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

gorelay.co

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

#51

Post by clepto »

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 VOIP services provider and we operate multiple brands which are companies we’ve acquired over several years. One thing that has rang true of every company we’ve acquired is that there is typically barely even a way to run one piece locally, let alone the whole thing.

Some of these when I took over there wasn’t even version control, and they were being developed by FTPing files to production server or even editing them live with vim or something. Certainly no reproducible containerization or even VMs to speak of.

I agree completely with you about having a solid development environment. I’ve spent the better part of a year creating such a thing for some of the brands, and it has increased our time to ship features and fixes probably ten fold.

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

#52

Post by Mandatum »

scarface74 wrote: post #47
polote wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No. They use ADP, Concur, WordPress (check out AWS official blogs), Salesforce and third party SaaS products just like everyone else.

Yeah, they know the "keep everything default as much as you can" rule better than anyone else with SaaS providers. What a load of gobshite.

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

#53

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

nijave wrote: post #39
bob1029 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ot…

I haven't found a wholistic integration testing framework where you can effortlessly mock out upstreams as running services, so that you don't have to ham-fist integration testing code into your app or rely on actual, live upstreams which are probably prone to breakage anyway.

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

#55

Post by icedchai »

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…

In my experience, good local development environments are relatively rare. We had them at a couple of small focused on software, local environments seemed more of an afterthought. With increased dependencies on cloud services, "serverless" environments, etc. it can also be painful to run stuff locally. Obviously you can build around this (and should...) but it requires thinking ahead a bit, not just uploading your lambdas to AWS and editing them there...

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

#56

Post by scarface74 »

Mandatum wrote: post #52
scarface74 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They use ADP, Concur, WordPress (check out AWS official blogs), Salesforce and third party SaaS products just like everyone else.

Yeah, they know the "keep everything default as much as you can" rule better than anyone else with SaaS providers. What a load of gobshite.

Are you saying they should keep everything in house? I can tell you from personal experience that the external facing services from one of the major cloud providers handle spikes in traffic and has much better uptime than many internal systems.

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

#57

Post by FpUser »

I've delivered custom backend business servers to a various businesses of healthy size. Almost all were deployed on rented multicore servers with gobbles of RAM from Hetzner / OVH / etc. Some running for many years already. Not a single one required to be "enterprise scaled".

Granted all servers are C++ and talking to a local DB. No problems in processing thousands requests per second without breaking much sweat.

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

#58

Post by grogenaut »

acwan93 wrote: post #42
bob1029 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Same here in e-commerce. We end up testing in production environments with an element somewhere that's in a development environment that can be tracked and actively watched. Amazon notoriously does not have a production environment, and eBay's is just unusable.

im pretty sure amazon has a production environment... just their staging is problematic. It's incredibly expensive to run a copy of prod and keep it up. You essentially have to get paged for it doubling your burden.

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

#59

Post by bin_bash »

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…

Local dev is great until production gets complex enough that you lose parity. That'll happen even earlier now that we run x86 on the server but ARM locally.

At my company we don't support local dev nor have any sort of staging environment. We have development linux servers connected to prod services and dbs. There are no pragmas or build flags to perform things differently in "dev". Things are gated with feature flags.

It scared me at first but now I think it makes sense: staging is always a pain and doing it this way we avoid parity problems between staging and prod. Local development would be impossible for a system at our scale but I think even a staging setup would result in more defects—not fewer.

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

#60

Post by roflyear »

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…

Extremely common. For some reason it is cool to put stuff in lambda or azure functions or whatever. Or to use 11 different stacks.
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