundancy is built in.
To that point nowhere im saying that you can’t democratize things.
We need to ditch cloud entirety and go in house again.
I certainly don’t miss dealing with air conditioning, dry fire protection, and redundant internet connections.
I also don’t miss trying to deal with aging servers out and bringing new hardware in.
That work is still being done by someone in a data centre. But all these jobs went from in-house positions to the centres.
The inverse of the old axiom “The cloud is just someone else’s computer” is “Yes, duh, that’s how you get economies of scale”.
In-housing would mean an enormous increase in demand for physical hardware and IT technical services with a large variance in quality and accessibility. Like, it doesn’t fix the underlying problem. It just takes one big problem and shatters it into a thousand little problems.
That’s good though. It means half the internet wouldn’t fail.
I think some of you younger folks really don’t know what the Internet was like 20 years ago.Shit was up and down all the time.
I worked on a project back in 2008 where I had to physically haul hardware from Houston to Dallas ahead of Hurricane Ike just to keep a second rate version of a website running until we got power back at the original office. Latency at the new location was so bad that we were scrambling to reinvent the website in real time to try and improve performance. We ended up losing the client. They ended up going bankrupt. An absolute nightmare.
Getting screamed at by clients. Working 14 hour days in a cramped server room on something way outside my scope.
Would have absolutely killed for something as clean and reliable as AWS. Not like it didn’t even exist back then. But we self-hosted because it was cheaper.
We also need more individuals paying for “business” Internet connections at home. We need self-hosters to be able to feel comfortable running public services from their homes. And so we need a set of practices and recipes to follow, so a self-hoster can feel confident that, if one thing gets broken into, the other few dozen things they’re hosting will stay safe.
The “family nerd” hosting things for the family needs to be a thing again. Sorry, friends, I know family tech support sucks. It’ll suck so much more when it’s a web site down and nobody can reach their kid’s softball team page, and there’s a game next weekend, etc. But we’ve seen what happens when we abdicate our responsibilities and let for-profit companies handle it for us.
(I wish so hard that I had a solution ready, a corporate LAN in a box, that someone can just install and use. I’m working on something, but I’m pretty sure I over-complicated it. It doesn’t need to be Fort Knox, it just needs to be pretty good. And I suck at ops stuff.)
We need more places offering the same upload as download so people can do these things from home. Here I know spectrum only offers like 10mb upload even if you’ve got like 3gb download.
It’s not just speed, CGNAT is a near complete “fuck you” to self-hosting. You can work around it with a VPN endpoint “in the cloud”, but that still means you are reliant on someone else’s computer.
It’s not only upload (I’m so lucky living in France) but CORS, DNS and other stuff that de-decentralise things IMO.
I’m so tired of my 40Mbps upload speeds. Why can I get 1.2Tbps down, but only 40Mbps up? It’s crazy.
Because that’s literally the minimum upload speed they can give you. If you’re pulling down data at 1.2Gbps, you’ll be sending back 40Mbps in response traffic. If they could give you less, they would.
I actually only go for the 400Mbps down plan, and it’s 40Mbps up across all of their plans, including the 1.2Tbps plan. I believe it’s some outdated hardware limitation of cable or something, at least that’s what I’ve heard.
You need a new modem that supports the higher upload speed protocol. And having a DOCSIS 3.1 isn’t enough… it has to be a DOCSIS 3.1 that supports the new protocols. I had to switch to a Hitron CODA because my Netgear CM1000 wasn’t enough anymore
At least where I’m at, Spectrum also blocks a lot of ports. Can’t even use FTP!
most consumers don’t need upload speeds. they aren’t uploading anything. most people’s internet traffic is like 99.9% streaming videos at this point.
Yes, so? So it’s fine to for literally no reason forcibly limit it? Just because old people don’t need 1tb phones doesn’t mean we should just make all iPhones 256mb phones.
Everyone with a cloud backup for anything needs a decent upload speed or it takes days to complete a backup
Well the rest (0.1%) needs good upload speed for their home servers. /s
Companies with lots of traffic certainly needs fast uplinks.
So upload speeds are not irrelevant and needs to accompany downloads speed for the health of the Internet infrastructure, as it trickles down to the households eventually.
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The last time I looked at bus internet for my location, they wanted 3x the price for 2/3 the speed. At my actual job 20m away, I have the same provider and a business acct. Same downtime, same equipment, only unlock port 80 and 443.
Maybe with symmetric fiber and if the electricity prices lower I’ll go back to that. Before the advent of convenient and cheap providers we had ou webservers, irc servers and some game servers at home… but the cost of that and the additional maintenance nightmare makes that less desirable than having OVH doing it all for me…
Homes should come with a static IP address.
Even just ipv6 would be nice so that we don’t need NAT
Tell me more about your thing!
I’m working on a decentralised sharing protocol, and I’d love getting likeminded people together.
We need to put Amazon in the cloud.
Cuz, you know, the cloud never goes down 👎. /s
We need more self hosted services
Aren’t those even less reliable? I participated on MetaFilter for a long time, a website running on a server in a guy’s closet. It was up and down, up and down. It became the bane of his existence. It was slow. I’ve heard other similar stories over the years.
So I’m genuinely curious - how would this solve anything?
I think they are saying they would rather depend on software and hardware that they can more or less control rather than cloud services
Reminder to everyone, if you aren’t necessarily worried about uptime too much, and have a spare device at home, you can host personal websites and various services that might be useful for yourself or friends and family. To keep it simple, all you would really need is
- an up-to-date router that isn’t end-of-life
- a firewall that geo blocks traffic from outside your country and blocks all ports except 80 and 443
- port forwarding 80 and 443 to your device
- setup dynamic dns service (some routers can handle this)
- a domain name
Keep your device and router updated and reboot it every once in a while to load the updated kernel. Then just install some web server software or whatever on your device and point your domain to it.
Together, we can decentralize the web a little bit 🙂
As a novice DON’T put your devices on the open Internet. Use something like tailscale or Splittunnel. You can give your friends access through that.
Thats why I suggested an up-to-date router that isn’t end-of-life. If you keep your router firmware updated, your firewall on, and your “server” updated, then you are as protected as any VPS that has ever been deployed.
Tailscale is centralized and prevents you from accessing your devices if it goes down, which is what the OP points out. If we want some decentralization, we can configure our current equipment to do so. Its not so difficult if you spend some time reading your router’s documentation and keep everything behind it updated. NAT firewalls are pretty good at keeping bad things out.
You are likely to get away with this if your website gets little traffic.
But to much and your ISP is likely to tell you to knock it off, or just close your subscription.
If they’re not actively blocking ports 80 and 443, then its pretty clear they are allowing their users to host websites (unless their terms of service specifically say don’t host websites)
What kind of services?
I’m having trouble imagining what’s possible and worth hosting for friends and family.
Any good guide to set this up?
It will totally depend on the equipment you plan on using, but in general, your router’s manual/documentation should say whether it supports Dynamic DNS, how to configure your firewall, and how to enable port forwarding.
From there, your device’s operating system should have documentation on how to perform maintenance, and the web server software you plan on using should have guides on how to get it running on your OS of choice.
For example: If you want to host some websites on your device (or just want a nice web-based control panel for your “server”), do a fresh install of Debian 12 and then install something like Virtualmin or HestiaCP. Those two include various web apps that are easy to install and run with a few clicks, like a Wordpress or something.
But in any complex system, the single point of failure is so important!
