Cloud-Exiter
Ruohang Feng @Vonng
Stop paying the cloud tax and self-host like a pro — deep dives, cost analyses and incident write-ups.
Those Who Left the Cloud Made a Killing
I spent years urging people to leave the cloud. Those who listened two years ago made a killing. Leaving has never been just about savings; it is about buying back your freedom. Cost curves move. …
Why Are People Who Leave Big Tech So Useless?
People who leave Big Tech are not stupid. They have simply spent too long using a rented mental map. Only after leaving the platform do they discover that the map has to be returned.
If There Was No Impact, Please Ignore This
A reader's RDS MySQL instance failed over twice in five days: the cloud provider's own back-end monitoring query brought it down, and the instance failed again with the same symptoms after the …
FastJSON Broke Again. Why?
FastJSON has failed again. When is “ship rough, scale hard, move fast” a defensible shortcut, and when does it become an engineering habit whose bill falls to whoever comes next?
Huawei Cloud Incident: Was IAM Involved?
Huawei Cloud confirmed abnormalities affecting some International Site accounts during a scheduled IAM upgrade window. The timing is suggestive, but the causal link remains unconfirmed.
Alibaba Cloud's 1 QPS DNS Limit Sent Me to Cloudflare
Alibaba Cloud's free DNS tier allows 100,000 queries per day—just 1.15 QPS averaged out. One throttling notice was all it took for me to move my domains to Cloudflare.
Xianyu, Qianwen, Alipay: Platform Trust 'Empowers' a Scam
Scammers hijacked Qianwen's trusted identity, then used a single Xianyu QR code to run a seamless phishing scam through official apps and trusted domains across Alibaba's ecosystem. I hope this case …
The Data Sovereignty Manifesto
As data becomes the most important means of production in the AI age, platform lock-in and cloud dependence are rebuilding digital feudalism. This manifesto calls on us to reclaim control through open …
Your SaaS, Someone Else's Kill Switch
Slack's Greater China shutdown is a reminder: the biggest SaaS risk is not price, but having your business continuity depend on someone else's business decisions.
Digoal, the Face of PostgreSQL at Alibaba Cloud, Has Left
Alibaba Cloud's leading PostgreSQL advocate has walked away, exposing a deeper struggle over the direction of China's cloud database market.
When AI Gets the Power to Gridlock a City
On the night of March 31, a large number of Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan failed at the same time. The real concern is not merely that autonomous driving failed, but that a centrally controlled, …
OpenClaw Broke npm Again: What Happens When You Ship Without Testing
OpenClaw v2026.3.22 was published to npm without its web console frontend and related build assets. The bigger problem is not the packaging accident itself, but the complete absence of post-install …
Meituan Deleted Users' Photos: Overbroad Permissions Are Worse Than a Privacy Leak
Many Android users reported that Meituan deleted files from their photo libraries. The bigger issue is not just this bug, but the still-common pattern of overbroad storage permissions in the Chinese …
Tencent Cloud 'Reduced' the Lobster King's Load by 180 GB
Tencent Cloud mirrored OpenClaw's official skill marketplace into its own SkillHub and then claimed it was helping the upstream project. The incident turned into a case study in open-source manners, …
Shockwaves at Alibaba Qwen: The Soul of the Team Walks Away
Qwen lead Justin Lin publicly announced his departure, followed by more core-team exits and a wave of speculation about compute allocation, KPI pressure, and organizational power shifts inside …
Drones Took Out Three AWS AZ: Into the Era of Bombable Data Centers
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones reportedly hit AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. If the reporting is accurate, this may be the first public case of a hyperscale cloud provider suffering direct …
Claude's Global Outage: Missiles or a Success Tax?
Claude went down globally on March 2, 2026. The cinematic theory blamed drone strikes on AWS in the Middle East, but the failure pattern points much more strongly to a front-end and authentication …
Did RedNote Exit the Cloud?
When a company that was "born on the cloud" goes "self-host first," does that count as cloud exit? A repost of a deleted piece on the infrastructure coming-of-age for China's internet giants.
Alipay, Taobao, Xianyu Went Dark. Smells Like a Message Queue Meltdown.
Dec 4, 2025, Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu all cratered. Users got charged while orders still showed “unpaid,” a carbon copy of the 2024 Double-11 fiasco.
