Adobe apologizes for repeated outages of its Creative Cloud video collaboration service Adobe-owned cloudy video workflow outfit Frame.io has apologized and promised to do better after a series of lengthy outages to its service, which became part of Adobe's flagship Creative Cloud in 2021. Frame.io bills itself as "The fastest, easiest, and most secure way to automatically get footage from cameras to …
Translation:
We may look stressed, but we have have your data and we fuckin' own you.
You are paying us and even when we fuck up because there is nothing that you will do.
We can do what we want because we know how much hassle it is to change.
Enjoy your day.
Adobe completed its acquisition of Frame.io in October 2021 – meaning Frame.io has in theory had access to lots of help and expertise for more than six months.
That's barely enough time for the problem to register and the first meeting to be set up. Nobody's giving any help and expertise until everyone's got a charge code.
Just because you are hosted in cloud doesn't mean you can leverage it if your app sucks(which it seems so many people don't understand, and probably never will). I can't count the number of times over the past 20 years of managing web applications where the performance limits were in the app and adding more servers/cpu/whatever wasn't going to do anything. Add to that most places don't properly performance test(I've actually only seen one valid performance test in 20 years and that was a very unique situation that really can't be replicated with another type of application). I have seen countless ATTEMPTS at performance testing all of which fell far from reality.
The org I work for did tons of performance tests(I wasn't involved in any of them, but my co-worker and manager were) before we launched our app stack in public cloud in late 2011, only to have all of those numbers tossed out within weeks and the knobs turned to 11 because the tests did not do a good enough job at simulating production workloads and cloud costs skyrocketed as a result. Of course moving out of public cloud months later (early 2012) helped a huge amount, and every day since just better performance, latency and availability across the board, and saved $10-15M in the process (over the past decade) for a small org.
I'll always remember a quote from a QA director probably 17 years ago he had a whole room of server equipment they used to do performance tests on for that company (the only company I've worked at that had dedicated hardware for performance testing), his words were "if I had to sign off on performance for any given release we wouldn't release anything". That company there was a handful of occasions immediately following a massive software update we had to literally double the server capacity in production for the same level of traffic vs the day before. I ordered a lot(for us anyway) HP DL360s back then shipped overnight to get the capacity in place on many occasions.
Another company I was at(the one with the good performance test), had the fastest running app I've ever seen, over 3,000 requests per second per 1U server sustained, made possible by no external dependencies, everything the app needed was on local disk (app ran in Tomcat). One particular release we started noticing brownouts in our facilities from hitting traffic limits that we should not of been hitting. We hadn't run a performance test in a while and when we did we saw app throughput dropped by 30% vs an earlier release. Developer investigation determined that new code introduced new required serialization stuff in the code which reduced the performance, they suspected they could get back some of that decrease but far from all of it.
Then there's the DB contention issues, Oracle latch contention at a couple different jobs, and massive MySQL row lock times (60-120+ seconds at times) at other places due to bad app design. Another quote I'll forever remember from that company 17 years ago during a massive Oracle outage due to latch contention "Guys, is there anything I can buy to make this problem go away?" (I wasn't responsible for the DBs, but the people that were told him no).
I've used Adobe products professionally for over 25 years, generally they have been great, but recently they haven't. It's hard to tell if it's the machine, the system, the software or the network that is the problem, or any combination of those elements. What I can say is that at times a ten minute job can take an hour. It would be nice if the paying customer wasn't working for free as a beta tester.
What do we want? Software that runs offline without obligatory phone home to HQ.
What do the current 'must have' apps offer? Subs, subs and more subs.
Even my DAW of choice has gone the same route, which is particularly awkward for live performance of your network connection on the road is shonky. At least it will still accept a usb dongle to work offline.
Counting the days till we lose that option. I'm half about hopeful other developers will see a market opportunity to step in.
Frame.io bills itself as "The fastest, easiest, and most secure way to automatically get footage from cameras to collaborators – anywhere in the world" because its "Camera to Cloud" approach "eliminates the delay between production and post" by uploading audio and video "from the set to Frame.io between each take."
Not a word on security or privacy. Nice.
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