
Due to the fires and power outages in California, oreilly.com is unavailable - accidentaldev
https://www.oreilly.com/index.html
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rurounijones
No geographic redundancy?

"Well, this is awkward…"

Doesn't quite cover it I think, especially given that these problems are not a
bolt out of the blue.

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majora2007
Yeah this is really weird. I remember we had fires in California and one of
our Data Centers was at risk. We migrated the apps to another primary DC.

You would think they would move it ASAP if their DC was at risk.

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Roark66
Surprising that they don't have a geo-failover location.

When I worked in the DR field many years ago all but the smallest companies
had some sort of business continuity plan if disaster strikes, but perhaps
this is an example of positive bias as only companies that already cared a lot
about DR would get a DR consultancy.

Those few companies I saw that had no DR and BCP whatsoever were usually small
companies that grew recently and their insurance provider told them to make
such plans so they have lower insurance premiums.

~~~
chrismeller
Having been through a variety of audits where this is invariably a topic that
comes up at couple of different companies you also have to keep in mind that
it’s one of those situations where one size doesn’t fit all.

A company with a call center had to have a plan in place for replacing office
space (and, yikes, call center personnel) because having people available to
answer calls and meet their SLA requirements was the biggest risk. The
servers... meh. It wouldn’t be pretty, but grabbing a machine at the nearest
Best Buy and picking up one of the semi-recent offsite backups from an
external hard drive at the CEO’s house would get everybody through.

At a dev shop with a variety of state and federal government clients the
office couldn’t matter less, what was important was geo redundancy, so we had
racks in VA and in somewhere out west, I forget where. Another instance where
everything probably could have been run (for a few days at least) off a couple
off the shelf boxes stuck under someone’s desk, but it would have to be
_immediately_ , and no one lived anywhere to do that practically, so the
second DC was invested in.

It’s all about identifying your specific risk and figuring out what to do to
mitigate it to a reasonable degree without breaking the bank. Apparently
Oreilly didn’t think geo redundancy for their main site was worth that trade
off.

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dd82
As a matter of fact, we're on GKE for most of our stuff, having moved out
about 6 months ago. There are some remnants left, however, and that's what's
causing the issue today.

The site is online, via learning.oreilly.com. The anonymous pages and login
were having issues, because the login was tied to something (not familar with
the exact details) in the DC offline.

So if you were already logged in, you won't notice much of anything
(hopefully!). But if your session expired and you have to re-log in or were
trying to see an preview of a book, that's where the problem existed.

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throwaway8941
Thank god I store all my learning material (among other things) offline, so
that my education doesn't have to depend on firefighters from the other side
of the planet.

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blub
A wise choice, but the economics are a bit different from cloud software, like
Adobe: the costs for books and training videos can add up to several thousands
of € per year and most of that knowledge will become obsolete in a couple of
years.

Many tech books should probably be rented, while the classics and very good
ones should indeed be bought.

~~~
pritambaral
That's an argument for _allowing books to be rented_, but not an argument for
_disallowing books from being bought or downloaded_.

Besides, your argument is already served by libraries. The problem in this
case is the publisher wants to be _the library_.

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ovi256
It's all fun and games until you get a GDP drop. For the areas affected, 3 day
= 1% of yearly GDP drop. But don't forget the knock-on effects.

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whoisstan
I just got an email today from the O'Reilly news letter.

Subject: 'How’d you weather the dot-com bust?'

Maybe they should focus on how to weather the climate bust.

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chrismeller
They include a separate link if you’re looking for online learning, which
gives you a login page, so clearly the part you’d care about as a customer is
still available.

Since that would also seem to be the most intensive part to keep operational
I’m confused...

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tzs
Last night when I tried it, links to the online learning site (both to the
login page and to specific chapters of books I'm in the middle of reading)
ended up at the page about the fire. The link to the online learning site from
that page just came back to that page, making me wonder what the point was.

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ahbyb
It doesn't seem unavailable. It's online, innit?

~~~
PeterStuer
It seems to be a single static page served directly from a machine at their
Sebastopol HQ, not from their datacenter in Petaluma

