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Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

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Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#131

Post by TheHwangover »

csomar wrote: post #87

The author, probably, picked the worst example. Here is a pic: https://iro.nl/app/uploads/2018/12/P-67-onboard-the-BOKA-Van... No, the containership is not a simple system. It's very sophisticated one. It takes massive engineering effort (literally historical effort and knowledge) to build, massive resources for the material and outsourcing, very complex (like the pic) infrastructure in case of repair, satellites to…

I love when people talk like they know what they're talking about and then get sonned. Hackernews everyone

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#132

Post by LargeWu »

nickbauman wrote: post #111
papito wrote: post #54

Instagram was what, 12 employees when they got sold for a gazillion dollars? They all could fit into a van. Because they kept their system simple. It was (and still is) a monolith. Now imagine that they decided to go the microservices way. Multiply that team size by 10 at least. Don't solve problems you don't have.

But microservices are an example of simpler systems. Each microservice does far less than the whole monolith does. You can read all the code in ~15 minutes. I've worked at companies that have monoliths that are 50x more difficult to work on because of the size. Some of them millions of lines of code. Nobody really knows how they work anymore.

Microservices, often, is just another word for "distributed monolith". Sure you can read the code of a single service quickly, but often in practice it's not possible to just make changes to one service. There are usually both explicit and implicit dependencies that span many service layers. What you gain in readability I think you often lose more in maintenance overhead.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#134

Post by sebringj »

In terms of the little guy having a saas, this is true for me...my saas basically is relying on s3 for both file storage and a json file per account to list out users allowed in the system. The only time it goes down is when s3 goes down or the occasional container restart.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#135

Post by yohannparis »

csomar wrote: post #87

The author, probably, picked the worst example. Here is a pic: https://iro.nl/app/uploads/2018/12/P-67-onboard-the-BOKA-Van... No, the containership is not a simple system. It's very sophisticated one. It takes massive engineering effort (literally historical effort and knowledge) to build, massive resources for the material and outsourcing, very complex (like the pic) infrastructure in case of repair, satellites to…

The author was not talking about software engineer but the user of software (sales & marketing). Building Hubspot (the example in his article) is a complex task. But implementing it in your business process should be a redundant and straightforward one.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#136

Post by wonderwonder »

I wrote my first deployed side project 5 years ago. It has been with the customer for the whole time and worked flawlessly while doing some fairly complex things, managing multiple processes for the customer. When I wrote it I had never done any web development and had not coded for 4+ years. C++ before that.

Due to my lack of web development knowledge and massive time crunch, I built it with no framework, zero best practices and the most basic code I could build. The code is atrocious, and would not scale at all but it does what it is supposed to do and works because I did everything in the most basic way, there are no gotchas. Straight html, basic javascript and php on the backend. It interacts with google docs as well. Its almost to dumb to break.

Sometimes we really do complicate things with all of our new fancy frameworks, microservices, states, etc.

With that said, it would be impossible for anyone else to maintain and if anyone posted the code on the web I would probably be unemployed. But it works, very difficult to insert new features though.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#137

Post by JackFr »

gk1 wrote: post #109
csomar wrote: post #87

The author, probably, picked the worst example. Here is a pic: https://iro.nl/app/uploads/2018/12/P-67-onboard-the-BOKA-Van... No, the containership is not a simple system. It's very sophisticated one. It takes massive engineering effort (literally historical effort and knowledge) to build, massive resources for the material and outsourcing, very complex (like the pic) infrastructure in case of repair, satellites to…

Hey, author here. My point is that simple-to-understand systems--not simple as in primitive--have less downtime, not that we shouldn't ever have complex systems. A container ship like the one in my article can be drydocked ("in the shop") for repairs and back on the water in less than two weeks. A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier cannot. So be mindful when you're building an aircraft carrier when a container ship wou…

To be fair though the autopilot does more than move the rudder.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#138

Post by busterarm »

I built a static jekyll site using wordpress as a backend for the content editors (jekyll build reads directly from the database) hosted on a handful of AWS VMs running NGINX and loadbalanced by HAProxy. The build system is automated in CircleCI. WordPress is hosted privately on a hosted WordPress provider.

There's an ELK stack + plugins for logs and alerting and saltstack to trigger some basic automated sysadmin tasks.

I left 3 years ago and the entire infrastructure has run on autopilot with zero downtime. Content editors and web developers still add to the content constantly. There is some dynamic content on the site handled by JavaScript and a few light APIs that I built to support the site. There's over 5000 pages of content. This simple infrastructure powers a website with a low-5 digit alexa rank for a business bringing in about a billion dollars a year.

The entire infrastructure bill comes in under $100/mo and they no longer need to employ any backend engineers. We negotiated a contract agreement for me to support the site if they need it. They haven't.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#139

Post by bitwize »

Koshkin wrote: post #83
hyperion2010 wrote: post #25

The only language that I have worked with that realizes that in the real world simple is _always_ a lie, is common lisp. It is the only language that has actually embraced the fact that its designers/committee were not geniuses and provided the tools for dealing with the complexity of the system. When unix tools fail, hope that you are on a system where it is possible to get the symbols and/or the source code, and ev…

Most proponents of Common Lisp swear by emacs/slime as the perfect IDE for it, but those may be not to everyone’s taste. Are there alternatives that are just as good?

There was a better alternative: Lisp machines. But in today's world, there's nothing as good as Emacs/SLIME. You can get almost there by connecting another editor to Lisp with an extension that speaks SLIME's SWANK protocol (like SLIMV for vim).

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#140

Post by busterarm »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #128
ailideex wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is incredibly simple compared to Windows once you actually your computer as a computer instead of as a really poorly made gaming console.

Bullshit. You're talking about an operating system where the common advice for someone who wants to install up to date software is to fucking compile it from source because the whole community never got their collective shit together enough to allow developers to directly distribute binaries without a gigantic fucking headache. Christ, it's such a fucking mess that one of the most compatible ways to distribute softwa…

Hardly. I've maybe had to do that 5 times in the last...10 years?

And I split my time between Arch, CentOS & OpenBSD. The vast majority of things these days are packaged in a useful way. There's also flatpak and similar now.

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