It’s mental that the entire thing is centralised. Why don’t big clients have their own servers? They’re paying a fortune every year.

The fact that the government can get taken down by a central server is mental.

Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence?

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plqbfbv 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's been a while (~10y) since I administered windows servers, but I recall they were much harder to automate w.r.t. maintenance. So Microsoft created M365 to fill that niche and have organizations offload operational cost to them.

With a linux fleet can run via SSH/ansible and you can patch thousands of machines programmatically in minutes and control the deploy at a fine level. With Microsoft/Windows it often involves/d logging in to the one AD server where everything runs, back it up via 3rd party software, apply the patches and hope it doesn't break, and if it does, call MS support, because rolling back is really your last resort (I feel it's become better since 10y ago, but I don't have hands-on experience anymore).

Our company runs on-prem Exchange since 2019, and... well... it's a PITA to work with (Legacy Outlook/New Outlook), we downgraded from M365 and it was really a step down in terms of features and reliability. OTOH I guess it's keeping us afloat today when M365 is having a really bad day.

	▲	venzaspa 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There isn't much if anything that can't be automated via Powershell and other methods. At this kind of scale, I would highly doubt that any of the servers running Exchange for EO are ever logged in interactively.

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onion2k 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They’re paying a fortune every year.

You can run your own email easily and cheaply, but if you wan to run with a team big enough and experienced enough to recover quickly if there's a problem it gets expensive fast.

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tgsovlerkhgsel 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If everyone had their own servers, either they're centrally enough managed that they aren't really independent servers or the management overhead and chaos from version drift etc. creates a mess that overall lowers the reliability of the entire system. Sure, you won't have concentrated outages like this but your instance's overall uptime is likely to be lower.

Google Workspace isn't going to be any different.

	▲	olyjohn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Whatever. People did this shit for years with little downtime. Even with Microsoft's own products.

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gpvos 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Keeping your own server(s) up, including spam control, is work that takes time and costs money. Microsoft is probably still cheaper than that,[citation needed] and has more resources to keep everything running than even a medium-sized government. So it is understandable.

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ricardobayes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes. M365 gives "free", secure emails in a scalable, hands-off way. The downside is it practically being a black box, making email issues undebuggable.

	▲	v7p1Qbt1im 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		In a sense you're also paying for delegating responsibility. You can put the blame on Microsoft. Same way companies (internal project sponsors) pay consultants to take the blame if a projects fails.

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einsteinx2 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence

It’s Microsoft we’re talking about so I feel like the latter is a given, and the former is a reasonable assumption.

Jokes aside, it does seem that somehow these hyperscaler cloud providers who tout the reliability of their multiple zones and global distribution sure do seem to always have some central dependency or single point of failure. AWS for example seems to have a global outage once every year or two at this point, or like us-east-1 problems always seem to affect other zones too. You’d think with their scale these clouds would be completely decentralized and redundant but apparently not.

	▲	LoganDark 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The problem with decentralized redundancy is that it requires separate update schedules and process controls. This directly conflicts with the desire for convenience in rolling out new updates and code changes, etc. so the single point of failure tends to be deploying new code to everywhere at once.
	▲	materielle 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Google basically is at this point, right? Not perfect, and obviously some things like DNS, Authn, and load balancing can’t be completely isolated. But overall, I think they put a ton of thought into removing software and hardware dependencies between regions, maintainence planning, and designing systems that don’t have outages correlated between regions.

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TacticalCoder 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence?

LLM generated code and/or configs?