Cloudflare’s Nov 18 Outage, Translated and Dissected
A ClickHouse permission tweak doubled a feature file, tripped a Rust hard limit, and froze Cloudflare’s core traffic for six hours—their worst outage since 2019. Here’s the full translation plus …
Alicloud “Borrowed” Supabase, the giant free loader
Founders here get asked the same question over and over: what if Alibaba builds the same thing? Alicloud RDS just launched Supabase as a managed service. Exhibit A.
AWS’s Official DynamoDB Outage Postmortem
AWS finally published the Oct 20 us-east-1 postmortem. I translated the key parts and added commentary on how one DNS bug toppled half the internet.
How One AWS DNS Failure Cascaded Across Half the Internet
us-east-1’s DNS control plane faceplanted for 15 hours and dragged 142 AWS services—and a good chunk of the public internet—down with it. Here’s the forensic tour.
Column: Cloud-Exit
A whole generation of developers has been told “cloud-first.” This column collects data, case studies, and commentary on the real economics—and traps—of public cloud rental models.
Those Who Left the Cloud Made a Killing
Leaving the cloud has never been just about saving money. It is about buying back your freedom. Cost curves move; sovereignty does not. I have spent years urging people to get out. Friends who listened two years ago made a killing. 1. The Best Trade …
Leaving the cloud has never been just about saving money. It is about buying back your freedom. Cost curves move; sovereignty does not. I have spent years urging people to get out. Friends who listened two years ago made a killing. 1. The Best Trade …
Why Are People Who Leave Big Tech So Useless?
A cutting remark supposedly from Sam Altman has been making the rounds online: by the time people leave a big company, their ambition, aspiration, and capacity to think have withered to almost nothing. Tell one of them about something that could …
A cutting remark supposedly from Sam Altman has been making the rounds online: by the time people leave a big company, their ambition, aspiration, and capacity to think have withered to almost nothing. Tell one of them about something that could …
If There Was No Impact, Please Ignore This
A reader sent me this story: his RDS MySQL instance underwent two primary/standby failovers in five days. The cloud provider’s explanation was remarkable: its own back-end monitoring had queried the instance to death. The provider then promised to …
A reader sent me this story: his RDS MySQL instance underwent two primary/standby failovers in five days. The cloud provider’s explanation was remarkable: its own back-end monitoring had queried the instance to death. The provider then promised to …
FastJSON Broke Again. Why?
On July 21, Alibaba published a FastJSON security advisory for CVE-2026-16723, rated 9.0 by its CNA and affecting versions 1.2.68 through 1.2.83. The advisory explained the flaw, its trigger conditions, and why a specified target type was not …
On July 21, Alibaba published a FastJSON security advisory for CVE-2026-16723, rated 9.0 by its CNA and affecting versions 1.2.68 through 1.2.83. The advisory explained the flaw, its trigger conditions, and why a specified target type was not …
Huawei Cloud Incident: Was IAM Involved?
At 02:49 GMT+8 on July 26, 2026, Huawei Cloud said that it had detected abnormalities affecting some accounts on its International Site, disrupting access to related services. Huawei Cloud later marked the notice as resolved, saying that the affected …
At 02:49 GMT+8 on July 26, 2026, Huawei Cloud said that it had detected abnormalities affecting some accounts on its International Site, disrupting access to related services. Huawei Cloud later marked the notice as resolved, saying that the affected …
Alibaba Cloud's 1 QPS DNS Limit Sent Me to Cloudflare
I had used Alibaba Cloud for domain registration and DNS for more than a decade. Then one morning, I received an email unlike any it had sent me before. Alibaba Cloud informed me that one of my domains had exceeded its daily quota of 100,000 DNS …
I had used Alibaba Cloud for domain registration and DNS for more than a decade. Then one morning, I received an email unlike any it had sent me before. Alibaba Cloud informed me that one of my domains had exceeded its daily quota of 100,000 DNS …
Xianyu, Qianwen, Alipay: Platform Trust 'Empowers' a Scam
My cousin messaged me today: she had been scammed on Xianyu, Alibaba’s secondhand marketplace, while trying to buy a Switch 2. She lost RMB 2,300. My first instinct was to laugh. Your mother is a police detective—so much for anti-scam education at …
My cousin messaged me today: she had been scammed on Xianyu, Alibaba’s secondhand marketplace, while trying to buy a Switch 2. She lost RMB 2,300. My first instinct was to laugh. Your mother is a police detective—so much for anti-scam education at …
The Data Sovereignty Manifesto
A specter is haunting the digital world—the specter of feudalism. A thousand years ago, a farmer was born on his lord’s estate, tilled his lord’s land, paid his lord’s rents and taxes, and lived his entire life in his lord’s shadow. He was never …
