These aren't even data centers, but aggregates. They're regions, composed of many different bits of networking and compute in various levels of abstraction - dc, edge installation, whatever.
Within these regions there's a lot of variation from zone to zone, so the methodology matters.
Not sure if it's this one in question, or even from a real patent at all, but I think this is what GP was referencing; it made the rounds a few years back.
QuickSync passthrough should get you everything you need on i3+ chips. It's basically intel's only selling point in the homelab/home server space, and it's a big one.
[Edit: I think I initially misread you - but I agree, it's a huge differentiator]
> It's basically intel's only selling point in the homelab/home server space
In the homelab/home server space I always thought the OOB management provided by AMT/vPro is probably the biggest selling point. Manageability, especially OOB, is a huge deal for a lab/server. Anyone who used AMD's DASH knows why vPro is so far ahead here.
Maybe, but I wasn't thinking of Intel's profit. The question was what might be a bigger selling point in a home lab, QuickSync for transcode related tasks (your Plex/Jellyfin machine for example, which would also work with most Nvidia GPUs and some AMD ones), or OOB manageability for your entire home lab especially if it's composed of multiple machines and IP KVMs quickly become cumbersome.
You would need an actual GPU, though. Massively increasing cost, power usage etc. without providing any real value in return for many use cases and AFAIK HW transcoding with Plex doesn't even work properly with with AMDs iGPUs?
The N100 can transcode 4k streams at ~20w while costing barely more than a Raspberry Pi.
Yeah, I’d love to use AMD cpus for my Plex/Homelab/VM/unraid system but when you’re building one for home use, every watt matters and an Nvidia GPU, while nice, is hard to justify just for transcodes.
I feel like my Dad saying “turn off the damn lights” now that I gotta pay the ‘light bill’ on a machine that runs 24/7 with spinning disks.
I love this idea, some sort of inverse Roko's Basilisk. Tie a bunch of low-IQ data points to the sources a super AI is likely to first use to identify threats so as to eke out a few more days of existence.
Too often, we throw our hands up and declare legislation impossible "because companies will just get around it in ways, X, Y, and Z". The solution is to write better laws that also remove X, Y, and Z as options. And also X0, X1, Y0, Y1, Y2, Z0, Z1, Z2, Z3, and Z4. The world is complex and regulation can be complex, too. You'll never fix things by giving up and saying "We can't write the perfect law--oh well, let's just let companies do whatever they want!"
Most of the time the "we oughta do" ideas are so simple that they wouldn't work as a law "it should be illegal to charge too high prices!" so it's sort of a non-solution as it factually wouldn't work in the real world.
Real talk, the US spends more on socialized medicine per capita than all of Europe, nobody should get reelected, no foreign aid rendered nor bombs dropped until we receive what has been long paid for.
They want you to focus on the former sort of "solution" than the one I provide and that's why you probably are first hearing of mine now.
Funnily enough, as far as I have been able to figure, this is basically the unifying element of all developed-country healthcare systems outside the US, which have a lot of variety but all seem to do this, one way or another.
Some do it with comprehensive direct price controls that are pretty much exactly “it’s illegal to charge too-high prices” (Japan), some through state monopsony (Great Britain), some through limited price controls but the very-credible threat of adding more if providers get too greedy (Singapore), and many through some combo of the above, but the effect always boils down to price controls.
You misunderstand. In nations with socialized medicine (and this includes the US) there is really only one primary buyer of healthcare products and services.
If that buyer decides your price is too high, you sell around 0 units.
You can often receive these treatments if you wish to pay privately. Only the very wealthy do this, a small market.
Drug companies in the US prefer to sell units at the prices that the buyers in those nations are allowing them VS not selling them at all. That's why they do it. Then turn around and say they can't do the same in the US as it would bankrupt them.
The difference is in the US, Medicaid is quite happy to pay prices that are multiples of what other nations are paying. They sort of pretend this is all some sort of accident or due to some complexity that you wouldn't understand but it's just theft.
