txlpo78 (u/txlpo78) - Readit News

txlpo78 commented on Amazon S3’s 15th Birthday: 5,475 Days and 100T Objects aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/... · Posted by u/yarapavan

tw04 · 4 years ago

>Most of our customers, if they have on-premises systems—if they're lucky—can store two objects in the same data center, which gives them four 9s. If they're really good, they may have two data centers and actually know how to replicate over two data centers, and that gives them five 9s. But eleven 9's, in terms of durability, is just unparalleled

I have a tough time taking him seriously reading this - I'm not sure if he's being intentionally ignorant or intentionally misleading.

I don't know of a single enterprise customer that doesn't have their data replicated to two datacenters, and then backed up to some other medium (tape or disk-based backup appliance) for anything business critical.

Their goal is 5-9's of UPTIME - the expectation is 100% data durability. You would get fired if you architected a solution keeping two copies of data in one datacenter.

Object storage absolutely has a place and I'm happy amazon was able to push a quasi-standard for the industry. Object storage prior to S3 was a hodge-podge of proprietary plays (EMC Centera, Bytecast, etc) and sort-of standards that nobody really used (CDMI). I just wish they did a better job of fairly representing it vs. turning every opportunity into a sales pitch spreading FUD about the alternatives.

txlpo78 · 4 years ago

> I don't know of a single enterprise customer that doesn't have their data replicated to two datacenters, and then backed up to some other medium (tape or disk-based backup appliance) for anything business critical.

Longtime consultant here with BCP/DR insight into 20+ large F500 companies... I think you would be seriously surprised at how common it is for even enterprise customers to not bother with multi-DC or even offsite backups. And even among the ones that do, many of the ones that are non-cloud-based are so immature at it that I would not put money on their backups being restorable if needed. And this is even more true for your “we’re a startup, we don’t have time to worry about backing up our data!” companies, which are in abundance.

For a small peak, go look at how many people were freaking out about losing their entire business due to the loss of a single OVH data center.

Of course, as a consultant I do naturally skew towards customers that need help with this stuff, so my perspective is probably biased towards the companies that are worse off in this regard. But they’re definitely out there.

txlpo78 commented on SpaceX plans Starlink broadband for cars, boats, and planes arstechnica.com/informati... · Posted by u/samizdis

Geee · 5 years ago

Do we have information whether Starlink satellites have cameras on-board? I was just wondering one day that it would make sense to use the satellites itself to build real-time maps.

Tesla cars are already connected through 4G/5G (when there's coverage) and they also store video feed in their memory, which they upload when the car connects to Wifi.

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

Almost certainly not. AFAIK the technology to do street-level imagery from satellites is still mostly only on government spy satellites, and certainly isn’t cheap enough to put on thousands of nearly-disposable sats. The type of imagery you see from Google Maps is taken from airplanes.

txlpo78 commented on 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/caution

sigstoat · 5 years ago

> -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country.

starlink is changing that, as these articles and letters are being written.

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

Elon himself has stated that Starlink is not intended to and should not be seen as a competitor to traditional terrestrial ISPs. It’s meant to supplement people in rural and possibly exurban areas, but it will not be breaking the monopolies that ATT, Comcast, etc hold over urban areas.

> So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.

...

> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."

> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."

From https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

txlpo78 commented on The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem garrettbattaglia.com/post... · Posted by u/gwoplock

wffurr · 5 years ago

“They turned the power off for many and just left us in the dark” is hard to reconcile with “Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out.”

I mean, yeah, Mother Nature rode in and fucked things up pretty good. But it’s been known for years both how to prepare for this and that it’s been needed (see the FERC report about 2011). There’s pretty clearly someone to blame, and it’s the grid operators, regulators, and the politicians and voters that enabled them to cut corners this hard.