A specter is haunting the digital world—the specter of feudalism. A thousand years ago, a farmer was born on his lord’s estate, tilled his lord’s land, paid his lord’s rents and taxes, and lived his entire life in his lord’s shadow. He was never …
Your SaaS, Someone Else's Kill Switch
What Slack’s withdrawal from Greater China reveals about the digital age’s most overlooked risk April 1, 2026. April Fools’ Day. But for the thousands of Slack-using teams across Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China, what happened that day was no …
What Slack’s withdrawal from Greater China reveals about the digital age’s most overlooked risk April 1, 2026. April Fools’ Day. But for the thousands of Slack-using teams across Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China, what happened that day was no …
Digoal, the Face of PostgreSQL at Alibaba Cloud, Has Left
Yesterday was April Fools’ Day, and Digoal published a post on his WeChat account titled “My Last Day as a Corporate Workhorse at Alibaba.” The database community immediately erupted. Many assumed it was an April Fools’ joke, but I knew it was not. …
Yesterday was April Fools’ Day, and Digoal published a post on his WeChat account titled “My Last Day as a Corporate Workhorse at Alibaba.” The database community immediately erupted. Many assumed it was an April Fools’ joke, but I knew it was not. …
When AI Gets the Power to Gridlock a City
On the night of March 31, a large number of Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan failed at the same time. The real concern is not merely that autonomous driving failed, but that a centrally controlled, cloud-based architecture may amplify a single-vehicle …
On the night of March 31, a large number of Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan failed at the same time. The real concern is not merely that autonomous driving failed, but that a centrally controlled, cloud-based architecture may amplify a single-vehicle …
OpenClaw Broke npm Again: What Happens When You Ship Without Testing
Last night OpenClaw released v2026.3.22. The npm package shipped without the console frontend, so users around the world upgraded, opened the browser, and went straight to 503. 1. What Actually Happened v2026.3.22 was a substantial release. ClawHub …
Last night OpenClaw released v2026.3.22. The npm package shipped without the console frontend, so users around the world upgraded, opened the browser, and went straight to 503. 1. What Actually Happened v2026.3.22 was a substantial release. ClawHub …
Meituan Deleted Users' Photos: Overbroad Permissions Are Worse Than a Privacy Leak
Starting on March 18, 2026, a large number of Android users discovered that Meituan had wiped files from their galleries. Photos, videos, audio recordings, PDFs, Word documents: sometimes hundreds of files, sometimes thousands. Android’s own …
Starting on March 18, 2026, a large number of Android users discovered that Meituan had wiped files from their galleries. Photos, videos, audio recordings, PDFs, Word documents: sometimes hundreds of files, sometimes thousands. Android’s own …
Tencent Cloud 'Reduced' the Lobster King's Load by 180 GB
Dedicated to the open-source projects that Tencent kindly “helps.” 1. Good news: the goose strikes again On March 11, 2026, Tencent Cloud quietly launched a platform called SkillHub. It copied more than 13,000 skills from OpenClaw’s official …
Dedicated to the open-source projects that Tencent kindly “helps.” 1. Good news: the goose strikes again On March 11, 2026, Tencent Cloud quietly launched a platform called SkillHub. It copied more than 13,000 skills from OpenClaw’s official …
Shockwaves at Alibaba Qwen: The Soul of the Team Walks Away
I had become more optimistic about Alibaba over the last year, largely because the Qwen team seemed to be doing real work: shipping strong models, contributing to open source, and earning genuine international attention. That is why this personnel …
I had become more optimistic about Alibaba over the last year, largely because the Qwen team seemed to be doing real work: shipping strong models, contributing to open source, and earning genuine international attention. That is why this personnel …
Drones Took Out Three AWS AZ: Into the Era of Bombable Data Centers
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones reportedly hit AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. If the public reporting is accurate, this may be the first time a hyperscale cloud provider has suffered direct military damage to physical data-center …
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones reportedly hit AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. If the public reporting is accurate, this may be the first time a hyperscale cloud provider has suffered direct military damage to physical data-center …
Claude's Global Outage: Missiles or a Success Tax?
