Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

roguelazer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 648 posts

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

#361

Post by zokier »

mvanga wrote: post #133

This 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…

> In the meantime, the simpler version of the software is long gone

The thing is that with free software the old software is almost never really long gone. It's still out there, free for your perusal. That is the beauty of free software, it's always additive process. But it does also put responsibility on the user to pick the patches they want, either themselves or by proxy. Ultimately you are responsible for the free code you are running, not some vague upstream dominated by fnaag et al.

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

#362

Post by pm90 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #81
pm90 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The apprehensiveness of sysadmins May have been justified in the world 5 years ago but today it sounds somewhat out of place. Note that critically evaluating new technologies is still an important skill and many infrastructure people I work with are extremely cautious about adopting new tech without spiking/getting to know it. But the sysadmins with the penchant for saying no is probably one of the reasons the devops…

> the devops movement actually kicked off And this is why every single project out there is now a house of cards (or should I say house of YAML files) using insanely complicated technologies (like Kubernetes) with very "interesting" failure modes to say the least. This attitude works today because of engineering-driven-development; the whole purpose of engineering is engineering and business priorities took a backsea…

Almost everything in your comment is wrong. Kubernetes has enabled a whole host of observability tooling (eg opentracing), promoted a culture where app logs are easily and always accessible, enabled 0 downtime deployments for teams without dedicate infra specialists and so much more. It has made deploying reliable applications a lot more easier than ever before.

Services today scale to handle a lot more users and traffic than they did not so long ago; and these reliability guarantees are the norm rather than an exception.

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

#363

Post by megameter »

013a wrote: post #248
pessimizer wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintaining large open source software projects is soul crushingingly, destructively, enormously hard. Are you making a case in this package that complex open source projects are impossible unless completely controlled by very large, highly opinionated companies? That can be proven wrong by endless examples. > Did the author join in on the discussion when these changes were made? Did they voice their concerns? Or d…

No. I'm making the case that nebulous philosophical reasons for why technology is the way it is are nearly always unproductive, and is certainly unproductive in this case, which involves a very liberally-licensed open and libre-source project. Its startlingly easy to write five-hundred words. Its startlingly difficult to accomplish what the etcd team has; I therefore give the benefit of doubt to etcd. I don't fully u…

Moral reasoning premised in attachment theory(which has been a very productive field in the past decades) and extrapolated to the inanimate would draw a different conclusion.

If you are that tied to your work you may be treating it as a child, and as a child, your moral reasoning will proceed with the underlying premise: "what is good for the child is good", leading towards a parenting of the project ahead of other needs.

But a software system is not a child, in fact. It's just an expression of ideas. "Skin in the game" signals that you've been dragged into being a parent. Is being a parent for software the right thing? Perhaps, if the software's premise draws upon a strong justification. But most of these tools have not been emerged from standalone justifications, but from solving something else, which neatly ties back into the author's argument: the corporate needs are what are complex. And here attachment-based morality recurses: if the corporation is the child and you are tending to it, once again, you will put it ahead of other needs, and hence will develop the justifications for software complexity.

But if we zoom out a bit and look at the world generally, it's operating from a point of indifference: if the output of the corporation is pragmatically convenient, it is good, if it presents an obstacle then it is bad. And ideas - and hence software - that persist in the indifferent world, outside of the attachment relationship, are the ones that survive.

Which perhaps means that all of it is wrong, which isn't a very stunning conclusion if you still have to work with it. But that is philosophy for you.

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

#364

Post by diehunde »

loriverkutya wrote: post #219
mvanga wrote: post #133

This 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…

He is talking in absolutes (Kubernetes being the worst piece of software, etc) and trying to convince reader that "megacorporations" are the faceless evil enemy and they are making everything worse for everybody. Either you are with him or against him (servant of the evil megacorps' interest), there is no middle ground. This person is not looking for a conversation, but looking for a fight. He seems to be angry and c…

Sorry but even though I disagree with most of the points from the article, I prefer to read this instead of a shy and unconfident rant from someone that's afraid of insulting your favorite tech.

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

#365

Post by jedberg »

cytzol wrote: post #337
jedberg wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there have been many container breakout CVEs, and I'm sure there will be more: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=container But let me ask the question another way. What security do you gain by being in a container instead of on a server without a container?