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

Did you misread my comment? I didn’t say this event was due to Mother Nature, and the entire second half is specifically about how the Austin Energy grid is mismanaged and victim to cut corners.

txlpo78 commented on The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem garrettbattaglia.com/post... · Posted by u/gwoplock

qqqwerty · 5 years ago

Just a reminder the your junior Senator (among many others[1]) mocked California and our electric grid when we were hit by record wild fires last year. He also voted against federal aid for Hurricane Sandy because it only impacted blue states.

And maybe you should look up the timeline on when your state representatives ran to fox news and tried to blame the green new deal and windmills for the outage. I am sure the national discourse would be a bit more sane if it wasn't kicked off by Texas politicians spreading 100% FUD.

You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.

[1] https://twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/1361693012225650688

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

Lol, this could not be a more perfect example of exactly what I’m talking about. Nowhere in my comment did I say that Texas politicians are not to blame (in fact, I said the opposite) and yet here you come riding in to “remind me” of some actions that Texas politicians did that have absolutely no relevance to the issue at hand.

> You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.

I don’t personally control Cruz or Abbott’s actions. If I did, they wouldn’t be in office. But what I can control is how I react to situations, just like you can control how you react to situations. I choose to be reasonable and expect others around me to be reasonable, because that’s how things progress. It seems you choose to double down on unproductive finger pointing and playing “gotcha”, though.

That’s fine if you don’t like Cruz. I don’t like him either. But Cruz being a dumbass and taunting California has absolutely nothing to do with the issues that affected Texas this week, and you bringing it up is completely unneeded and unhelpful. Please go have your outrage session somewhere else.

txlpo78 commented on The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem garrettbattaglia.com/post... · Posted by u/gwoplock

hn_throwaway_99 · 5 years ago

Except the east and west grids have enough geographic variation where they are unlikely to have the same grid-wise problems as Texas with a much smaller grid.

The very west (i.e. El Paso) and east parts (Beaumont) of Texas are not covered by the ERCOT grid, they invested heavily in weatherization after 2011, and neither of them are experiencing anything close to the catastrophe in the rest of Texas:

https://news.yahoo.com/parts-texas-not-ercot-power-080159059...

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

Beaumont has indeed been subject to blackouts. They’re covered by MISO and were under EEA Level 2 and rolling blackouts, and the area is currently under a boil water notice. They had ~30,000 customers without power at one point. For comparison, Austin at its worst peak had ~230,000 customers without power in a city 5x the size.

My family in the area lost power for more than a day. And as another anecdote, my friends in Lubbock (also not part of ERCOT) were powerless for two days.

I’m in Austin, and while things indeed seemed worse here than either Lubbock or Beaumont, they were still quite bad in those places, too.

txlpo78 commented on The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem garrettbattaglia.com/post... · Posted by u/gwoplock

gwoplock · 5 years ago

> But none of the other states have giant winter blackouts like Texas had this week, and most of them have worse weather.

Not exactly true. SPP the grid operator for OK and the area immediately east of Texas did have to go to EEA3 twice and implement rolling blackouts

https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/

>Feb. 15 at approximately 12:10 pm. While still under EEA Level 3 and after exhausting reserves, SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.

>Feb. 16 at 6:15 a.m. SPP declared an EEA Level 3. System-wide generating capacity had dropped below current load of approximately 42 gigawatts (GW) due to extremely low temperatures, inadequate supplies of natural gas and wind generation. SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

MISO, the grid that covers parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and more also had to do this: https://www.entergynewsroom.com/news/entergy-forced-initiate...

txlpo78 commented on The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem garrettbattaglia.com/post... · Posted by u/gwoplock

gwoplock · 5 years ago

If I'm reading http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi... right there is no power across the DC_L (Laredo VFT), DC_R (Railroad) and DC_S (Eagle Pass) HVDC ties.

for posterity:

  DC Tie Flows  
  DC_E (East)  -595  
  DC_L (Laredo VFT)  0  
  DC_N (North)  -218  
  DC_R (Railroad)  0  
  DC_S (Eagle Pass)  0

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

For reference, the Laredo, Railroad, and Eagle Pass ties are all connections to Mexico’s power grid. They’ve been at zero most of this week because Mexico is also dealing with major power outages along the border, and so they don’t have any electricity to share.

