IIRC, some AWS services are solely deployed on and/or entirely dependent on us-east-1. I don't recall which ones, but I very distinctly remember this coming up once.
The Route53 control plane is in us-east-1, with an optional temporary auto-failover to us-west-2 during outages. The data plane for public zones is globally distributed and highly resilient, with a 100% SLA. It continues to serve DNS records during regular control plane outages in us-east-1, but access to make changes is lost during outages.
CloudFront CDN has a similar setup. The SSL certificate and key have to be hosted in us-east-1 for control plane operations but once deployed, the public data plane is globally or regionally dispersed. There is no auto failover for the cert dependency yet. The SLA is only three 9s. Also depends on Route53.
The elephant in the room for hyperscalers is the potential for rogue employees or a cyber attack on a control plane. Considering the high stakes and economic criticality of these platforms, both are inevitable and both have likely already happened.
There's no secret. This is how every single corporation operates these days. Employees chase and managers reward KPIs, real value be damned. The new game is do only what makes you look good. Anything else, bugs and all, can be a "fast follow" after shipping, which of course everyone knows is a thinly veiled way to make sure you never have to do said thing. "Promotion driven development" is real.
Lol, not only do I not want to jump back into that pit after having already climbed out, the site is entirely infested with AI bots now. So thanks but no thanks. It's a pretty worthless site now.
I see you're not terribly familiar with Costco. Membership fees account for the vast majority of net operating income for Costco and they keep markups on items at no more than 14% over cost (15% for Kirkland brand).
So yes, Costco does make most of its profit by ensuring customers are happy and continue to renew their memberships every year.
>Membership fees account for the vast majority of net operating income for Costco
This is financially illiterate because you're mixing revenue ("membership fees") with profit ("net operating income"). While it might be tempting to assume that membership fees is pure profit for them, it's not, because people only buy memberships because they're useful for something (ie. shopping at their stores). Therefore you can't strip that out from the other costs associated with operating a chain of warehouses.
It’s kind of a meme; Costco’s profits are almost exactly the same as their total revenue from membership fees, which leads people to think that the warehouses run at zero margin and the fees are their only profit source. The fees certainly give them room to run the sales at extremely low margins (though large grocers like Kroger only have something like 3% margins), but it wouldn’t take a huge shift in purchasing patterns to change this coincidence. If all the people who don’t use their membership that much dropped them and those who use them were all large-scale buyers, they would have to increase their prices just to give themselves a bit of cushion.
>It seems to amount to a similar principle, that their business model depends on repeat customers, and would fail if they lost trust.
You think dollar general is making $37.9B (in 2023) of annual revenue from one-off customers? Unless you're operating a tourist trap, or some sort of business that people only need a few times in their lifetimes (eg. real estate agents), most businesses rely on repeat customers.
Dollar stores around here pop up in small towns, killing off any locally-owned competition, and are far enough away from the big chains to mean they can charge quite a bit more while offering terrible service.
No, I think they have other advantages that are less attractive to me.
I have money to buy in bulk, care about quality, and am willing to make longer trips to stock up. The membership is trivial relative to annual groceries.
I think think the target market for dollar stores is the opposite
Oh gee aren't you cute. Costco's entire cost of doing business are covered purely by their sale of goods. The memberships are pure icing on the cake. It's not wrong to look at it this way.
I gave up on using Nextcloud because every time it updated it accumulated more and more errors and there was no way I was going to use a software that I had to troubleshoot every single update. Also the defaults for pictures are apparently quite stupid and so instead of making and showing tiny thumbnails for pictures, the thumbnails are unnecessarily large and loading the thumbnails for a folder of pictures takes forever. You can fix this and tell it to make smaller thumbnails apparently, but again, why am I having to fix everything myself? These should be sane defaults. Unfortunately, I just can't trust Nextcloud.
I gave up updating Nextcloud. It works for what I use it for and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. I'd rather not spend 4+ hours updating and fixing confusing issues without any tangible benefit.
Reminding me of the Mariners playoffs game a couple seasons ago that lasted 18 innings. That was bizarre to watch. I forget who they were facing. Astros I think?
There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
I would also add that it is the easiest and best way for me to find new musicians relevant to my tastes. I literally don't know how else I would find new bands and songs to listen to. YouTube certainly doesn't cut it (although I don't use YT Music, so I dunno).
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