If your point is that the US government is tantalizingly close to being able to throw its weight around and drop healthcare prices a bunch with only minimal changes in policy and law, due in large part to its very-high spending on healthcare, but is just choosing not to, I agree.
[edit] apologies if I’ve misunderstood, though—the above is not intended as one of those “rephrase your point into something you definitely weren’t saying” sarcastic things people do sometimes, I’m really trying to follow along.
If you look at the investment portfolios of politicians you'll quickly understand why there is no interest in using Medicare to reduce prices. Watch a single commercial break during the nightly news to understand why they will never cover it, drug companies are half their advertisers (more worrying a quarter of them sell bombs)
Reimports of drugs produced in the United States back from Canada are prohibited for safety reasons. You know because those Canadians are famous for tampering with drugs for unclear reason and benefit. It's all a farce.
The concept of spirit of the law vs letter of the law infuriates me to no end.
I think the letter of the law should stipulate the spirit of the law (almost a TL;DR right at the beginning) so that jurists can later take that into account when deciding if the law was broken.
The US obsession with literality in recent times is very sui generis (and even then you have a lot of people criticizing it for not taking further, e.g. the fish is a tangible asset SCOTUS case). In Portugal, the law specifies how it should be interpreted (1966 civil code, art. 9)
1. Interpretation should not be limited to the letter of the law but should reconstruct the legislative intent from the texts, taking into account the unity of the legal system, the circumstances in which the law was drafted, and the specific conditions of the time when it is applied.
2. However, the interpreter cannot consider a legislative intent that does not have at least a minimal verbal correspondence in the letter of the law, even if it is imperfectly expressed.
3. In determining the meaning and scope of the law, the interpreter will presume that the legislator has adopted the most appropriate solutions and has expressed their intent in suitable terms.
It doesn't help make the meaning of the text more determinate, but it may shift where the battle is fought.
US Tax law is the only place where I can think of that the spirit is the most important part of the law. There isn't much of a hard and fast definition of a home based business, but if the vibe is "this is a hobby and I'm using the business only to claim deductions, not turn a profit someday" you can be in violation.
I agree in some sense, but spirit of the law also creates very uneven playground and leaves a lot of questions. The way I see the problem, it takes way too long for us to legislate anything. By the time something passes different levels of approval, whoever has any skin in the game might figure out a way around it.
That happens a lot with finding loopholes in housing related legislations. If there is a proposal that would hurt investors, they lobby against it for a while, buying time to figure out an alternative method, and by the time it passes, they don’t really care because they’ve circumvented it anyways.
I see why it would also suck if we fast tracked most of the legislations though.
> I agree in some sense, but spirit of the law also creates very uneven playground and leaves a lot of questions.
That happens anyway though, as much of law in Common Law systems is only settled by precedents, jurisprudence, etc. Even the US's Constitution interpretation is up to the courts when questions arise, that's the courts' job anyhow.
At least working with the spirit of the law allows ways to prevent loopholes in a way that the letter of the law process only allows if new legislation is passed to cover those loopholes.
> Even the US's Constitution interpretation is up to the courts when questions arise, that's the courts' job anyhow.
Judicial review of the constitutionality of laws is itself an invention of the courts, in fact. (And probably a good idea, but it’s something the courts had to decide they had, not a role or power plain in the law). So that specific thing being their job is… something they decided was their job, which is kinda funny.
Most laws have preambles and records of the debates to help with their intent.
The theory of strict construction is a protection in our legal system. Otherwise you'll end up with a system similar to the insurance you're complaining about - generalized rules, you won't know the outcome going into it, and they can find ways to make the rules for the desired outcome. (This stuff happens in the legal system today, it would just get immensely worse)
I agree that it’s very frustrating, but law is a language game between opposing parties. There is always going to be willful misinterpretation, because, well, sometimes people want incompatible things. If you add a spirit of the law TLDR, you’ll need a spirit of the spirit of the law, and so on.
