How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#21

Post by dkarapetyan » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:22 AM UTC

That's because most of these tools are built by people who are borderline psychos. I don't mean the murderous kind but the kind that is emotionally stunted, working under intense business pressures to deliver (which is really just another group of psychos higher up the hierarchy), and overworked. The best part is that there is nothing new. It's all just the same old stuff except now it's in the cloud and requires 10 layers of configuration being held together by heroic manual effort. I know you think chef, ansible, salt, puppet, etc. helps. Nope, tried them all, same thing applies and I'm no longer in the mood to learn yet another DSL for shell scripting.

It's not just AWS. This is pretty much true of every infrastructure/cloud as a service company. They either have too many knobs with all sorts of unintended interactions and half-baked integrations or they abstract away way too much and you have no control over anything and can only deploy a nodejs or django application that follows a very specific rigid structure. Oh and did I mention most of this stuff is insecure by default and if you want to do anything in a secure way then your n-layer configuration nightmare is now 10x worse (probably why most places are looking for 10x programmers). Oh and there is also networking/NAT, user management, logging, artifact distributions, service discovery, etc. to worry about as well using tools that are just as half-baked.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#22

Post by vonklaus » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:32 AM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #21

That's because most of these tools are built by people who are borderline psychos. I don't mean the murderous kind but the kind that is emotionally stunted, working under intense business pressures to deliver (which is really just another group of psychos higher up the hierarchy), and overworked. The best part is that there is nothing new. It's all just the same old stuff except now it's in the cloud and requires 10…

Is there a hello world version of this? I have been trying to pick up IaaS (insanity as a service) and it has been really difficult.

At what point does it make sense to use docker? Is it worth learning all of the above crazyness if you have less than 10K people using your service and are 1 person?

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#23

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:34 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #17

skywhopper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a static website, maybe. If you have a web application with millions of users, several large and complex data stores, and lots of functionality, things get complicated fast. Most critically, it's not a direct relationship. If you double the number of pieces in your infrastructure, your problems become four times as hard if not more. You might have a database and a web app. But the database gets slow, so y…

Got it, but this guy was trying to deploy a 15-minute sample app.

[deleted]

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#24

Post by dkarapetyan » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:38 AM UTC

vonklaus wrote: post #22

dkarapetyan wrote: post #21

That's because most of these tools are built by people who are borderline psychos. I don't mean the murderous kind but the kind that is emotionally stunted, working under intense business pressures to deliver (which is really just another group of psychos higher up the hierarchy), and overworked. The best part is that there is nothing new. It's all just the same old stuff except now it's in the cloud and requires 10…

Is there a hello world version of this? I have been trying to pick up IaaS (insanity as a service) and it has been really difficult. At what point does it make sense to use docker? Is it worth learning all of the above crazyness if you have less than 10K people using your service and are 1 person?

No, it's all just terrible software managed by even more terrible software. It's all very aesthetically unpleasant and when I look for good software I look for a certain "coherence" that I have not found in any of the cloud providers.

If you do things right and stage your artifacting and deployment process properly then that is 90% of the battle I think because none of the cloud providers are magic. Any service they have that promises to abstract away your deployment and configuration pipeline is a bold-faced lie. Heck, they don't even have a way for automating the network topology configuration that isn't a nightmarish maze of JSON (I'm speaking of course of cloud formation). So even if you are using docker, that is in no way a solution to a proper deployment pipeline with properly versioned artifacts and dependencies.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#25

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:45 AM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #21

That's because most of these tools are built by people who are borderline psychos. I don't mean the murderous kind but the kind that is emotionally stunted, working under intense business pressures to deliver (which is really just another group of psychos higher up the hierarchy), and overworked. The best part is that there is nothing new. It's all just the same old stuff except now it's in the cloud and requires 10…

> Oh and there is also networking/NAT, user management, logging, artifact distributions, service discovery, etc. to worry about as well using tools that are just as half-baked.

