Its a cousin of the mindset that the reason people don't steal is because they think they will be caught and rationally weigh up based on the value they gain and the chance of loss that its not a worthwhile action.
No, most of the time people steal because they think its wrong, and they dont want to do it.
Public trust is a real thing and varies massively by country. America is notably extremly low on this metric
Do you want performance, or correctness.
Well, if you want performance you use write through caching and in the case of distributed storage: more nodes confirming the block before returning. Huge performance cost.
Outsourcing this just means someone else makes these tradeoffs, they will prioritise the general case- and they’re even more incentivised to move the needle towards things that are most visible to the end user.
In this case, performance.
You won’t notice that theres a third commit server off-site (unless that site is bombed), but you will notice slower writes- and the general case says that people will express comparative dissatisfaction with weaker performance and use it as a justification to use another provider.
So any software company/project which actually took the time and effort to fully handle the enormous complexity, they can't sell themselves based on that fact because every other company (who didn't invest the effort) is also claiming it and the customer has no mechanism to verify the claims until some major rare event occurs.
And most of the effort is required precisely to handle those 1% of rare situations.
So then that big thing comes to you. It’s all kind of … held together by a prayer …
Trust me I’ve worked at these big places. You wouldn’t believe how much fucking luck and grace from God is allowing you to do anything with your digital life. It’s a mindfuck of a tangled mess out there, eternities worth of written code that only God ensures works together at this point, only to get more hidden with AI.
For example, you mention Backblaze. Backblaze has public posts about their durability model. They claim to use 17:20 Reed-Solomon erasure encoding. That means there are 20 shards of a blob, and you can lose 3 of them and still reconstruct the blob.
Think about that for a second. If they store 4 shards in a datacenter, that means that a loss of that one datacenter is sufficient to lose the blob, forever. That entails that blobs are sharded across a minimum of 7 data centers, or the loss of one data center might mean permanent data loss. Which one do you think is true? (In fact it's pretty clear from Backblaze's public posts that they don't shard across data centers at all, only across racks within a data center.)
Now, AWS's availability guarantee — not their durability guarantee — entails that they use a less cost-effective erasure coding ratio. S3 is designed so that your blob is available even if a whole AZ goes down, and it's well known that most AWS regions have only 3 AZs. Therefore, if you tolerate the same number of shards lost to HDD failure as Backblaze in your durability model (3), then you might need 17:30 erasure coding to get the same durability and the required availability. That means S3 is storing way more physical bytes than Backblaze — 1.76x the logical size of the blob, instead of Backblaze's 1.18x. That's more expensive, but it also gives you better availability.
Which is also why One Zone S3 is cheaper — if you don't care about the availability guarantee, S3 can do what Backblaze does and save 33% on physical bytes, and they pass on 40–50% of those savings to the customer (this is fairer than it sounds — there's more overhead than physical storage bytes).
But here's the thing. AWS has more redundancy built in than Backblaze because they make availability guarantees in addition to durability guarantees. BUT the durability model is the same, which is why Backblaze can claim equivalent durability to S3. S3 in fact has better durability — they can survive the permanent loss of an AZ without necessarily losing blobs stored there (with the exception of One Zone blobs), and Backblaze cannot. But that's not actually a factor of the durability model, which is just taking into account normal events like HDD failure. Instead, S3 has durability that's more resilient to AZ loss because of their availability model. It's a side effect that isn't actually part of the durability promise!
Not disimilar to how AI naratives are pushed on executives these last two years.
If businesses are going to cloud but without engaging / listening to competent people who know these basics -- then the blame needs to be somewhat pointed back at those very business leaders I feel.
This is not obscure magical knowledge either that is tightly controlled. Any cloud vendor will freely teach you that. Or even a google search would.
I mean, every time cloud comes up on HN we see legions of techies posting strowman arguments about why you should offload everything onto AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/fis/latest/userguide/what-is.htm...
But the problem is right there: "non-technical" leaders. Never work for one if you can avoid it.
I feel like if this was done correctly it would eat a bunch of the market, but I question how many people are actually willing to pay for "the right way". The last time I had that experience it was with Heroku which was quite a leaky abstraction.
And for that, with a simplified use case, well, they can scale up to $20k+ a month if they like, that would be ideal, and if they need a more complicated setup or enterpriseyness, migrate off with my blessing and available-not-required hands on support (again for a reasonable fee, maybe $10k if you want the white glove).
This is true. The latter half of your comment is not. At best they have a duty to shareholders. But your assertion would mean every time a company posted a loss and the price went down the execs would be in legal trouble, which is nonsense.
Something bad happens, stock goes down, angry shareholders sue because they should have been told the bad thing would happen and the stock would go down.
https://secform4.com/insider-trading/1018724.htm + https://i.imgur.com/tMBfGee.png = ?
Cue security entitlements, e.g. https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/testimony/SJUD-2364-202...
There are plenty of companies who pay no dividends and have not returned growth in share price. They’re still operating and no one’s coming to throw the execs in jail.
On the off chance that there is such a law, please cite it.
> Ce dérèglement se manifeste avant tout par la réduction de la démocratie à une logique juridique, le néolibéralisme ayant imposé une conception où le droit, érigé en garant exclusif de la liberté individuelle, relègue le politique à une fonction purement gestionnaire
automatically translated as
> This dysfunction manifests itself primarily through the reduction of democracy to a legalistic logic, as neoliberalism has imposed a conception in which the law—elevated to the status of exclusive guarantor of individual liberty—relegates the political realm to a purely managerial function.
Of course that all this is kind of circular, meaning the (neo-liberal) morality imposing itself via law on the current (and by now surpassed) morality, but that's how things usually go when it comes to societal theory.
It's very clearly not about you being able to set-up redundancy for yourself.
But it's not designed to survive TWO datacenters going offline, and in a permanent fashion.
_You_ are supposed to have three copies of everything - and two of those should be off AWS.
But when I put data on normal S3, isn't my money supposedly paying for triple redundancy?
Look, here's the documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...
"S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive redundantly store objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones in an AWS Region. An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region."
As far as I've heard before that's not with parity and three zones means three copies. But when I search now I see things about 5+4 parity, any insight here?
Not just in terms of service costs, but in time and complexity. In many cases building out that complexity is complicated and difficult. And sometimes the functionality you need isn't supported in the regions you use.