Claude went down globally on March 2, 2026. The dramatic narrative that immediately formed was irresistible: AWS facilities in the Middle East had just been hit by drones, and now Claude was collapsing too. The story spread fast. But it was probably …
Claude went down globally on March 2, 2026. The dramatic narrative that immediately formed was irresistible: AWS facilities in the Middle East had just been hit by drones, and now Claude was collapsing too. The story spread fast. But it was probably …
Did RedNote Exit the Cloud?
Original WeChat post Yesterday, I spotted a new article from RedNote’s official tech blog: “Design and Practice of Self-Built Data Centers under Hybrid Cloud Architecture.” I wrote a quick technical commentary on it. What I didn’t expect was the …
Original WeChat post Yesterday, I spotted a new article from RedNote’s official tech blog: “Design and Practice of Self-Built Data Centers under Hybrid Cloud Architecture.” I wrote a quick technical commentary on it. What I didn’t expect was the …
Alipay, Taobao, Xianyu Went Dark. Smells Like a Message Queue Meltdown.
Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu simultaneously faceplanted on Dec 4. Cards were debited, yet orders sat frozen at “pending.” The story rhymes perfectly with the 2024 Double-11 outage, so the leading suspect is once again the message queue or whatever …
Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu simultaneously faceplanted on Dec 4. Cards were debited, yet orders sat frozen at “pending.” The story rhymes perfectly with the 2024 Double-11 outage, so the leading suspect is once again the message queue or whatever …
Cloudflare’s Nov 18 Outage, Translated and Dissected
Yesterday the “cyber Bodhisattva” Cloudflare suffered its worst incident since 2019. For six hours, core network traffic couldn’t be delivered. ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Uber—everyone felt it. Root cause: a permission change on ClickHouse made the …
Yesterday the “cyber Bodhisattva” Cloudflare suffered its worst incident since 2019. For six hours, core network traffic couldn’t be delivered. ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Uber—everyone felt it. Root cause: a permission change on ClickHouse made the …
Alicloud “Borrowed” Supabase, the giant free loader
Chinese founders hear the nightmare scenario constantly: “What happens when Alibaba shows up?” Well, Alicloud RDS just shipped Supabase as a first-party feature. This is what it looks like when a hyperscaler parachutes into your niche. Supabase in a …
Chinese founders hear the nightmare scenario constantly: “What happens when Alibaba shows up?” Well, Alicloud RDS just shipped Supabase as a first-party feature. This is what it looks like when a hyperscaler parachutes into your niche. Supabase in a …
AWS’s Official DynamoDB Outage Postmortem
AWS just released the official postmortem for the Oct 20 us-east-1 meltdown. It’s one of the rare times we get first-hand detail, so I translated it to Chinese and sprinkled in commentary. Here’s the English recap with my notes. Incident page: …
AWS just released the official postmortem for the Oct 20 us-east-1 meltdown. It’s one of the rare times we get first-hand detail, so I translated it to Chinese and sprinkled in commentary. Here’s the English recap with my notes. Incident page: …
How One AWS DNS Failure Cascaded Across Half the Internet
On Oct 20, 2025, AWS’s crown jewel region us-east-1 spent fifteen hours flailing. More than a thousand companies went dark worldwide. The root cause? An internal DNS entry that stopped resolving. From the moment DNS broke, DynamoDB, EC2, Lambda, and …
On Oct 20, 2025, AWS’s crown jewel region us-east-1 spent fifteen hours flailing. More than a thousand companies went dark worldwide. The root cause? An internal DNS entry that stopped resolving. From the moment DNS broke, DynamoDB, EC2, Lambda, and …
Column: Cloud-Exit
People praise the cloud as carefree, with managed services easing every pain. I say clouds are pig-butchering schemes, hundredfold markups with smug disdain. Cyber landlords hold monopolies, hike the price, extract your vein. They outsource ops, …
People praise the cloud as carefree, with managed services easing every pain. I say clouds are pig-butchering schemes, hundredfold markups with smug disdain. Cyber landlords hold monopolies, hike the price, extract your vein. They outsource ops, …