Oh the good old times when I was learning to program. Configuration was just a simple INI parser written in two hours from scratch. Networking was done by Apache, user management meant a database table, logging was done with a function wrapping over fprintf(), "artifact distributions" meant res/ folder, service discovery was done on paper. And somehow everything worked. It worked better and was infinitely more manageable, and was mostly dependency-free.

I can see how the above would cause problems for e.g. Google. But 99% of companies and open-source projects are not Google.

Web development is insane.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#26

Post by zyxley » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:47 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #12

ryandrake wrote: post #6

Note, I'm definitely not a web developer. I've put static web pages together and fooled around with Rails & Heroku a little. So, as an outsider, I'm curious: How did you all (the web development community) make DEPLOYMENT so complicated? All these packages and environments and VMs and containers and environment variables. Shouldn't deploying something on the web be a few minutes of FTP and then go do something more p…

> Shouldn't deploying something on the web be a few minutes of FTP It should be, but well... this is something if you're using PHP. If you're using anything hipster (ruby, iirc python, Java) you're out of luck with that.

Heroku is pretty straightforward for most stuff. Python, for example, is basically "make a requirements.txt, a Procfile to tell it what the entry point file is, and then push to the Heroku repo".

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#27

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:51 AM UTC

nothrabannosir wrote: post #7

derefr wrote: post #4

Two important points the author (re-)discovered here, that are really not as commonly known as they should be: 1. Docker is a first-class citizen on Linux, and a second-class citizen everywhere else. "Setting up Docker" on Linux means installing the Docker daemon. "Setting up Docker" on OSX or Windows means installing a Linux VM containing Docker and getting it to port-forward the docker daemon from that VM to your h…

> Once it's set up, there's no day-to-day usage difference On a laptop you now have an extra OS running, with all the associated costs: talking to disk every now and then, doing os-y things. If nothing else, it feels like my battery runs out faster with docker-machine on and no containers running. But maybe somebody has actual numbers on this?

Yes, you have one unnecessary OS there, and it isn't Linux running Docker. :). Personally, I run Windows because for some unknown reason that's what I get issued at every company I join. This Windows runs a VirtualBox with Linux, where I do actual work. Docker is amazing operated directly, and you get all the benefits of your dev and production environment being essentially the same.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#28

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:55 AM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #15

ryandrake wrote: post #6

Note, I'm definitely not a web developer. I've put static web pages together and fooled around with Rails & Heroku a little. So, as an outsider, I'm curious: How did you all (the web development community) make DEPLOYMENT so complicated? All these packages and environments and VMs and containers and environment variables. Shouldn't deploying something on the web be a few minutes of FTP and then go do something more p…

If you have a static website, maybe. If you have a web application with millions of users, several large and complex data stores, and lots of functionality, things get complicated fast. Most critically, it's not a direct relationship. If you double the number of pieces in your infrastructure, your problems become four times as hard if not more. You might have a database and a web app. But the database gets slow, so y…

Was there even a project in which a single person was responsible for all of this? It feels that if you're having scaling issues so bad you need to do all of the things you described, you're already big enough to have 20 people on payroll handling this.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#29

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 2:59 AM UTC

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #16

sakopov wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny because I was about to say the complete opposite.

That's funny because I run almost everything smoothly (Vagrant, Node (grunt, bower, ...), Python, Chocolatey and now Meteor), on my Intel Atom NETBOOK. It's not perfect. Can get laggy, but works just fine must log the time. That said, I think I'll jump on the Linux bandwagon very soon.

> Intel Atom

I worked that way for two years. It doesn't really matter if everything works smoothly under Vagrant if every day you want to kill yourself at your desk because you can't run an Vagrant and a browser at the same time without bringing the system to its knees.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#30

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 3:00 AM UTC

Palomides wrote: post #3

"I’ve wasted the whole day exploring new things and concepts" is a weird thing to say after you set out with the goal of learning some new tools. Definitely seems like he learned something.

I understand the frustration. Reminds me of the first time I tried to run something on a VPS. I wasted at least a day or two fighting with bullshit issues like botched up Unicode support on my Debian installation. I did learn something, but it was not the thing I wanted to be learning.