I am constantly amazed at how complicated doing simple things has become.
There's very little yak actually there, once you get done shaving it.
Back to the '70s with Serverless
211–220 of 310 posts
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of religious followers of the one true AWS way of thinking. I dared bitch too loudly about SES delivery policy once and said to look elsewhere and earned the ire of the architectural elite. This is insane because I'm certified too but a non believer, a concept which does not compute for a lot of people.
You don’t believe in AWS? Or not in SES, because I feel like they still win in general ‘want to recommend’.
I don't believe in anything past 100% portable IaaS platforms. Within those bounds, careful application of AWS is fine.
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you are working at hyperscale yourselves already, and there are maybe 50 organisations like you out there. Maybe. Right now I don't think that there is a single telco that has the scale to break GCP, or a single manufacturing company (exempt Tesla) or a single energy company. Or bank. I agree that pharma, social media and streaming may do this. But since Netflix is on AWS I am doubtful of the last.
Plenty of scientific computing applications fall over on the "cloud", too. The LHC produces somewhere between 20-30 petabytes/year[0][1] (at a rate of about 200 Megabyte/second[2] after ignoring many "uninteresting" events) The LHC is a big name, but there are many other applications in disciplines like physics, genomics, meteorology etc for whom "just use the cloud" is a terrible suggestion. [0] https://www.popularm…
Actually, Grid Computing.
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for putting this into words. People want a reason to log on, a reason to show up to work. I wrote a blog post on Monday about a relatively old and not-hot language. The post nevertheless trended on Medium and received 50k views. A lot of the feedback was from people who were just happy to see someone senior say something positive about the not-hot language. Anyway, working with The New Hotness also gives peopl…
Is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars plus stocks and bonuses not enough of a reason to show up at work?
I suspect the majority of readers are being paid less than $100k with no stock or bonuses, and correctly intuit that new-hotness things on their résumé will help them climb the salary ladder towards that magic $100k threshold.
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, "the cloud" is bunk from any technical point of view. It exists to shift CapEx to OpEx for accounting. Any technical considerations are a distant third place on the list.
Leasing programs did that well before the cloud ever came along
"The cloud" is a leasing program except even more optimized for OpEx - pay-as-you-go monthly billing and you now don't even need to hire ops people because it's "serverless".
(Of course you have to force your devs to do the ops stuff now, but that's not accounting and HR's problem now.)
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, "the cloud" is bunk from any technical point of view. It exists to shift CapEx to OpEx for accounting. Any technical considerations are a distant third place on the list.
Well, if you mean CapEx because one needs fewer programmers and a higher AWS bill, then yes I agree with you. But if you mean CapEx because one needs fewer physical computers that they own and a higher AWS bill for computers that they rent, then no I do not agree with you. First, the markup in just sheer ops terms is enormous. Minimum 4x, and in some cases 20x. Sure, you get a couple more nines of reliability, but 99…
I'd guess that the vast majority of "cloud" customers are boring enterprises doing boring enterprise stuff, probably not even Internet-related stuff at all.
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the scalability "argument". The capabilities of a single thread of processing in a modern x86 CPU are underestimated by several orders of magnitude in most shops. The unfortunate part is that the more you chase the scalability with the cloud bullshit, the more elusive it becomes. If you want to push tens of millions of transactions per second, you need a fast core being fed data in the most optimal way possibl…
Judging by the occasional post on HN, even a lot of experienced software engineers (the "experienced" being my take) seem to have no good handle on what a single thread and a single machine should be capable of handling, what the latency should look like and what it should cost as a result. The posts that I mean are about "look how we handled the load for a moderately active web-app which is 90% cacheable with only f…
I think you're right on the money with people having gotten used
to it. Once I truly started harnessing the power of Vim combined
with shell scripts and terminal multiplexers, my patience for
many other programs and tasks decreased even further.
We have the computing power to run complex physical simulations or AI training sequences on a normal home computer, but for some reason use programs that take 100 times longer to start than old software despite not having more features, and websites that sometimes even come with loading screens. Electron isn't even as bad or slow as many people think, but somehow developers still manage to throttle it so hard that I might as well just use a website instead.
As someone who is just starting with nodejs and web development I find a lot of the tech feels nice but sometimes also unnecessarily abstract. Sure, it tends to make a lot of the code very elegant and simple, but every additional framework adds another guide and documentation to look at, another config file that has to be correctly referenced by an already existing one so npm knows what to do, another couple of seconds of build time and another source of bugs and build problems. Then of course you need that trendy package for easier imports maintenance - which IDEs automatically handled in the past, but now we gotta use an editor running in a hidden web browser which started from scratch in terms of features but is just as slow in return.
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#218One thing that surprised me as a latecomer to software development coming from a visual arts background is how much choice of technology and working practices are purely fashion driven. The thing about fashion is that the way if develops is largely arbitrary. Changes in fashion resemble a drunken walk through possible design space with the drunkard receiving regular shoves from "influencers" who are usually trying to…
I'm going to play devil's advocate here. A sleepy engineer wakes from their slumber when a new technology
takes hold their mind. They find new ideas exciting and intoxicating. And sometimes that energy can be infectious and makes the entire development process more enjoyable for product owners and QA.
There needs to be a balance. For example, upgrade to the latest version of Rails. Upgrade previous file storage gems to active storage. Upgrade the deployment process.
There are many exciting things to improve in a monolith.
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to see how this supports your claim that you can get by with "a few minutes per month" of devops. In fact, it's a classic red herring. Your original claim is quite unrealistic and you'd do well to retract it. It's bad advice both for public cloud and for self-managed efforts alike.
When I used to work for an MSP, we would sell Dell servers to rural banking groups. We supported disaster recovery and high availability deployments. Any failed component, Dell would send us a replacement in less than 24 hours.
24? I guess it's that long because it is rural? We use Dell servers and I sleep a bit better having seen their 4hr support replace a motherboard with a bad lifecycle controller within 2 hours of the initial call.
Try calling Amazon and getting that kind of response for your problems.
Re: Back to the '70s with Serverless
#220In a similar vein, other things I find interesting in the software industry:
- Startups looking for a CTO but they already know they will run in the cloud and have chosen their frontend and backend stacks.
- The way mainstream technologies get established not by quality but by pure luck. Javascript was a pretty poor language added to the Netscape browser in a hurry, but since everybody hated Microsoft at that time it succeeded.
- The way old technologies remain relevant just because many people know about them and there is a good ecosystem/large codebases. C/C++ comes to mind.
- The way compensation is hardly tied to the value created. Often you can only advance by switching jobs all the time. That will not let you learn from your mistakes, and systems become legacy very quickly.
- The overkill of infrastructure in the cloud just to get a simple system running. This is the complexity the author mentions, which leads to huge and expensive support orgs and high costs. I still love building a system from the ground up as much as possible with very few moving parts instead of gluing together the latest AWS services. It's shocking how many orgs believe they need to rely on K8S just because everyone else does.