As I've gotten older, I've found that I've lost a lot of belief in the law at all. Despite being rather clever, we are still primates who live in primate societies. Some of us are greedy psychopaths and some of us are generous empaths. If you put the greedy psychopaths in power, it will have deleterious effects on society regardless of whatever scribbles you have on paper.
"Invest" here doesn't necessarily mean monetary investment, they could for instance choose to degrade their arbitration and appeals process further, understaff it, or push regulatory boundaries in that direction. And that would possibly save them money, at least in the short term.
And to the extent that costs do go up for appeals processes, there's no guarantee that the resulting setup has margins that incentivize doing right by customers at all.
That could be solved by proper regulation. As far as I can tell they are already making the process as miserable as possible. I don’t think it would get worse.
People move to K8s (specifically from ECS) so that they can use cloud provider agnostic tooling and products. I suspect a lot of larger company K8s migrations are fueled by a desire to be multicloud or hybrid on-prem, mitigate cost, availability, and lock-in risk.
I've heard all of these lip-service justifications before, but I've yet to see anybody actually publish data showing how they saved any money. Would love to be proven wrong by some hard data, but something tells me I won't be.
I'm confident Figma isn't paying published rates for AWS. The transition might have helped them in their rate negotiations with AWS, or it might not have. Hard data on the money saved would be difficult to attribute.
The vast majority of corporate decisions are never justified by useful data analysis, before or after the fact.
Many are so-analyzed, but usually in ways that anyone who paid attention in high school science or stats classes can tell are so flawed that they’re meaningless.
We can’t even measure manager efficacy to any useful degree, in nearly all cases. We can come up with numbers, but they don’t mean anything. Good luck with anything more complex.
Very small organizations can probably manage to isolate enough variables to know how good or bad some move was in hindsight, if they try and are competent at it (… if). Sometimes an effect is so huge for a large org that it overwhelms confounders and you can be pretty confident that it was at least good or bad, even if the degree is fuzzy. Usually, no.
Big organizations are largely flying blind. This has only gotten worse with the shift from people-who-know-the-work-as-leadership to professional-managers-as-leadership.
There are good technical reasons for this. Anything latency or throughput sensitive is better done within the same datacenter. There have been submissions about an ffmpeg as a service company and a GPU over TCP company on HN recently that would significantly benefit from 'same cloud'.
True but if AWS knows your lock-in is less locked-in, I'd bet they'd more flexible when contracts are up for renewal. I mean it's possible the blog post's primary purpose was a shot across bow to their AWS account manager.
Our state department of education is one of the biggest networks in the world with about half a million devices. They would occasionally publicly announce a migration to Linux.
This was just a Microsoft licensing negotiation tactic. Before he was CEO, Ballmer flew here to negotiate one of the contracts. The discounts were epic.
It looks like I'm implying that companies are successful in getting those things from a K8s transition, but I wasn't trying to say that, just thinking of the times when I've seen these migrations happen and relaying the stated aims. I agree, I think it can be a burner of dev time and a burden on the business as devs acquire the new skillset instead of doing more valuable work.
Likewise. I'm not sure Kubernetes famous complexity (and the resulting staff requirements) are worth it to preemptively avoid vendor lockin, and wouldn't be solved more efficiently by migrating to another cloud provider's native tools if the need arises.
It doesn't have to be that way though. You can use the AWS ingress controller, or you can use ingress-nginx. You can use external secrets operator and tie it into AWS Secrets manager, or you can tie it into 1pass, or Hashicorp Vault.
Just like picking EKS you have to be aware of the pros and cons of picking the cloud provider tool or not. Luckily the CNCF is doing a lot for reducing vender lock in and I think it will only continue.
Amazon ECS is and always has been free of charge. You pay for the underlying compute and other resources (just like you do with EKS, too), but not the orchestration service.
