jotterbrain

The part about Apple is not accurate. Apple operates several dozen datacenters, has spent north of $30 billion building them and expanding them in recent years, operates their own Kubernetes (was Mesos) cloud platform that looks a lot like Heroku internally, and leverages public cloud for a couple parts of iCloud as a redundancy play, and no more. Maps helped prompt the expansion from single-homed iTunes legacy datacenter strategy, but even that iTunes legacy has been online since the early 2000s. Note that my context ends almost a decade ago, so, there’s that. The fleet dedicated to Maps alone when I worked there was large enough to be its own FAANG/MAMAA.

They’re in the datacenter game long term. In no universe does Apple “host iCloud in other company’s clouds”. Apple is notoriously a control freak and would never place their strategic services at the whim of cloud AZs. That idea was proposed and quickly eliminated. (Believe it or not, it is possible to spend that much on Azure/GCP and still only use it for basically blobs. How do you think they moved so easily in 2018ish?)

Filings from the chassis stamper, which yours certainly were given the combination of circumstances and vendor, are present when the machine is installed. If you’re buying racks, your integrator inspects them. If you’re buying U, you do. It’s a five minute job to catch your thank-God-my-career-was-short story before the machine is even energized, which I know because I’ve caught the same thing from the same vendor twice. (It’s common; notice several comments point to it.) Why do you think QC benches have magnifiers and loupes? It’s a capital expenditure and an asset, so of course it’s rigorously inspected before the company accepts it, right? That’s not strange, is it?

You can point at Google and speak in abstracts but it doesn’t address the point being made, nor that your rationale for your extreme position on cloud isn’t as firm as you thought it was. Is Dropbox the only time you’ve worked with hardware? I’m genuinely asking because manufacturing defects can top 5% of incoming kit depending on who you’re dealing with. Google knew that when they built Platform A. The lie of cloud is that dismissing those problems is worth the margin (it ain’t; you send it back, make them refire the omelette, and eat the toast you baked into your capacity plan while you wait).

They’re saying it’s a surprise to hear that Dropbox doesn’t know what QC and order acceptance means. And it is, I agree. That you spent the time investigating it, implying those servers were in production, is a shibboleth to those of us that know what we’re doing when designing hardware usage that Dropbox doesn’t. It is, however, your self sourced report and we don’t have an idea of scale, so maybe they do and you’re just unlucky.

And no, operators don’t disassemble to perform QC. And no, I could hire an entire division of people buying servers at Best Buy, and disassembling them, and stress testing them, and all of that overhead including the fuel to drive to the store would still clock in under cloud’s profit margin depending on what you’re doing.

You’re of course entitled to develop your cloud opinion from that experience. That’s like finding a stain in a new car and swearing off internal combustion as a useful technology, though, without any awareness of how often new cars are defective.