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You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

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Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#31

Post by polote »

taylodl wrote: post #2

> "So unless your product legitimately only sells to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple, you probably don’t need to be 'enterprise ready'" What in the actual fsck? Check out this list of companies ranked by the number of employees they have - https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-o... . Okay, Amazon is #2 - but notice the top 100 doesn't include Apple. There's a lot more to business than FA…

And good luck selling enterprise software to Apple, Google and Facebook, they all already have some custom internal softwares for everything

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#32

Post by dgb23 »

s1k3s wrote: post #21
cubes wrote: post #11

Hard agree. History is littered with dead startups that designed for scale before they had enough usage to justify it. Within reason, having users knock your site over resulting in failures like the Twitter Fail Whale is a good problem to have. With that said, you need to be prepared to scale up quickly once you have this problem. There's a reason Facebook counts its users in the billions, and Friendster is a footnot…

Yes, but.. I am a software architect. ~90% of the job offers I get are from CEOs/CTOs who want me to join their small company to help them refactor because they can’t grow anymore. Tech debt kills as well.

Is that a "but" or is that how things should work? You solve a problem when you have it or can reasonably predict it (in technical/engineering terms). I also think it's sensible to look for experts when you need them right?

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#33

Post by adepressedthrow »

bee_rider wrote: post #22
wereHamster wrote: post #19

I'm working on a project where the backend devs decided to use Cassandra to manage a few hundred entities. Due to different access modes they had to denormalize the data into multiple tables and we're constantly running into consistency issues. A fucking sqlite db with a few tables and indexes would do just fine. Also, the tool has maybe a dozen DAUs. But it's web scale, so, yeah…

This completely tangential, but any time I see someone talking about normalizing a database, I briefly think they are talking about doing something like: x/|x| Ya know, like normalizing a vector. Of course this brief confusion doesn't matter, I sort it out quickly, and it is totally clear language to other database people -- it is just a funny quirk of overloaded lingo. But I wonder if as big data and machine learnin…

While the overloading is annoying, database normalization actually has a strict definition that is not unlike the standard mathematical use; that is, to imply consistency (to make normal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

I would also point out that normalization within mathematics does not have a single concrete definition either, and it depends on your domain and desired property to stabilize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_(statistics)

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#34

Post by fasteddie31003 »

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they intorduce many bugs without testing locally. They response was along the lines that they hired good engineers that could understand all the complexity before deploying new features.

I believe having a solid development environment where you can develop and test the whole stack is key to making reliable software. Is this common at other companies that you cannot run the whole app locally to develop and test against?

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#35

Post by bob1029 »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #34

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they in…

> Is this common at other companies that you cannot run the whole app locally to develop and test against?

Yes. I work in B2B banking software, so having an "authentic" environment to test against is extraordinarily complex. Even the big vendors in the space seem unable to maintain accurate facsimiles of production with their own decades-old core software, so smaller vendors stand no chance unless they adjust their entire strategy.

What we ultimately had to do was negotiate a way to test in the production environment in such a way that all the activity could be tracked and backed out afterwards. A small group of important customer stakeholders were given access to this pre production environment for purposes of validating things.

This is something that has never sat well with me. But, the way the business works the alternatives are usually worse (if you want to survive long-term, that is). We wasted 18 months waiting for a customer to have a test environment installed before we learned our lesson about how bad those environments are in reality.

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#36

Post by GauntletWizard »

pid-1 wrote: post #14
bigtones wrote: post #5

You actually do need to have Enterprise security and authentication features if you intend to sell to Enterprise customers. (SOC2, OAuth, SAML etc)

You actually need OAuth / SAML if you give 2 shits about your customers.

You need OAuth and not to use SAML. Saml is insecure by design: https://joonas.fi/2021/08/saml-is-insecure-by-design/

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#37

Post by asd88 »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #34

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they in…

I work at a company that has similar practices to what you describe (we don’t run our services locally). While it’s hard to get used to at first, I think the silver lining is that it forces everyone to write good unit tests, since it’s the only efficient way to run their code before publishing a PR. Having worked on the opposite end (at a team where we mostly tested locally and had almost no automated tests), I much prefer this environment.

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#38

Post by scarface74 »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #34

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they in…

Why is it a big deal to run your app locally? You just give each developer access to a cloud account (either one account or one per developer) with wide enough guard rails.

Heck, when I am in a place with bad internet, I spin up a Cloud 9 (Linux) or Amazon Workspace account (Windows) and do everything remotely.

I’m not wasting my time trying to use LocalStack or SAM local.

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#39

Post by nijave »

bob1029 wrote: post #35
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #34

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they in…

> Is this common at other companies that you cannot run the whole app locally to develop and test against? Yes. I work in B2B banking software, so having an "authentic" environment to test against is extraordinarily complex. Even the big vendors in the space seem unable to maintain accurate facsimiles of production with their own decades-old core software, so smaller vendors stand no chance unless they adjust their e…

Worked with banking software before; it can be incredibly complicated. I worked on proof of concept infrastructure for a Websphere monolith that ran on AIX servers. It had at least 10-15 services it connected to and each one of those were huge Java monoliths, too. Some of those apps had 8+ copies of /each/ environment (8x dev, 8x test, 4-8x stage/uat, 1-2x prod) so you could do integrated tests without stepping on other people or something software (software B might have a dedicated test environment of software A)

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#40

Post by nijave »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #34

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they in…

Yeah, once you have more than a small handful of dependencies (SaaS, databases, microservices). Some of the stuff I worked on will have built in stubbing/mocking so you can run parts of the stack locally and the test suite also uses the mocks/stubs.
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