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…
Could you share some info about the switch to gRPC, not for the authors benefit, but for the rest of HN? As someone not familiar with this story, I’d be very curious for your insights!
Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
191–200 of 648 posts
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he/she made it clear it is needlessly replacing parts of the job. The question is, should one feel any one way about that. I’d imagine it would be the most annoying thing on earth, so it’s a valid emotion being expressed.
> I think he/she made it clear it is needlessly replacing parts of the job Maybe? There weren't any actual reasons for why the author so vehemently disliked all of the technologies mentioned, and there was certainly no acknowledgement of the potential benefits of them.
The author is arguing that simple, easy to use, and easy for hobbyists and upstarts to learn tools are being replaced by complex systems designed by and for the 1% of companies who will actually need the complexity.
They are arguing that "House Builders Inc" has invented an automated robotic nail gun and is encouraging standards industries to recommend the only things built with such a system are compliant.
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#193> That's it. That's the story. Popular modern technology is taken over by expats from a megacorp and made worse in the service of a hyper-specialized (and just plain over-hyped) orchestration platform If you hate the direction the open source project has gone in, why not fork it and have the v2/HTTP version live on forever? The project does not owe it to you to stay crystallized at a moment in time.
When v2 is removed, I'll be shocked if etcd isn't forked because it still has enough value to enough people to maintain it.
But it hasn't been removed yet. It might be cynical, but I think a v2 fork now won't accomplish anything because the people most interested in one would simply continue to use v2 upstream.
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#194I 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.
YAML actually has one of the worst default behaviors I've seen: automatic conversion of certain strings to bools.
This wouldn't be a problem if YAML required that all strings be quoted...but it doesn't, and there's no "strict" mode to force quotes, so users are extremely likely to end up doing something that behaves unexpectedly.
If you're lucky, you'll spot the problem quickly instead of wasting half a day on it.
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#195This post sums up the last decade. Shouldn't tools and protocols become simpler and easier to use? If megacorps can use complexity to reduce democratization of the web, they will because of profit motive.
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HTTP/2 can only bring advantages if you actually go all the way to push/bundle resources into responses Compared to well-optimized HTTP/1 (e.g. using minified CSS and sprite-sheets), sure. Compared to most HTTP/1 deployments, though: no. HTTP/2 gives you tons of advantages "for free" that you need build-time processes to attain in HTTP/1. With HTTP/2, you can do "the naive thing" that'd you'd have done on the 1995…
I agree these things can be useful, but again none of these come out of the box (if I haven't overlooked or misunderstood something). Including "doing the naive thing"; I mean how do you expect your web server to automatically push CSS or SVG sprites/fonts unless you're relying on the server to intercept/parse your HTML for delivery-time optimizations a la PageSpeed and make heuristic scheduling decisions? Unless you…
That's not true at all. HTTP/2 is hugely impactful without using push at all—multiplexing beyond 4/8 streams enables radically different, performant bundling strategies, all "for free" with zero configuration, just by the act of using the protocol.
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#197There'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.
Well, I am using it as my PO wants it, to serve only 4 apis.
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#198This is one weird comment section. There are people attacking the author for a statement made about CoreOS, and for some hate towards Kubernetes. The key point of the article is not really being addressed here: vested interests from large companies are able to introduce huge complexity into simple, well-designed projects. While the complexity may be good for some end that said vested interest has in mind, they are al…
But that's just the "circle of life" no matter what. Things start very simple, and then inevitably get ambitious and try to add new gizmos. Sooner or later you end up with a monster.
Over and over again.
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
It violates the old school UNIX Philosophy of (1) simple standalone tools (2) text as the universal interface. (1) systemd is a monolith that aspires to do almost everything from booting to networking to sound. It's in many ways a Kubernetes sans distributed systems. (2) systemd uses binary logs, abandoning "text is the universal interface" systemd is also a giant single point of failure. Personally I don't see the b…
i went trying to learn how to make my linux box do something at startup. as somebody learning how to use my linux, systemd clouded the discovery process of learning how to linux in the intended way. i ended up using systemd, but now that's the thing i'm familiar with if i want to add some service to my computer... so it has infected me with some non-linux-y knowledge that won't go away soon.
Also compare it to doing things the Windows way: Something to run on startup? Put it in the "Startup" (magic) folder. Want something to do the things a service does, where it gets auto-restarted and auto-run and even logs success and failure? Like three clicks can run arbitrary anything using the scheduled task GUI and things get auto-logged in the Windows Event Log
Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
#200I have not found etcd to be 'an absolute pleasure to work with', to put it lightly. It has been a plague of stability issues and it sometimes seems better to roll one's own than continue tracking down issue after issue in etcd (yes I realize DIY has its own set of probably bigger problems :) ) I don't know if this experience is due to the changes on the original etcd implementation that the author is describing.