This is a wonderful story of how Pijul and Nest worked hard to overcome challenges brought about by the OVH data center fire earlier this year.<p>Also, I really like this footnote:<p><i>The realisation that naming things is a discipline of its own has probably even been one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century. Cantor probably started that, by rebuilding foundations for mathematics (definitions were particularly fuzzy before him), Wittgenstein established a link with philosophy, blurring the distinction between mathematics and philosophy. Kuhn even established a distinction between the scientists who name things (whom he called “revolutionary”) and the others (the “normies”). Deleuze restated the role of the philosopher as a creator of concepts (which also applies outside of science), or in other words, as a professional namer. And by the way, the history of Computer Science is full of such half-philosophical, half-mathematical discoveries, where naming is almost everything: Turing machines, Communication Complexity, Yao’s principle…</i>
Re: the part about using your own home-grown leader replication on top of Postgres: it seems it focuses on electing a new leader if it fails: do I understand that all database traffic gets routed to the leader? Do you serve read-only queries from the local replica?<p>The described setup looks like something that cockroachdb would be able to handle nicely, which perhaps is a little more battle-tested than what you wrote.
<i>> In the particular case of Scaleway, the largest shareholder is very active in French politics (to the point of buying a major news outlet), and a vocal supporter of the side that, in the last four years alone, caused months of riots (only stopped by Covid-19), organised militia against its fellow citizens, gave presidential interviews to magazines equating black people to slaves, and didn’t immediately and strongly object to threats of a military coup “in memory” of colonisation in Algeria.</i><p>Wow... that's... an extremely partisan description of Emmanuel Macron, to say the least. In particular, there's a lot to dislike about how Macron and the government handled the Benalla scandal, but saying they "organized a militia against its fellow citizens" is about as honest as saying "the US government is running extermination camps" because it detains immigrants.<p>Otherwise, the takeaway from that section seems to be "Scaleway is out of bounds because its largest owner is a supporter of the President of the Republic"? I'm sorry, but what?<p>What's next, you're not allowed to connect to a Pijul database if your ISP is Free, because Free is also owned by Xavier Niel? You're not allowed to contribute to the code if you were taught at the 42 School? (yes, I'm caricaturing, but still)<p>I'm not completely against politicization of tech; I get not wanting to build AI that ends up being used for militant policing, for instance; in this case, I get not wanting ties with Dassault to avoid getting tangled with the arms industry. But advertising "we won't work with this company because a shareholder is a support of the president and the president went on French Fox News once" is the kind of ultra-divisive, "we will separate the world into good guys and bad guys and erect an impassable wall between the two" mentality I just can't get behind.
I've never heard of etcd being described as a "leader election tool." I'm sure it works, just not sure that's why it was written or how that might even look.<p>Also, as pleased as I am that pijul exists and as grateful as I am for the tireless efforts of the author of the post in trying to bring it about, I am less than enthused that an i3 notification bar and a laptop is a major contributor in the supply chain of backups for a server that people are supposed to trust as the final resting place of their code. There are several free-ish tools out there that allow this type of automation to take place that are more reliable, e.g. CircleCI.
"OVH, the largest cloud provider in Europe"<p>I wonder if this is a factual statement or just blathering. OVH had €600 million revenue in its last full year. AWS had $45370 million. If even 2% of AWS revenue is from Europe, then AWS is larger.