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How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

mr.si

31–40 of 45 posts

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

so just to be clear, you are a huge fan of bundled cloud services then? can't really praise them enough?

Cheers, will stick with getting better at developing software and not worry about the container craze yet. thanks.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#32
Hah, this is why I don't use Docker. Too much added complexity for too little gain.

I'm extremely conservative these days. I beat my head against Capistrano long enough to learn its ins and outs, so if some new tool doesn't work with minimal Googling, I go right back to good-ole' Cap. I have a provisioning procedure I adapt for each cloud host that basically gets the machine ready for cap deploy. If cap deploy doesn't run smoothly, I alter my provisioning procedure once I figure out why. Usually it's for gem OS dependencies.

Any replacement strategy would have to beat the ease and reliability of Capistrano. That's going to be tough.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#33

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…

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.

Whatsapp probably did.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#34
I wasted a lot of weekends getting Docker or Vagrant to work so the rest of my team could follow what I was doing. After a few weeks of Google and outdated documentation, I decided to try out LXC and throw away all the other fancy tools. I went into each container and ran my provisioning script(s), updating them for each trick I stumble upon. My sanity is back now, and my team will clone the LXC repos for their development environment.

After a few nights of trying to get Docker to run on my work laptop, I figured there was an issue with Windows security as the VM would be created but Docker would fail to initialise. One of my colleagues said a CentOS worked for him. By then I had dumped Docker for Vagrant; which also had the same issues. I was now trying to figure out how to run Vagrant on Hyper-V as Vbox was acting up. I grew some grey hair those weekends. I'd rather be conservative with my time; use what works and wait for some of these tools to mature.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

so just to be clear, you are a huge fan of bundled cloud services then? can't really praise them enough? Cheers, will stick with getting better at developing software and not worry about the container craze yet. thanks.

Ya, there is no substitute for fundamentals. If you don't have that down then docker is not gonna help. Like C++ it just makes it easier to shoot yourself in the foot harder.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whatsapp probably did.

I'm reading WhatsApp history on Wikipedia[0]; it seems they got themselves a lot of money before having the need to scale beyond what simple solutions would allow.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#37
post #5
post #2

The sad part is that it's even worse when using windows. The only thing I've got working without too much yak-shaving was node, but anything devops-y is a pain including vagrant, otto and even the package manager (chocolately)

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

Sounds like I'm doing something very wrong then. I have a corp-issued windows 7 laptop. Any advice or resources for how I should be setting up my machine? (Chocolately isn't installing properly at the moment)

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so just to be clear, you are a huge fan of bundled cloud services then? can't really praise them enough? Cheers, will stick with getting better at developing software and not worry about the container craze yet. thanks.

Ya, there is no substitute for fundamentals. If you don't have that down then docker is not gonna help. Like C++ it just makes it easier to shoot yourself in the foot harder.

Can't harp on fundamentals enough. The thing to realize is that everything you do in an automated fashion can also be done manually. If you haven't worked out how to do it manually, then when your automated solution fails to work, it's going to be much easier to troubleshoot if you know the basics.

Hence why I prefer things like OOCSS over Bootstrap, Capistrano over Docker. Bootstrap forces your markup to conform to your framework, drowning you in incoherent class names that are going to flee your mind the second you have to remember why you put them there. OOCSS makes you treat your markup and CSS holistically, so that when it comes time to troubleshoot a browser bug, you can easily apprehend what your markup was supposed to do and why you did it that way.

Docker automates things that don't really need to be automated, unless you've got the kind of problem that really could make use of Docker's abstractions. People think they need Docker when they don't, then get surprised when Docker doesn't magically solve the problem they were hoping it would solve.

Make things work in the simple case, and then iterate towards the complex. If you ignore this, then you will eventually find yourself in the situation where you have a deadline to meet that you simply won't be able to meet because you're writing technical checks that your skills won't be able to cash.

Re: How to Deploy All Day yet Deploy Nothing

#40
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…

> I'm surprised more of these businesses don't exist.

They tend to be small, and only wrap a single aspect of the AWS service.

My simple site wraps Route53, allowing you to maintain and change DNS via git-pushes, chances are you've not heard of it because the number of users it suits is pretty small - https://dns-api.com/

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