> What security do you gain by being in a container instead of on a server without a container? I'm not a container guru, but... this is obvious, right? You have to break out the container, which is an extra layer. In order to get root on the server, you need: • Without container: application vulnerability (to gain access to the OS) + kernel vulnerability (to gain access to root) • With container: application vulnera…

Why do you need to access the OS? If you break out of the web server, you have control of the container. You can then launch any sort of internal attack at the access level of the container. You could also launch a DDOS from the container.

Most of the bad stuff you can do when you take over a web server doesn't require root access, just user level access, and you get that whether or not it's in a container.

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

#366

Post by neurostimulant »

KaiserPro wrote: post #202
ixtli wrote: 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…

the problem is that k8s is a half arsed implementation of borg/tupperware. Having supported a large team migrate from a custom system based on fleet (god know why they were allowed to waste two years on that) jump to k8s (around 1.2) it struck me how many features it actually lacked (like pod drain, although thats fixed now.) The worst offender in K8s world is the networking scheme. Its utterly batshit, and clearly d…

> The worst offender in K8s world is the networking scheme. Its utterly batshit, and clearly designed by people who've never had to support anything out of hours. (statically assign 254 IPs to each host, or fuck with the routing table.)

Hmm, I thought you could specify larger node cidr at cluster creation time so you can have >254 ip addresses on each node? The default is /24 but you should be able to specify a larger block, unless you're on GKE (not sure if you can do that on GKE).

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

#367

Post by HideousKojima »

Twirrim wrote: post #348
greyhair wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me think of military contracting as a parallel example. (at least in the USA) The rules required to develop, build, and deliver military equipment to the US is exceedingly complex. And it isn't necessarily a benefit for the Pentagon, as much as it is for the established defense contractors. The barriers to entry in that industry are huge, purely based on the contracting requirements. So complexity (in tools…

> And it isn't necessarily a benefit for the Pentagon, as much as it is for the established defense contractors. As with many government related procurement systems, there is so much paranoia about abuse, and desire not to repeat various disasters from the past, that the system has by perceived necessity become complicated. Of course it makes it frightfully expensive to the degree that few companies can actually thro…

If you don't mind sharing, what was the company you worked for?

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

#368

Post by swagonomixxx »

zokier wrote: post #361
mvanga wrote: post #133

This 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…

> In the meantime, the simpler version of the software is long gone The thing is that with free software the old software is almost never really long gone. It's still out there, free for your perusal. That is the beauty of free software, it's always additive process. But it does also put responsibility on the user to pick the patches they want, either themselves or by proxy. Ultimately you are responsible for the fre…

While this is technically true, using old, unsupported versions of software (such as etcd) in production is a recipe for disaster, especially when you start running into problems with it.

I think, in the case of etcd, it would have been better for the k8s folks to fork the project and add whichever features they felt were needed to be able to use it for k8s. Instead, it seems like they swarmed the original project and added a ton of features that made it a behemoth of complexity rather than the simple tool it once was.

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

#369

Post by msla »

freedomben wrote: post #24
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.

You may not realize you're inciting a flame war. If you google for this there's no shortage of arguments going back 10 years and continuing to this day

"You can't discuss this topic because of a flame war" is ceding territory to the assholes. I'm willing to accept that when it comes to talking about political topics here, because this isn't a political forum, but I refuse to accept that we can't talk about technical topics here because some people refuse to keep a civil tongue.

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

#370

Post by duncan_bayne »

lemmsjid wrote: post #289
mvanga wrote: post #133

This 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…

The problem, I think, is that the article presents all of its views as almost self evidently true. If you distill it down, the complaint is that etcd added gRPC. I think it was a good move for an infrastructure piece like etcd to add gRPC. Now I can just grab a generated client in a language of my choice. There's certainly valid critiques of gRPC / protocol buffers but I've found things like gRPC and Thrift to reduce…

> Now I can just grab a generated client in a language of my choice.

No, you can just grab a generated client in a language of your choice if that language happens to be supported by protobuf.

This is a massive regression from the openness of HTTP REST APIs.

Post reply on HN