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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

#561

Post by teraku »

blixtra wrote: post #472
csours wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any resources for understanding OSS/FOSS around minimal Linux distributions for containers?

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. But Flatcar Container Linux is completely open source. In fact, everything we do at Kinvolk is. We do not build open-core products. For example, we've gone a step further than CoreOS did and have a fully open-sourced update server, Nebraska ( https://github.com/kinvolk/nebraska ). We also generate a list of contents and licenses for each build. Here is an example from the most…

That sounds really interesting! I currently work on a side-project which is a distributed application and I plan on incorporating kubernetes/cloud-native into some of the core concepts, so I will check it out once I'm at this part of the implementation!

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

#562

Post by mjw1007 »

fightme wrote: post #418
mjw1007 wrote: post #183

I don't know anything about what's happened with etcd in particular, but I think there is a genuine problem in this area with the model of "the people doing the work get to make the decisions". If you have a piece of software which is basically finished, and a group of people come along who are interested in extending it far beyond its original purpose, then it's very easy for those people to end up as the official m…

Hi, thank you for admitting in your first sentence you're not qualified to comment on the subject at hand, yet felt compelled to share your two cents. Here's the context for your totally uninformed opinion: I was a major contributor for etcd 2.3-3.2 at CoreOS. The people who extended etcd to support gRPC included the original etcd author (hi Xiang). gRPC support was necessary for good performance; we had benchmarks t…

I am saying:

- The problem the author describes can happen (I have seen it happen)

- I do not know whether it happened in the case of etcd

I am not saying:

- I have a proposed solution to this problem

- The people who do the difficult work of actually writing the software should be removed from the decision process

Apologies if that wasn't sufficiently clear.

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

#563

Post by GoblinSlayer »

js8 wrote: post #319
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…

> It's almost like there's no good representation in the open-source world for the solo developer or small team. IMHO, there is a simple solution to this - release the software under the GPL license. Then no corporation will want to touch it.

Only if it's proper GPL3. Google and Microsoft touch linux everywhere: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

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

#564

Post by knorker »

This doesn't sound right:

> In 2015, an unrelated tool called Kubernetes was released by Google (but, really, by Xooglers)

1.0 was released in 2015, but seems to me the relevant year was 2014:

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/google-kubernetes/

And how was it Xooglers? Wikipedia certainly seems to be saying this is a Google-initiated product, through and through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes

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

#565

Post by amarshall »

jedberg wrote: post #539
amarshall wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> a VM > Containers These are not the same thing, and have different security guarantees.

Since the whole article is about containers, I assumed they were using VM as shorthand for a container.

Since they also mention QEMU, I do believe they actually meant VMs.

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

#566

Post by brabel »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #315
sercand wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By using gRPC, we get much more without thinking too much. Also, bi-directional streaming is instantaneous and it is not like afterthought long polling. For example, whole etcd API is located at https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/blob/4c6881ffe4b3bae257c0720... It is pretty straightforward and not too hard to understand the API. Designing APIs with protobuf makes things convenient and it brings lots of already written t…

"we get much more without thinking too much" is precisely one of the reasons for the original push to REST (and against RPC at that time SOAP and CORBA and RMI etc.) was made in our industry 10-15 years ago. By falsely representing a _remote_ resource as if it was a _local_ one we open a whole can of worms; not just performance, but resilience, infrastructure issues, etc. Transferring documents over HTTP with a commo…

> But it seems to have taken hold everywhere.

I don't think that's accurate... as the article claims (and it seems believable) it has only appeared in etcd because of Xooglers interfering with the project in the name of Kubernetes (also from Google). Or do you actually have examples of gRPC being used in many other non-Google-related projects?

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

#567

Post by mikro2nd »

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…

> the article presents all of its views as almost self evidently true

Not so. The article, imho, presents all of its views as unabashedly opinionated views of the author.

The complaint that simple, lucid and well-fit functional designs are getting hijacked by large-corp vested interests has been adequately taken up elsewhere in this thread.

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

#569

Post by parentheses »

Joe Armstrong spoke of "the mess we're in" and I think he captured it well. He was referring to the symptom in general, where-as this essay is about one of the root causes.

Having recently learned bits & pieces of Kubernetes, I can see the author's perspective as it's one I held for some time. Kubernetes is useful and makes many things easier. In exchange you give up finer-grained control and you have to work with an abstraction. Such is the nature of all abstractions.

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