71–80 of 621 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a staff member. Can't remember first name, Yuri maybe, who is fairly active with the project.
Nope, that would be me.
> Our backups to S3 apparently don’t work either: the bucket is empty followed by > So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place. is no way to be running a public service with customer data. Did the person who set up that S3 job simply write a script or something and just go "yep, it's done" and walk away? Seriously?
> Our backups to S3 apparently don’t work either: the bucket is empty followed by > So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place. is no way to be running a public service with customer data. Did the person who set up that S3 job simply write a script or something and just go "yep, it's done" and walk away? Seriously?
https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/production-engineer/
-------------------
Applicants for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Please keep in mind that applicants can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find her/his job title on our team page.
Qualified applicants receive a short questionnaire and coding exercise from our Global Recruiters
The review process for this role can take a little longer than usual but if in doubt, check in with the Global recruiter at any point.
Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 45min screening call with our Global Recruiters
Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a first 45 minute behavioral interview with the Infrastructure Lead
Candidates will then be invited to schedule a 45 minute technical interview with a Production Engineer
Candidates will be invited to schedule a third interview with our VP of Engineering
Finally, candidates will have a 50 minute interview with our CEO
Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email
This is painful to read. It's easy to say that they they should have tested their backups better, and so on, but there is another lesson here, one that's far more important and easily missed. When doing something really critical (such as playing with the master database late at night) ALWAYS work with a checklist. Write down WHAT you are going to do, and if possible, talk to a coworker about it so you can vocalize th…
This is painful to read. It's easy to say that they they should have tested their backups better, and so on, but there is another lesson here, one that's far more important and easily missed. When doing something really critical (such as playing with the master database late at night) ALWAYS work with a checklist. Write down WHAT you are going to do, and if possible, talk to a coworker about it so you can vocalize th…
To me the most illuminating lesson is that debugging 'weird' issues is enough of a minefield; doing it in production is fraught with even more peril. Perhaps we as users (or developers with our 'user' hat on) expect so much availability as to cause companies to prioritize it so high, but (casually, without really being on the hook for any business impact) I'd say availability is nice to have, while durability is mandatory. To me, an emergency outage would've been preferable to give the system time to catch up or recover, with the added bonus of also kicking off the offending user causing spurious load.
My other observation is that troubleshooting -- the entire workflow -- is inevitably pure garbage. We engineer systems to work well -- these days often with elaborate instrumentation to spin up containers of managed services and whatnot, but once they no longer work well we have to dip down to the lowest adminable levels, tune obscure flags, restart processes to see if it's any better, muck about with temp files, and use shell commands that were designed 40 years ago for when it was a different time. This is a terrible idea. I don't have an easy solution for the 'unknown unknowns', but the collective state of 'what to do if this application is fucking up' feels like it's in the stone ages compared to what we've accomplished on the side of when things are actually working.
6/6 failed backup procedures. Looks like they are going to be hiring a new sysadmin/devops person...
> Our backups to S3 apparently don’t work either: the bucket is empty followed by > So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place. is no way to be running a public service with customer data. Did the person who set up that S3 job simply write a script or something and just go "yep, it's done" and walk away? Seriously?
Is it even possible to pay for the hosted GitLab.com instance?