Live data from Hacker News

Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

roguelazer.com

61–70 of 648 posts

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

#61
post #35

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…

My team ran about 50% of a Fortune 500 software company on CoreOS up until a few months ago when we migrated to Flatcar. We even paid a lucrative support contract while we ran it. I can count the number of major OS issues we had with it over several years on one hand- and we've had even better success with Flatcar so far.

Calling CoreOS unsuccessful is a massive misunderstanding of the market.

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

#62
post #5

"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.

From an administrator's perspective it's the same problem with every declarative run control system: there is a layer of indirection between what's written in the configuration files and what the machine does (as opposed to an imperative system, where it's a bunch of shell commands that are literally the actions the machine takes).

With systemd in particular the indirection is notably (needlessly) opaque, with a big spaghetti mess of unit files symlinked in 18 different places, some of which have semantic meaning to the init system and some of which do not.

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

#63
post #60
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

I love that we're far enough in the future that there's such a thing as a classically trained sysadmin.

hardly new, Matt Simmons coined the term in 2014.

https://standalone-sysadmin.com/the-difference-between-site-...

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

#64
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.

This. I cannot tell you the number of times where I've seen teams use Mongo and then reinvent a schema as part of the development contracts. It's enraging.

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

#65

> 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…

I procrastinated switching to CSS sprites until HTTP/2 came around and made it superfluous, so I don't agree.

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

#66
post #23

It's mostly a rant about someone not accepting that extra performance can come at the cost of complexity. While I could argue with all the points that he's making, my main counterpoint is this: junior devs don't care that their http/2 server uses way more "complex" code then their http/1 server, it's just a flag away (or in most cases, automatic). Senior devs worth their salt also don't care, if I design an applicati…

The performance benefits are aimed squarely at the large, entrenched interests who can absorb the increased costs as a rounding error. HTTP/2 and SPDY/QUIC look, to me, to be about decreasing costs and increasing efficiency for large web hosts and erecting barriers-to-entry for competitors.

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

#67
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statements are overly hostile and hyperbolic. There's been plenty of great software out of Google and lots of good ideas taken for granted. I'll give you folks trying to build things the Google way without Google tools or scale is more often than not the wrong thing to do, but that doesn't invalidate the good.

Name a single piece of good software from Google.

The Go Language.

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

#68
post #50
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

saying "no" does not a devops engineer make

What is a devops engineer? Devops is a culture as originally defined. With sysadmins and software engineers. And, yeah, sysadmins used to say no a lot but younger ones tend not to because they haven't been rubbed wrong by the silo's of yore.

..yet

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

#69
post #18

bai

Its safe to say the unix crowd recreated the Windows Registry. I guess it turns out the Microsoft guys weren't idiots its just a messy problem that requires a messy solution.

etcd is not a windows registry- it's more similar to active directory, but with consensus protocols to implement the multi-machine requirements for consistency.

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

#70
post #47

I run k8s in production and I think this is a really bizarre axe to grind that sort of smells like someone who got upset by how steep the kubernetes learning curve is. Which, in a way, is understandable. > 1) Add hundreds of new failure modes to your software In my entirely anecdotal experience, it removes error modes. It turns out that just because k8s offers a feature (it offers many!) doesn't mean you're required…

What's wrong with the YAML? It's easy to read and write, concise, and generally has sane defaults meaning you don't have to be overly verbose.
Post reply on HN