As much as this happens, I don't feel it's something to be expected or even okay.
The major cloud services are expensive. This extra cost is supposed to provide for cloud services' high level of flexibility. Running out of capacity should be a rare event and treated as a high priority problem to be fixed asap.
Without the ability to rapidly and arbitrarily scale, they're just overpriced server farms.
> Without the ability to rapidly and arbitrarily scale, they're just overpriced server farms.
I mean that's what cloud is (outsourced server farm). Sure they also offer services on top, but that's mostly because they want to lock you in, and can charge more for, so it's a win win for them.
And there is no magic here, someone has to get the chips, build servers and connect them to network. And while they will often overbuild for capacity, they will never do it to a degree, where they can't run out, because that would be way to expensive and not financially viable.
I don't think any cloud will ever be able to guarantee to never run out of resources.
> I don't think any cloud will ever be able to guarantee to never run out of resources.
I agree with this, but clearly there's a disconnect between how often people expect these kinds of issues and how often they actually happen. The whole point of the cloud is you pay a premium for the added flexibility. If it turns out that flexibility isn't there when you need it then maintaining your own servers becomes a lot more attractive.
>Some problems can't be fixed (eg. chip supply chain problems) even if you have more money.
They can't magic chips into existence, but leaving a major region like Germany high & dry for almost half a year sounds like planning went wrong frankly. If it were a matter of chips I would have thought on a 3+ month timescale they can steal a few from another region that has a bit of fat
A big thing I think is left out is how deeply personally invested people get in the language(s) and tool(s) they use. Technical discussions around those things become perceived as personal attacks and reasonable discussion is impossible.
I could be wrong, but I feel like a lot of the most ardent defenders are people who stick to one/a couple of languages and tools. As someone who loves a lot of languages and has liked a lot more before falling out of love, I also tend to have a bit more critical eye because I've seen the warts by comparing one language to another. No tool is perfect.
It would be interesting to see which tools people are the most defensive about. I've certainly noticed a lot of JS defenders who ignore how insane some of the weirdness of that language (never mind the ecosystem) are, but one person's observations aren't data.
The GDPR covers tracking of users, but is much more broad in scope. Simply not tracking users doesn't stop the GDPR from applying.
The GDPR provides a framework by which bad actors can do their thing legally without too much trouble. To a good actor, who only stores the data they actually need and doesn't track users, the GDPR still applies and is just as big a pain in the ass.
This is what Mozilla does. They did it with Mozilla, then Phoenix(now Firefox) saved them. Did they learn anything from that and keep developing Firefox as the best browser? Of course not, they slowly turned Firefox back into Mozilla.
People complain about Google and Chrome/Chromium for turning the browser market back into a monoculture, but it's just as much Mozilla's own fault for failing to keep up. I want to use Firefox, I want to LIKE Firefox, but Mozilla has for years now decided not to prioritize making Firefox a great browser.
AWS/Azure/etc. are just not the place to get up a low cost personal server. I think the free tier confuses people into trying it, but ultimately what you get is a tiny VM with limited services that is designed for you to rapidly outgrow.
That's okay though, because that's not why the big clouds are valuable. I'm going to refer specifically to AWS, but I also include Azure, GCP, etc. AWS is not cheap. If you only need a single host, or a small fixed group of hosts, AWS is an expensive option with little to justify the added cost. What you're paying for with AWS isn't just the resources you use, but the resources AWS keeps available for use at a moment's notice. If you don't have that need to scale your resources up and down, the costs of using AWS become harder to justify.
If the goal is to do it on the cheap, a $5/mo vps is going to do better than the AWS free tier. If you need more power, the price gap between a bare metal private server and an equivalent AWS instance just gets bigger as the server gets more powerful.
This kind of bullshit law or regulation doesn’t affect enough people to cause anyone to fight it, and I would venture to say that the vast majority of laws on the books fall into this category. Inch by inch we are divided and disempowered.
