Live data from Hacker News

What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

youtube.com

221–230 of 284 posts

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with computers.

With zeros, there are generally no issues, until you add ones.

See? As soon as we introduce 1, we give rise to the question: what is 0 - 1? And that, alas, is the root origin of downvoting.

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A ship in harbor is safe — but that is not what ships are built for."

Are you implying that software purpose is to provide developers with puzzles to tinker with... in detriment of their paying customers?

I see how one could interpret it that way. I meant to imply rather that software generally needs to be regularly changed in order to continue providing value to its paying customers.

At minimum, you've got keeping up with security patches, library/framework deprecations etc. Software which has literally not been changed in years is often an insecure timebomb, with unpatched vulnerabilities, and as soon as you do need to change it, you're stuck because all its dependencies are deprecated. Besides, you also need to keep up with the market, competitors, customers' usage patterns changing, etc.

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#223
I found this video so super interesting and yet frustrating for completely personal reasons: the company I work for used to sell a tracing product that was specifically designed for the distributed tracing problem and handled all of the issues he highlighted - trace sampling, cross-language/framework support built in, etc. It was/is based on the same tech as Zipkin but is production ready. Sadly, he and his team must have spent a huge amount of time rolling their own rather than ever learning about our product. Now, it still might not have been a good match, but man, the problems he mentions were right in the sweet spot of what our product did really, really well.

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#224

I found this video so super interesting and yet frustrating for completely personal reasons: the company I work for used to sell a tracing product that was specifically designed for the distributed tracing problem and handled all of the issues he highlighted - trace sampling, cross-language/framework support built in, etc. It was/is based on the same tech as Zipkin but is production ready. Sadly, he and his team must…

Sure, but was it Invented Here?

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#225

I found this video so super interesting and yet frustrating for completely personal reasons: the company I work for used to sell a tracing product that was specifically designed for the distributed tracing problem and handled all of the issues he highlighted - trace sampling, cross-language/framework support built in, etc. It was/is based on the same tech as Zipkin but is production ready. Sadly, he and his team must…

This is why sales and marketing is so so important and yet overlooked/undervalued. You might have a great product that's perfect for your customer, but you also have to convince them to use it and pay for it.

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#226

I found this video so super interesting and yet frustrating for completely personal reasons: the company I work for used to sell a tracing product that was specifically designed for the distributed tracing problem and handled all of the issues he highlighted - trace sampling, cross-language/framework support built in, etc. It was/is based on the same tech as Zipkin but is production ready. Sadly, he and his team must…

Sure, but was it Invented Here?

Yes, I think that is the primary problem - they invested in Zipkin. At the end of his talk, he mentions the idea that you should prioritize core functions and use vendors for everything else. But he's right that some person created that code - and thus it becomes difficult to get them to switch. And instead it becomes a huge source of technical debt for a company that is non-core to their mission.

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#227

I found this video so super interesting and yet frustrating for completely personal reasons: the company I work for used to sell a tracing product that was specifically designed for the distributed tracing problem and handled all of the issues he highlighted - trace sampling, cross-language/framework support built in, etc. It was/is based on the same tech as Zipkin but is production ready. Sadly, he and his team must…

This is why sales and marketing is so so important and yet overlooked/undervalued. You might have a great product that's perfect for your customer, but you also have to convince them to use it and pay for it.

True - and marketing to developers is very challenging - a lot of noise to get above.

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the netspit stuff I'd look at Phoenix.Presence works and see how that handles it with a CRDT. There are various ways of distributing things across nodes in Erlang/Elixir but maybe you'd need to build something. I think you are right about the riak core stuff - you could probably keep track of cars using some sort of distributed hash and kill multiple cars if they were to ever spawn. In fact a way of instantiating…

I think that's a cool idea. It would have the downside that error recovery could take a while though, depending on the permdown period, so during that time a driver would be stuck; while in a request-based system they can immediately try again and it would work (hit a different instance). But it might not be too bad.

[deleted]

Re: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber [video]

#230
It amazes me they have 1,700 services. It would be hilarious satire to actually see the description of each. And the debugging scenarios he listed make it sound like they have very poor engineers working for them. Who on earth lets an application get to prod that iterates through a list of items and makes a request for each thing?

When did we loose our heads and think such an architecture is sane? The UNIX philosophy is do one thing and do it well, but that doesn't mean be foolish about the size of one said thing. Doing one thing means solving a problem, and limited the scope of said problem so as to have a cap on cognitive overhead, not having a notch in your "I have a service belt".

We don't see the LS command divided into 50 separate commands and git repo's.....

Post reply on HN