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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

#551

Post by lmilcin »

Regarding some hate against Kubernetes.

The problem is not with the Kubernetes but with management/architecture teams of companies that decide to use k8s for projects that have no real scaling requirements or when overhead of just having a constant fleet of nodes would be less than overhead of maintaining working k8s deployment.

Kubernetes is a hugely complex piece of software that is handling hugely complex cases that arise when you try to deploy and maintain a large number of applications with hugely differing scaling needs.

In my experience, k8s deployment absolutely requires a dedicated team with top notch k8s knowledge and debugging skills. You also need to understand k8s is a huge constant overhead as it requires actual knowledge and experience to use and has complex faults that require ability to debug really complex and interdisciplinary problems.

Google could do that because they invest in their teams and because they have exactly the type of problems that greatly benefit from a single complex solution that can handle all of them (meaning your engineers can migrate between projects but they still can use same tools they already know).

The trouble with management/architecture teams is they do not understand they are not Google. They are Google-wannabees. They like to promote how great they are and how great their projects are but are either deluding themselves or are being deluded by their lower echelons and have not set up themselves to understand what is actually going on.

And that's how you land at a situation where a team that has simple application that would require just two nodes (second for redundancy only) and no knowledge of Kubernetes is required to deploy to k8s instance and deal with a host of problems they never had to deal before that are beyond their capabilities.

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

#552

Post by q3k »

thyrsus wrote: post #550

I'll pile on: I'm working through Marko Luksa's "Kubernetes in Action", where he introduces this quaint line of code: etcdctl ls /registry He notes in an aside that you may have to do etcdctl get /registry --prefix=true for later versions of the protocol. But here I am with k8s 1.16, and etcd has been locked in a pod (seriously, why?) so before you contact it you need to "kubectl exec ..." We're not finished. Apparen…

> (seriously, why?)

Ask whoever deployed this cluster. This is not something that Kubernetes mandates.

> and do SSL encryption to make contact

And that's a bad thing?

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

#553

Post by sriku »

mekoka wrote: post #441
bfb09 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shot across the bow at the Kool-Aid which everyone here has imbibed to some extent. Of course they're going to shoot the messenger. When I clicked this thread I said out loud to my team, "oh, this should be good," and I hadn't even fathomed precisely how predictable the discussion would be. It's so far removed from any consideration that it lands something like explaining to an American that they're a subject…

You should also consider that the contrarian nature of HN would set it up to exactly the opposite reaction had the post expressed the reverse of its current positions. The big irony is that it's not inconceivable that it would involve some of the same actors voicing different opinions. > "the incentives of modern software engineering value complexity to artificially strengthen a software engineering job economy" Not…

> " that somehow found their ways in software engineering, out of possibly good intentions"

It seems that systems and principles invented for some specific situations get rapidly entrenched as "best practice" due to the wild success of their root corporations. That's twisted much like fashion - "that dress looks great on that model, maybe if I wear that dress, I would look good too".

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

#554

Post by goatinaboat »

sfgweilr4f wrote: post #349
Gibbon1 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first boss (rip) had a internship with a defense contractor his junior year in college. They gave him one project. Design a cover for the air intake for an APC or some such. Easy!!! No not actually easy because of all the constraints. It had to be stowable. So a hard cover was out. It couldn't produce toxic fumes if it caught fire. So most plastics were out. Cloth was a problem because it couldn't get sucked into…

Those constraints seem a lot more reasonable than what I've seen in other aspects of the business world. At least they are grounded in the realities of the actual purpose. Well, mostly anyway. I'll leave justifications for the $1000 left-handed hammers as an exercise for later. I've seen (and removed) plenty of requirements that were put in the specification just because . Because someone needed X amount of Y technol…

I'll leave justifications for the $1000 left-handed hammers as an exercise for later.

Those tend to be an accounting artifact, I heard. If you order a thousand different items for a million dollars total then each one of them will show up as costing exactly $1000 no matter what they are.

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

#555

Post by growlist »

kelnos wrote: post #469
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…

> There are people attacking the author for a statement made about CoreOS, and for some hate towards Kubernetes. That's not really surprising, and maybe should be a lesson to the author. If you want to make a particular point, you shouldn't make inflammatory/controversial statements about other, only-tangentially-related things. It distracts from and dilutes your point. For my part, I know one of the CoreOS founders,…

Eh, idk. It makes for entertaining reading for a devops-sceptic.

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

#556

Post by goatinaboat »

what-the-grump wrote: post #307
adamsea wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React I have been thinking about, having worked with it a lot and also recently done a React / TS / GraphQL (GraphQL may have been the poorest choice I made; time will tell) project. I think React itself is awesome and I've always enjoyed it. While I'm not an expert, it's conceptual foundations and core abstractions felt right, and I do think it makes lots of frontend tasks simpler, especially for non-small projects.…

I have that rant daily at this point. Dev A: I need an API to CRUD Me: But we've been doing CRUD for 30 years without an API this is a small project Dev A: But I don't know how, its not best practice, my team lead agrees, here is a medium article, get with the times, etc. Me: Ok so you don't know how to do your job. Dev B: Here, put the React SPA in a Docker container and run it on some cloud its easy... Me: But all…

Dev B: Here, put the React SPA in a Docker container and run it on some cloud its easy...

I have 100 different devs telling me "do this thing, it's easy" and it's easy for them, but now I have 100 different things to think about and make work together and devs never think about how their tiny thing fits into the big picture.

99% of web apps could be pure HTML + CSS on the front end, and Flask or something on the back end, talking pure SQL to Postgres. Really. That's all you need. And probably 99.99% of those apps that run internally to one company.

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

#557

Post by sriku »

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…

> direct his anger to "make good art"

Here is one from me with the solo-dev/small-team in mind - https://github.com/imaginea/inai . Good or not I don't know. It came out of some reading I was doing and I'm having fun with it due to the "deploy first and then dev" mindset it encourages.

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

#558

Post by GoblinSlayer »

abernard1 wrote: post #327
lemmsjid wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. But you can't curl the state of your infra component without creating a program and downloading the client artifacts. This is a very big step backward from an operability standpoint. > because there's a thousand interpretations of REST out there ...but there weren't a thousand different interpretations of the etcd API out there: there was exactly on…

gRPC also adds its own bugs, which are platform dependent and binding dependent.

(I use it)

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

#559

Post by pas »

_jal wrote: post #87
gnur wrote: 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…

I must have read an entirely different article. The one I read was about simple tools being redesigned for environments most people don't work in. I also disagree with much of the rest of that, but the clouds are getting sick of me today.

etcd never was simple.

if you wanted simple, there was redis or memcached.

it's an arbitrary cutoff to call etcd simple (it implements Raft, for fuck's sake, it implies a distributed system, multiple odd number of nodes to avoid split-brain!)

systemd is simple, fixed config format, comes with every distro, default works, has extensive documentation, compared to undocumented distro-specific init scripts written in sh (or bash, or worse).

sure, if someone just wants to hack on their 8bit toaster, then they might find a simple shell script simpler.

but the post is not lamenting that.

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

#560

Post by pas »

lmilcin wrote: post #551

Regarding some hate against Kubernetes. The problem is not with the Kubernetes but with management/architecture teams of companies that decide to use k8s for projects that have no real scaling requirements or when overhead of just having a constant fleet of nodes would be less than overhead of maintaining working k8s deployment. Kubernetes is a hugely complex piece of software that is handling hugely complex cases th…

k8s is great even if your requirements are almost static. because it standardizes so many small but important details
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