I'm a DO employee on the tech side of the house. According to the CTO, the primary reason for this was actually reorg, not financial though that obviously played a part. Mostly managers got cut, with the goal of flattening the org. I'm keeping my ear to the ground but it doesn't seem like there's going to be more cuts any time soon at least. Apparently we're still hiring a ton this year, so that jives.
I dont think an existing cloud provider makes sense since they’ve all ramped their efforts pretty hard to compete with each other. I would suspect AAPL would be the buyer. It is a big risk for all iOS apps to be backed by infrastructure belonging to other companies they compete with in consumer devices. I think AAPL would want to make another option available.
I guess iCloud is hosted on AWS? I never actually looked. It doesn't seem to be that big of an issue for Apple though. And if it did happen I guess that wouldn't be so bad, I mean it could be worse. Oracle could decide to get into the cloud business by buying out DO.
This was never the case. They are self hosted and for a while they hosted a fair bit of data on Azure & AWS. Not sure if they still use Azure and AWS, but iCloud has never been on Google's infra. (Other Apple content has been served by Google at various times, maps being the big/ obvious one)
For acquirers, it makes more sense for it to be some other company that wants to add 'cloud provider' to their list of services. To avoid losing their customers to amazon or google or MS.
Someone mentioned Cloudflare as a possible acquirer which makes a lot more sense than one of the big providers. Though I wouldn't be too surprised to see Google pick them up either.
no offense but I wouldn't take your CTO's word at face value. you need to watch out for your own interest, including looking at other opportunities, even if it's just to keep yourself top of mind to others if something happens
Agreed fully. I always have an escape strategy in mind if things go south, but I'm pretty bullish on DO right now. That could always change, certainly.
I'm still amazed that there's no billing cap in Amzn/Goog.
Google tried to charge me $1000 for a service normally costing $1 / mo because of a runaway restart issue. I had a $2 / mo "max budget" on it and we responded within minutes of receiving a budget alert. I only got them to reverse the charge after doing a ton of work to prove that my team reacted in <15 minutes, and it was their budget alert that was more than 6 hours late. They still seemed to think that was fine (?!) but because I had some great graphs and a HN-oriented blogpost ready to go, they reversed it anyways. That sounds kind of like blackmail, now that I think about it, but no more than what they're doing sounds like fraud.
It's glaringly obvious that a hard cap on the budget is a missing feature, since all projects need to deal with billing. What's even more bizarre, is that Google's docs include a tutorial, with code, on how to set up this feature.
To me, this says that the shortcoming has been noted, and then a product manager has argued against implementation. If I squint I can even justify it - shutting down a website right when it gets hugely popular is not something that's easily reversed, while it's pretty easy for GCP to write off a bill for $1k.
The tutorial's budget hard limit system is actually kinda interesting as it dogfoods GCP - the budget-hit notification is sent via GCP pubsub, and a lambda (aka Google Cloud Function) then removes the billing account from the project, which shuts down the project's resources.
(To be clear, having to write/tweak code and deploy this myself is a suboptimal solution to the problem but it's neat from an engineering perspective.)
not blackmail I suspect -- you're asking them to stick by their contractual responsibilities / make up for their own failure to notify you in an edge case
on the face of it, them exceeding their max budget probably puts them in the wrong if this went to third-party arbitration
This is actually huge. Especially in a startup or other small business. Misconfiguring something in AWS (or just simply not understanding their contrived billing models) can get unpredictably expensive.
TIL. I have used "jive" instead of "jibe" for a couple of decades. At some point, words change due to usage. I wonder how many people fall into my same boat. And I used it knowing it means "music" - the way it sounded to me was to "jive" was to fit in harmony.
Amazing, TIL. I'm usually picky about words, but I've gotten this one wrong. Turns out the verb "jive" like was used here actually means to speak falsely -- a sort of literally/figuratively meaning inversion.
Curious.. does your employment agreement not put you at very, very significant personal risk for putting information out like this? Throwaway account or not?
I'm inclined to trust HN and it's community to a pretty strong degree. But forgive me for simply not seeing this as anything but controlled information release.
Your read is probably more practical than mine, and fits in better with a "don't assume malice" standpoint. I just know that social media (of which HN is begrudgingly a member) can very effectively be swayed.
I'm a DO employee on the tech side of the house. According to the CTO, the primary reason for this was actually reorg, not financial though that obviously played a part. Mostly managers got cut, with the goal of flattening the org. I'm keeping my ear to the ground but it doesn't seem like there's going to be more cuts any time soon at least. Apparently we're still hiring a ton this year, so that jives.