Data Centers IN SPAAACE | Discord GDPR Fine | AWS Fires Dead Wood

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: The EU wants to put servers in orbit, a GDPR penalty for Discord, and Amazon has the hatchet out.

1. ASCEND Your Infra Above the Cloud

First up this week: The EU’s bonkers-sounding plan to launch orbital data centers. Someone with too much budget has flashed the cash and contracted a bunch of hungry firms to tell them if it’ll work.

Analysis: Strange pork

For a couple of million, I’d be happy to advise. The short answer: No. The long answer: Nooooooooo.

Sebastian Moss: EU feasibility study for ‘ASCEND’ space data centers

‘Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero emission and Data sovereignty’ is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe research program, and aims to see if data centers in space would lead to fewer emissions than those on Earth. … The first stage of the study sets out to answer a critical question: Whether the emissions created by producing and launching the space data centers would be less than that generated by ground based ones.
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Thales Alenia Space … is teaming up with several others for the study: Climate companies (Carbone 4, VITO), cloud computing and IT businesses (Orange, CloudFerro, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Belgium), launch vehicle developers (ArianeGroup), and orbital systems makers (German aerospace center DLR, Airbus).
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The company, jointly held by Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), was last year contracted by NASA to study a data center on the Moon. … NTT and SKY Perfect JSAT also plan to build a number of compute- and storage-focused satellites that would together form a single data center via optical communications.

It’s really hard to find anyone who thinks this is a good idea. Kurgan counts the ways:

Idiotic in every respect. I just cannot stop thinking how stupid this idea is:
High costs,
Not repairable,
Pollution from the rocket,
Cooling issues,
Radiation issues,
Bandwidth issues to/from ground,
Can be targeted by a satellite weapon.

Just make efficient computers, power them with solar panels and batteries, and cool them with water from the sea or a river or a lake.

How much is this “feasibility study” going to cost? €2 million. jkflipflop98 has an idea:

Wow. You guys really paid out over two million … to have some bloke say, “That’s not gonna work.” … Quick! Better levy a fine against another American technological powerhouse to pay the bills. I’m sure someone is guilty of something.

2. Speaking of Which …

Discord just got fined €800,000 for breaking GDPR. The French regulator, CNIL, took the lead and extracted the cash from the VoIP/chat outfit.

Analysis: Learn from others’ mistakes

The reasons given were the sort of things that your apps might be guilty of. Have a look and see how GDPR is being interpreted now.

Marie-Laure Denis et ses amis: Discord Inc. fined 800,000 euros

[We] considered that the company had failed to comply with several obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):
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Failure to define and respect a data retention period: … CNIL confirmed that there were 2,474,000 French user accounts in the DISCORD database that had not been used for more than three years. …
Failure to ensure data protection: … When a user logged into a voice room closes the DISCORD application window by clicking on the “X” icon at the top right of the window in Microsoft Windows, they actually just put the application in the background and stay logged into the voice room [which] may lead to users being heard by other members in the voice room when they thought they had left. …
Failure to ensure the security of personal data: … When creating an account … a password of six characters including letters and numbers was accepted. [We] considered that DISCORD’s password management policy was not sufficiently strong and restrictive to ensure the security of users’ accounts. …
Failure to carry out a data protection impact assessment: … The restricted committee considered that the company should have carried out such an impact assessment, given the volume of data processed by the company and the use of its services by minors.

That’s a lot of damage. femboy cheers:

Props to the EU for keeping data giants accountable. It is a shame the data protection authorities only have resources to process so many companies, unfortunately, many get away with much more harm to user privacy. … While not a direct security breach investigation, these have high impact on user data.

“You are the product.” u/mark_fawkes agrees:

100% true. Bottom line is, these products and services are made and provided by giant corporations. Their top concern is not your privacy or even your user experience. … Their top concern is $.

3. Amazon Web Services to Fire Poor Performers

Amazon’s extended hiring freeze has trickled down to AWS. Sources say managers are being “encouraged” to let go any employees who aren’t pulling their weight.

Analysis: This is news?

While I’m no fan of grading to the curve or automatically losing the bottom cohort, if a badly performing employee can’t improve, why wouldn’t you let them go? Especially in a culture such as Amazon’s. This is true no matter what the economic context.

Kylie Robison: Web Services business extends hiring freeze

[AWS] is asking managers to weed out underperforming workers on teams that have grown too fast, and will extend a hiring freeze across the organization into the first quarter of 2023. … Amazon’s cloud business posted its slowest growth on record during the third quarter and missed analyst expectations.
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Some AWS teams … are currently above their headcount targets. … Managers of such teams are expected to “fix” the situation by the end of Q1 … by managing out low performers through performance improvement plans, attrition, and other means.
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Given the tough economic backdrop, some AWS insiders had been bracing for worse. … The cloud business’ importance to the bottom line may provide AWS employees some protection from the deeper cost cuts underway across Amazon.

“Managing out low performers.” Is that really different from how Amazon normally operates? vaidhy calls it “stressful and ruthless”:

You can be asked to dig holes and close them up again [i.e.] completely useless work. And you can be given an ever increasing quota to do it, with the threat that one of the holes you dig might have your body in it.
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The challenge most of the people outside of Amazon do not realize is that micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination, esp. as the software matures. A large part of core services have been built over several years (and decades) and they have been architected to optimize for some operations at the cost of other operations. You can think of this as how you would design a DB schema. It is a trade-off between write speed, query speed and availability. Now, think about it happening at massive scale. As an engineer, you would spend a lot of time working/waiting on partner teams to prioritize your changes while under pressure to deliver. A lot of teams ended up building the pieces on their own into their own services leading to a larger maintenance and operational load. … Keeping the lights on (KTLO) was a big ticket item on every annual plan I created when I was there.

“Performance improvement plans, attrition, and other means,” has a wonderful Orwellian vibe to it. King_TJ explains:

What usually happens is someone falls short of some new or upgraded expectation (because they’re constantly moving the goal-posts of what they expect from people). … Once you get hit with the [performance improvement plan], you’re as good as terminated.
…
At that point, you’re under a microscope. … Most people I knew there were happy to resign and go find a less stressful and more reasonable employer to work for, vs. fighting to stay there when their boss clearly considers them one of the expendable ones.

The Moral of the Story:
To write about life, first you must live it.

—Ernest Hemingway

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

Image: Greg Rakozy (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)