[TeMPOraL]

Solutions based on third-party butts have essentially two modes: the usual, where everything is smooth, and the bad one, where nothing works and you're shit out of luck - you can't get to your data anymore, because it's in my butt, accessible only through that butt, and arguably not even your data.

With on-prem solutions, you can at least access the physical servers and get your data out to carry on with your day while the infrastructure gets fixed.

[chupasaurus]

Any solution would be based on third parties, the robust solution is either to run your own country with fuel sources for electricity and army to defend the datacenters or rely on multiple independent infrastructures. I think the latter is less complex.

[dijit]

This is a ridiculous statement. Surely you realise that there is a sliding scale.

You can run your own hardware and pull in multiple power lines without establishing your own country.

I’ve ran my own hardware, maybe people have genuinely forgotten what it’s like, and granted, it takes preparation and planning and it’s harder than clicking “go” in a dashboard. But it’s not the same as establishing a country and source your own fuel and feed an army. This is absurd.

[HighPlainsDrftr]

Correct. Most CFO's I've run into as of late would rather spend $100 on a cloud vm than deal with capex, depreciation, and management of the infrastructure. Even though doing it yourself with the right people can go alot further.

[chupasaurus]

The GP's statement is about relying on third parties, multiple power lines with generators you don't own on the other side falls under it.

Fun related fact: My first employee's main office was in former electonics factory in Moscow's downtown powered by 2 thermal power stations (and no other alternatives), which have exact same maintenance schedule.

[Godel_unicode]

Assuming you have data that is tiny enough to fit anywhere other than the cluster you were using. Assuming you can afford to have a second instance with enough compute just sitting around. Assuming it's not the HDDs, RAID controller, SAN, etc which is causing the outage. Assuming it's not a fire/flood/earthquake in your datacenter causing the outage.

...etc.

[killjoywashere]

Ah, yes, I will never forget running a site in New Orleans, and the disaster preparedness plan included "When a named storm enters or appears in the Gulf of Mexico, transfer all services to offsite hosting outside the Gulf Coast". We weren't allowed to use Heroku in steady state, but we could in an emergency. But then we figured out they were in St. Louis, so we had to have a separate plan for flooding in the Mississippi River Valley.

[hinkley]

Took me a second.

I didn’t know the cloud-to-butt translator worked on comments too. I forgot that was even a thing.

[trevyn]

Oh that’s weird, because it totally worked for me with “butts” as a euphemism for “people”, as in “butt-in-seat time” — relying on a third-party service is essentially relying on third party butts (i.e. people), and your data is only accessible through those people, whom you don’t control.

And then “your data is in my butt” was just a play on that.

[TeMPOraL]

I keep forgetting that I have it on, my brain treats the two words as identical at this point. The translator has this property, which I also tend to forget about, that it will substitute words in your HN comment if you edit it.

But yeah, it's still a thing, and the message behind it isn't any less current.

[crankylinuxuser]

There is a cloud I've developed that is secure and isn't a butt :P

https://hackaday.io/project/12985-multisite-homeofficehacker...

I made IoT using cheap (arduino, nrf24l01+, sensors/actuators) for local device telemetry, MQTT, node-red, and Tor for connecting clouds of endpoints that aren't local.

Long story short, its an IoT that is secure, consisting of a cloud of devices only you own.

Oh yeah, and GPL3 to boot.