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Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

roguelazer.com

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Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#31

Post by freedomben »

dilandau wrote: post #9

There's a lot of justified hatred for kubernetes, but for fuck's sake why did anyone adopt it in the first place, if they didn't understand what they were getting into? It's like the startups from 10 years ago who absolutely had to use MongoDB because "scale", and then they never get off the ground because they're trying to implement ACID from first principles.

It's possible that many people (like me) had been trying to solve a similar non-business problem for years, including rolling our own solutions and the like, and when an open source option widely backed emerged and looked like a possible standard, we accept some warts in exchange for a broad, general purpose, flexible, automatable, and well-thought out (yes) solution.

Of course K8s is not perfect, and it's overkill for small to medium apps (I think hype train convinced a lot of people they would need to scale to massive cloud levels when really they didn't), but if you have ever needed K8s (especially for a complex microservice system at big enterprise level) then you know the value and you remember the proprietary vendor-locked era of sadness before K8s emerged.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#32

Post by jeppesen-io »

dimgl wrote: post #5
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #3

"Kubernetes is the worst thing to happen to system administration since systemd." I'll take that quote into my fortune file.

What are some of the arguments against `systemd`? I've used it in several production systems and don't really have an opinion on it.

I've grown to think its a very vocal minority that objects simply ideological reasons, then finds techincal reason to back that up

Even https://nosystemd.org/ mostly just lists bugs

After moving all my services from varius init systems to systemd, I'd never go back

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#33

Post by tannhaeuser »

> HTTP/2 a.k.a. SPDY is a comically bloated Layer 4/5/7 mega-combo protocol designed to replace HTTP. It takes something simple and (most importantly!) comprehensible and debuggable for junior programmers and replaces it with an insanely over-complicated system that requires tens of thousands of lines of code to implement the most minimal version of, but which slightly reduces page load time and server costs once you reach the point of doing millions of requests per second. I am filled WITH RAGE just thinking about how we took a fundamental part of the Internet, simple enough that anyone can implement an HTTP server, and replaced it with this garbage protocol pushed by big megacorps that doesn't solve any real problems but will completely cut out future generations from system programming for the web

This resonates with me, and I'd like to add HTTP/2 can only bring advantages if you actually go all the way to push/bundle resources into responses and have a strategy/priority when to push eagerly vs serve lazily; I'm even much more worried about upcoming QUIC (and DoH) because there's no impl in sight.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#34

Post by Spivak »

dilandau wrote: post #14
dimgl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of the arguments against `systemd`? I've used it in several production systems and don't really have an opinion on it.

https://nosystemd.org/

I feel like this page actually comes off as a pretty good recommendation for systemd. Like it's a piece of software with normal bugs and the usual crop of hard decisions.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#35

Post by alpb »

Author is really good at discrediting themselves straight off the bat in one sentence:

> for a ~~bullshit~~ unsuccessful project called CoreOS Container Linux that was EOL'd several years ago

CoreOS was actually quite successful to me as an outside observer. It had decent paid user base as well as people using it without paying. It has showed people that Chrome OS can be used to build atomically updating host OS with a readonly fs for container hosting. It has inspired many other container hosts to come like RancherOS and Google’s Container-Optimized OS. Similarly, it was probably one of the reasons why Red Hat was interested in the acquisition.

Furthermore, CoreOS was EOL'ed last month; not several years ago.

I can keep going on why etcd API was switched to gRPC and what benefits this offers, even at small scale. But I don't think it's worth anyone’s time convincing the author otherwise. Based on their tone, it's clear to me that they have trouble with using software when things get a tad bit complicated. Usually, there's community decision-making behind these decisions, and they're often deliberated for months, backed with prototypes and data. I'm pretty sure the author doesn't care, however.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#37

Post by justincormack »

runawaybottle wrote: post #26
scaryclam wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The writing style is so full of bile that any actual point just drowns in it and makes the author seem petty and bitter about the world. Not a good read, even for those that agree with the author about unneeded complexity.

Should bile and bitterness and pettiness never ever be expressed in written form?

There is a higher bar. This post is full of actually false things, giving it no credibility. A high quality rant I can get behind, but not a bad one.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#38

Post by sisk »

Curious why the author declares Container Linux bullshit/unsuccessful? I thought it was a wonderful project that got better over its (brief) lifetime. The active/passive upgrade was an absolute blessing. If the declaration is it was unsuccessful because it no longer exists, Flatcar and Fedora CoreOS are pretty straightforward successors. fcos is basically functionally equivalent if you don't use rpm-ostree layers and if you use podman in place of any rkt containers. If the complaint is "systemd," that's fine—it's not the OS for you—but I don't think that makes it bullshit.

I didn't like having to move cl machines to fcos but it really wasn't that bad and I still get coordinated, active/passive upgrades. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#39

Post by dijit »

mooted1 wrote: post #18

bai

> This guy used to run infra at uber and was incredibly salty about every single new technology. There were a lot of bad ones, but every conversation was about as constructive, free of evidence, and bitter as this blog post.

I'm going to assume you're a developer?

Infra people are usually much more apprehensive to take on new technology. Crucially I would describe classically trained sysadmins as 'pessimists to the core'. This is why there's memes of operations saying 'no'.

This is what devops was all about, the shared responsibility of it all. I'm going to assume that uber was perfect and got devops exactly right- but adding technology should in my mind always be met with the absolute most critical eye imaginable; and if he's a classically trained sysadmin then it probably comes from that place of being once bitten twice shy.

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