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Reliability: It’s not great

community.fly.io

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Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#351

Post by IshKebab »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #324

I've been doing reliability stuff for near two decades. The one thing I am sure of is there is no way to just engineer your way to reliability. That is to say, no person, no matter how smart, can just invent some whizbang engineering thing and suddenly you have reliability. Reliability is a thing that grows, like a plant. You start out with a new system or piece of software. It's fragile, small, weak. It is threatene…

Maybe so but there are definitely technology choices that have vastly different "initial reliability". What would you expect to be more reliable - a bash script or a Rust program?

I'm not that familiar with setting up global network infrastructure but I imagine there are similar choices that can vastly affect initial reliability.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#353

Post by vinay_ys »

Corrosion seems over-engineered. Instead of doing a simpler federation of multiple databases (one per datacenter) across the globe, they decided to do gossip amongst every single VM across the globe! You don't really gain much but you do get all the noisy complexity for sure.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#354

Post by clement_b »

I've been with fly.io at small scale and I have always loved their approach to content (docs, blogs, forums), and needless to say, their product. They are very talented and are building something truly great. Their openness, shown in this post, is an example to follow. It's very hard to be that honest and direct when you're meant to be an infallible entity, but it's not a surprise at all to see fly authoring such a post. That's how they operate and that's why I trust them over anyone else.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#355

Post by cowl »

karmelapple wrote: post #72
trilobyte wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generous free level of service, This is likely the biggest culprit for a lot of these companies. Too many of us have grown up in the culture of getting hosting and platform for "free", but at some point the companies providing it still have to pay the bills. There has to be a better pricing model that let's someone deploy their relatively small, low-traffic app for $10s/month or even $200 - $300 / year for the basi…

I agree. And I know this is unpopular, but I think none of these companies should be expected to have a free tier. A low-cost tier? Certainly. Perhaps even a free trial with a credit card? Great. But our team, who has used Heroku for over a decade, got bit multiple times by Heroku having a free tier. Why were we impacted by other apps? Because Heroku’s load balancers are shared amongst all their apps. That includes a…

Most of these platform have reached their critical mass to stay in business (and time to attract the customers like you) only because of the free tier. Sorry but even a low cost tier is too much for most wanting to give a try to a new infrastructure/stack. Most of these adoptions come from hobby projects trying it first and then recommending to use it in a professional setting. In a professional setting yes. you can afford to pay to low cost to evaluate it but you cant afford the time to do so. So they always rightly offer a trade of time to evaluate for the free cost. This is what actually brings the initial customers.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#357

Post by ocimbote »

azurelake wrote: post #169
zamnos wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does the misalignment between what the customer thinks they want, and what they actually want fit in to your philosophy? Google Spanner is a great example of this because who doesn't want instantaneous global writes? It's just that, y'know, there's a ton of businesses, especially smaller ones, that don't actually need that. The smarter customers realize this themselves, and can judge the premium they'd pay for…

> who doesn't want instantaneous global writes I want to gently note since I see a lot of misunderstanding around Spanner and global writes: Global writes need at least one round trip to each data center, and so they're still subject to the speed of light.

> so they're still subject to the speed of light.

I giggled. Good witty comment, bravo.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#359

Post by LunaSea »

fcantournet wrote: post #226
LunaSea wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen a company without Google Search, Google Chrome, AWS, Microsoft 360 and the lot. Which alternatives are they based on?

Those would not contain PII from your users though, unless you have terrible policies about copying personal information in random Google Docs.

All of these will absolutely contain PII every time.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#360

Post by capableweb »

IshKebab wrote: post #351
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #324

I've been doing reliability stuff for near two decades. The one thing I am sure of is there is no way to just engineer your way to reliability. That is to say, no person, no matter how smart, can just invent some whizbang engineering thing and suddenly you have reliability. Reliability is a thing that grows, like a plant. You start out with a new system or piece of software. It's fragile, small, weak. It is threatene…

Maybe so but there are definitely technology choices that have vastly different "initial reliability". What would you expect to be more reliable - a bash script or a Rust program? I'm not that familiar with setting up global network infrastructure but I imagine there are similar choices that can vastly affect initial reliability.

I'd say it depends more on the person rather than the technology.

A master in bash will build more reliable API (in bash no less!) than a beginner in Rust, simply because of experience and knowing their way around the tools they're using. Newer/different technologies won't simply solve a problem unless the person has some sort of domain knowledge of said problem.

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