AWS private rates gives PingCAP ~47% off list price. Wonder which services got the biggest discounts? Unsurprisingly for a db company the cross-az traffic is 15% of their bill.
This is similar to how wind and solar actually work, except CfD payments are taken from consumers directly rather than indirectly through taxes. Price at £5 in summer - wind still gets £90. Wholesale price in UK has little relation to actual cost.
To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:
The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...
And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.
So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.
That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?
Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
Ukraine has backups and redundancy in allied countries. Russia has been doing the opposite recently, trying to reduce their dependence on foreign infrastructure, which now bites them in the ass since it concentrates them into a small number of physical locations in strike range of Ukraine.
They just re-host it on chinese clouds. Most of european part of russia dont have mobile internet for years now and it did not change much for people living there.
Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.
> So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public
Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.
The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.
The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.
A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.
Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.
Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.
So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.
That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.
The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).
If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.
In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.
Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
A lot of the smaller drones that Ukraine is using only do limited damage - they may start a fire that can spread, but are not going to destroy an entire larger facility (although the Flamingo can do significant damage). Many Russian energy facilities just get hit repeatedly over time - Russia will fix as fast as they can. Staggering hits seems to make sense.
Energy facilities have the destructive energy stockpiled on-site. Don't need to fly in much force yourself.
Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.
I think the energy facilities being hit are mostly refineries - not storage, and anyways any bulk storage is just temporary for bulk transport for export or to the front, etc, so having it in 25gal cans wouldn't be very helpful!
Countries still have strategic reserves, but usually of crude, not refined product --> decentralized reserves would help with supply cuts by any cause. The benefit would be too individual vs export/frontlines, so won't happen.
There are chemical based emp bombs, NNEMPs, if the penetrate through to the inside and set that off it seems like it would be pretty effective on datacenters.
Russian air defense is multi layered and relatively strong, so one of Ukraine's main strategies so far has been just to overwhelm them with volume. You want mass volume cheap and cheerful, not expensive ones, unless for the occasional strategic target.
Ukraine only has limited number of more capable missiles/drones like Flamingo FP-5 and Neptune, although now the FP-7 is about to hit volume production, followed by the FP-9, as well as Europe-supplied missile and anti-missile systems, so it remains to be seen if this will change Ukraine's strategy ... I tend to doubt it - they will have firepower to retaliate much harder, and at further distance, when they want to, but I expect they don't want to unilaterally escalate.
I'm surprised they didn't go the debt route, trade finance could cover their customer orders. I know they are risk averse in case companies back out of orders, but bringing on more shareholders is its own form of risk.
Is something else going on here, are they locking in orders from AMD and other suppliers beyond their current order backlog?
Debt can bankrupt you, equity can’t. They’re concerned the meme companies will collapse, cancel their orders and then kill them. Then mr bezos will turn up and liquidate their assets.
Or… they could just take on equity investment at no risk.
This is a crazy take. If you can raise on good terms (or better) then it almost always beats debt. Debt can make it a lot harder to raise or take on more debt in the future.
They're profitable, they are going to get the best terms possible at this moment.
But if they're just scaling inventory, debt makes way more sense because they payoff is almost instant as soon as they fulfill the order to the customer. I agree the math is hazier when you're talking about massive capex, growing headcount, or other longer-horizon capital commitments. But if they just need to buy inputs to sell output to complete an order backlog, selling a portion of the company seems odd.
The people running the company are people who lived through the tech crash, and saw how quickly the entire economy around them can evaporate. At Sun, only slightly exaggerating, they went from flying high and controlling a market segment, to seeing all the demand evaporate and customers vanish, leaving the company holding the bag on just massive piles of inventory, basically in a day.
When you sell shovels, even slight downturns are massively exaggerated because the shovels can be resold, and if some of their customers go under, it's not just that demand that goes away, it's all the demand that can be satisfied by their customers purchasing second hand servers from the bankruptcies instead.
No-one can really say how long this bubble will last. Might pop tomorrow, might be a decade. But if Oxide funds inventory on debt, and the bubble pops, they go with it. Whereas if they fund on equity, and it pops, they will come out the other side just fine. The cost of this is that the old stockholders have a slightly lower upside.
They can likely fund the purchase orders for 10% while they grow. Sounds cheaper than giving away a percent of all future profits. This is very common.
That would mean they would be growing slower. Being common is irrelevant.
Raising a Series D is an attempt to permanently increase the velocity of their enterprise. The change in the cap table is negligible if they succeed.
Raising debt right now would be a massive unforced error given they were able to shore up half a billion dollars in funding. If the funding well were dry then it'd be a different story, but that's not the case.
They said they are profitable aside from funding purchase orders, they don't need capital to fund growth. If they said they raised in order to grow faster and that they were not profitable then I would agree with you.
Here are some bugs:
- `ADD m.a.c :inc` update expression wrote a literal top-level m.a.c attribute but didn't change the nested number.
- TransactGetItems returned fields not requested.
- update expression can update the same key multiple times.
In total my conformance suite found 583 failures out of 1279 tests.
Thank you. I'm going through the DynamoDB issues now, starting with the three you listed. The Parity Suite is great. I'm wiring it into fakecloud's CI.
Funny fact, DynamoDB local fails about 100 of my conformance tests. Mainly around error message formatting and text. Just be careful about parsing those.
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