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Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

roguelazer.com

291–300 of 648 posts

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

#291
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I saw it as a general lament against over-engineering. I don't think the point got lost in the super specific example... You could just as easily level similar rants against the likes of React and it's wider ecosystem, Tensorflow, Typescript (many will disagree), Docker... I'm sure others have their own bugbears. Much of this is subjective, of course. But to me, it feels like software development is trending…

> towards unecessarily complicated development processes and architectures please note that what's "unnecessary" for you is not necessarily unnecessary for others. this is an important point. i guess what these projects need is a way to communicate explicitly the costs of maintenance and developer mind-share when adding more complex features to their product. Because especially as small dev team it is difficult to fi…

I think your point is slightly off in its 'angle'.

Consider that "unnecessarily-complicated" and "unnecessary" do NOT mean the same thing -- particularly in this case.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because then you'd have to maintain it....

As it stands, the version with a gRPC API has to maintain the HTTP API. If the HTTP API has value, the cost to maintain it should self-justify, right?

The point was not value, but value for whom, or in the service of what end.

Everything anyone ever did had some kind of value to someone, even murdering babies.

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

#293
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 f…

and me)

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

#294
post #229

> In 2015, an unrelated tool called Kubernetes was released by Google (but, really, by Xooglers). I would go so far as to say that Kubernetes (or, as the "cool kids" say, k8s) is the worst thing to happen to system administration since systemd. This, I think, is the key to understanding this whole rant. It is entirely of a piece with the anti-systemd crowd, and I think understanding what was really going on there hel…

I don’t think it’s even that. Most software developments in the last 10 years are vanity projects, fashion shows or death marches built to sell support, IPOs and conference tickets.

We forgot what we were doing somewhere. Oh yes, solving problems.

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

#295

> 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…

What I don't get with the complaint is that HTTP/1 still works fine. If you are hosting (or writing) your own server, you can stick with that and be fine. I have heard ZERO talk about browsers deprecating HTTP/1 support.

For the companies implementing http/2, those improvements DO matter. They have different needs.

Why is this bad?

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TypeScript is a funny one. I love the language, but at the same time, I totally agree with the premise that it is unnecessary complexity! And yet I swear by it. I can't explain why there's not more cognitive dissonance there. JavaScript taught me to love async, then functional programming, and TypeScript taught to me to love static types. I'm now desperately wishing for a world of OCaml/Haskell, but where are you goi…

What is unnecessarily complex about TypeScript? It's JavaScript, with static typing plus type inference, and pretty nice generics. The ecosystem of modern JS surrounding it is horribly complex but TypeScript itself seems like a fairly straightforward programming language.

Offtopic but what's nice about Typescript generics? Typescript doesn't even let you specify variance. It's one of the unsound parts of the language's type system in fact.

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

#297

>The compression scheme in HTTP/2 is so shitty that the "compression table" in RFC 7541 [appendex a] is just a list of the 61 most popular headers from Google properties. I thought this was moderately-funny cheeky banter, but I wanted to see what implementation decision they were making fun of with this silly misrepresentain. Quote RFC 7541: "The static table was created from the most frequent header fields used by p…

Why do you think that is a bad header compression scheme for a static protocol where the majority of traffic contains those headers/values repeated over and over? That indexed table shaves about 30% off header size.

https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http2-hpack-compression

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everyone here remembers that time they wrote a simple HTTP server, that just works, and would continue to work today. If anything, I hope that we can recognize that there has been advancements in computing. Back in the day you would be open to attacks left and right. It was the wild west back in the day. Today, you can take that tiny webserver and put it in a VM, and voila, now it doesn't matter if anyone bre…

> Today, you can take that tiny webserver and put it in a VM, and voila, now it doesn't matter if anyone breaks in This is a dangerous viewpoint to hold. Containers do offer some slightly better security, but they are not a silver bullet or anything close. There are still lots of ways to cause problems whether the software is in a container or not.

Short of CVEs, which are fixed after identification, can you point out other ways to "cause problems" with a tiny webserver serving static content in a container?
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