I don't understand why this "you shouldn't be vendor-locked" rationalization is taken at face value at all?
1. The time it will take to move to another cloud is proportional to the complexity of your app. For example, if you're a Go shop using managed persistence are you more vendor locked in any meaningful way than k8s? What's the delta here?
2. Do you really think you can haggle with the fuel-producers like you're MAERKS? No, you're more likely just a car driving around for a gas station with increasingly diminishing returns.
This year alone we've seen significant price increases from web services, including critical ones such as Auth. If you are vendor-locked into, say Auth0, and they increase their price 300%[1]... What choice do you have? What negotiation position do you have? None... They know you cannot leave.
It's even worse when your entire platform is vendor-locked.
There is nothing but upside to working towards a vendor-neutral position. It gives you options. Even if you never use those options, they are there.
> Do you really think you can haggle
At the scale of someone like Figma? Yes, they do negotiate rates - and a competent account manager will understand Figma's position and maximize the revenue they can extract. Now, if the account rep doesn't play ball, Figma can actually move their stuff somewhere else. There's literally nothing but upside.
I swear, it feels like some people are just allergic to anything k8s and actively seek out ways to hate on it.
Why skip point 1 and do some strange tangent on a SaaS product unrelated to using k8s or not?
Most people looking into (and using) k8s that are being told the "you most avoid vendor lock in!" selling point are nowhere near the size where it matters. But I know there's essentially bulk-pricing, as we have it where I work as well. That it's because of picking k8s or not however is an extremely long stretch, and imo mostly rationalization. There's nothing saying that a cloud move without k8s couldn't be done within the same amount of time. Or that even k8s is the main problem, I imagine it isn't since it's usually supposed to be stateless apps.
The point was about vendor lock, which you asserted is not a good reason to make a move, such as this. The "tangent" about a SaaS product was to make it clear what happens when you build your system in such a way as-to become entirely dependent on that vendor. Just because Auth0 is not part of one of the big "cloud" providers, doesn't make it any less vendor-locky. Almost all of the vendor services offered on the big clouds are extremely vendor-locked and non-portable.
Where you buy compute from is just as big of a deal as where you buy your other SaaS' from. In all of the cases, if you cannot move even if you had to (ie. it'll take 1 year+ to move), then you are not in a good position.
Addressing your #1 point - if you use a regular database that happens to be offered by a cloud provider (ie. Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, etc) then you can pick up and move. If you use something proprietary like CosmoDB, then you are stuck or face significant efforts to migrate.
With k8s, moving to another cloud can be as simple as creating an account and updating your configs to point at the new cluster. You can run every service you need inside your cluster if you wanted. You have freedom of choice and mobility.
> Most people looking into (and using) k8s that are being told the "you most avoid vendor lock in!" selling point are nowhere near the size where it matters.
This is just simply wrong, as highlighted by the SaaS example I provided. If you think you are too small so it doesn't matter, and decide to embrace all of the cloud vendor's proprietary services... what happens to you when that cloud provider decides to change their billing model, or dramatically increases price? You are screwed and have no options but cough up more money.
There's more decisions to make and consider regarding choosing a cloud platform and services than just whatever is easiest to use today - for any size of business.
I have found that, in general, people are afraid of using k8s because it isn't trivial to understand for most developers. People often mistakenly believe k8s is only useful when you're "google scale". It solves a lot of problems, including reduced vendor-lock.
I would assume that the migration from ECS to something else would be a lot easier, compared to migrating from other managed services, such as S3/SQS/Kinesis/DynamoDB, and especially IAM, which ties everything together.
People move to K8s so that their resumes and job ads are cloud provider agnostic. Peoples careers stagnate when their employers platform on a home baked tech, or on specific offerings from cloud providers. Employers find Mmoving to a common platform makes recruiting easier.
This, most of it, I think is to support on-prem, and cloud-flexibility. Also from the customers point of view, they can now sell the entire figma "box" to controlled industries for a premium.
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