Viewing profile — kovyrin

I wrote about a workflow I’ve been using to manage AI agents across multiple projects using structured PRDs and task lists. It’s a manual, markdown-based approach that ended up bei…

> I think it can be summarized as "recklessness" (i.e. jumping the gun without proper understanding of/regard to foundational concepts) Well… I tried to approach it properly. You g…

Great comment! Thanks a lot for sharing this.

Those weren't outages for a specific instance. But from the whole pool of instances we were running 2-3 would have networking issues, random unexplained hangs requiring an instance…

We had reserved instanced and regular ones, we did not see any patterns in stability issues between those. Re: instance types - I do not really remember which instances we were usi…

Honestly, just as it is with many SAAS companies at some scale, we do not need care about any specific customer's traffic anymore. Simply because we get so much traffic already fro…

We get free inter-DC connectivity for free with Softlayer. There really is no difference for us between connecting to a server within a DC or between datacenters (aside from added …

No, I really do not think going to EC2 could be beneficial in any way in terms of improving resiliency compared to Softlayer. SL allows you to control which VLANs your box will end…

AFAIK Softlayer has hourly-based rental for real hardware as well. Never tried that, so could not comment on it though.

Softlayer manages the network for us. They offer a fully isolated backend network (frontend connection to the world is optional). For frontend connections we simply use iptables.

My personal experience within the last 7 years: * Softlayer – the best option in terms of quality of service, quality of hardware, quality and size of the infrastructure (geo distr…

With Softlayer I get multiple locations (transparently routed 100% transparent backend connectivity), get 1-2 hrs provisioning speed, I do not need to worry about networking and ha…

Colo - that's an option I'll try to stay away from as long as it is humanly possible. All of my experiences with colo hardware caused a lifetime of pain so that I'm happy to be pay…

Yeah, that (worker nodes, async processing, etc) seems like one of those ideal use-case for clouds that I could definitely support as a viable option for companies that aren't read…

1-2 hours is their new server provisioning time. For HW issues we use nagios (that checks raid health and ECC memory health regularly) and at the moment we just file a ticket with …

Yes, it really does look like @stephen-mw is talking about a migration to an owned/colocated hardware. And that's a very different kind of hairy mess I'd prefer to stay away from a…

This comment is pure gold! That's exactly what I wanted to explain here and you did it so well. Thanks!

Absolutely, 100% agree. Thanks for the comment!

If only it were that simple... But every second relatively young engineer I interview points out that "But Netflix! Look how good the cloud works for them!" and once again I need t…

Oh, there wasn't a handful of servers after we finished the migration (we have migrated a bit late IMO, so we had a lot of traffic even back then). And today, with much larger infr…

Yep, that is why I specifically noted in the article, that given enough resources, it is possible to survive and even thrive in the cloud (Netflix being one of the best examples of…

Yep, that is why in the article I specifically pointed out that we have migrated from EC2, but we are still a loyal customer of some of AWS services and those work really nice for …

We use DNS-based load balancing along with an HA pair of load balancers in each datacenter. If the DNS health check fails, we stop sending traffic to a failing frontend LB. If fail…

Yes, completely agree. Maybe I'd just add one more case here: some users are OK with locking themselves up to AWS by treating it as a platform from the day one and building on top …