The North tie connects to the Western US grid in Oklahoma, while the East tie connects to the Eastern US grid near the border with Arkansas/Louisiana. They’ve been fluctuating between 0-600 this week depending on how much power has been available on those grids.

txlpo78 commented on The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem garrettbattaglia.com/post... · Posted by u/gwoplock

reportingsjr · 5 years ago

Can you provide a source for that?

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225369

> the Midwest went into a power emergency of their own, and ERCOT was no longer able to import approximately 600 MW.

txlpo78 commented on The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem garrettbattaglia.com/post... · Posted by u/gwoplock

Meekro · 5 years ago

Texan here, living in a suburb of Houston. This was a really unique week, but not that bad I think. Everything was totally covered in snow Monday through Wednesday, which was super-weird for Texas. My power was only out on Wednesday, 9am-6pm precisely. Pretty sure it was a rolling outage because it died and came back on the hour. Our water comes from a neighborhood well shared by about 10 houses here. That means when we lose power, the pump stops and we have no water. Our heating is natural gas, but lack of electricity to run the fan motors means no heat.

When the power failed, neighbors went door-to-door making sure everyone had enough food, water, and blankets. Some people had indoor fires going and invited others to come and stay warm. One neighbor had a backyard pool and he let us come in with buckets and take back some water for flushing toilets.

Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts. Most of the roads were covered with ice on Monday/Tuesday so safe driving was limited to 15mph. This made it hard for repair crews to get to where they were needed.

Grocery stores had lots of empty shelves, but plenty of food, too. Safely driving to one was the hard part. Again, 15mph is pretty much your limit unless your car has AWD, winter tires, etc. I saw some photos showing huge lines to get into stores, and that was misleading-- it's probably just people waiting for the store to open. Store hours were heavily reduced. The store website might say they'll be open 12pm-5pm, but then not actually open until 12:30. When that happens, people would line up and wait (or wait in their cars). With dangerous road conditions keeping non-desperate shoppers away, I never saw the stores get overcrowded.

Overall, things were pretty okay as far as I saw. I feel like some of the media reports were focusing in on the worst of it and gave readers a very wrong impression of how the average Texan was faring. To be fair, though, it would really suck if you broke a leg or otherwise needed medical care on Monday.

[EDIT] Couple things I forgot to mention- There was another neighbor who had a generator that she was using to run an electric heater and heat up a single room in her house. She invited her neighbors to come and spend the night there if anyone was too cold, but power came back before the night came. Also, we had every faucet in the house dripping water-- this was enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I saw some burst pipes spraying water when I was driving on Monday, but they seemed to be in "abandoned" businesses-- some small auto repair shop or something where no one came in on Monday, so the heat was off and the faucets weren't dripping.

txlpo78 · 5 years ago

I’m in Austin and I have to agree. The media and especially social media would have you believe that the literal apocalypse happened this week (if you dare, go read r/Austin and witness how many people are having ragefits insisting they are going to actually die if Adler doesn’t personally restore their power ASAP). This situation has been very bad, especially in terms of property damage (broken pipes etc), but it still has been an easier situation than something like a hurricane or the floods in Houston, yet I don’t see r/Houston turn into a harbinger-of-doom support group whenever a hurricane hits.

I think the fact that this time there is “someone to blame” is really exacerbating the outcry. When a hurricane hits, everyone sort of accepts that Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out. But this time, everyone seems to be set on being angry at state/city leaders and really wants to make their voices heard.

> Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts.

That’s true for most of the state, but it is worth noting that in Austin, it wasn’t this. The people you are hearing talking about multi-day blackouts (I was one of them) are likely Austinites where the poor state of the city electrical grid meant that they could not do rolling blackouts. They turned power off for many and just left us in the dark for days. And that’s a whole other issue that needs to be addressed, along with all of the ERCOT issues etc.