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Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

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Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#61

Post by gen220 »

macNchz wrote: post #54
CSMastermind wrote: post #10

So by and large I agree with the things in this article. It's interesting that the points I disagree with the author on are all SaaS products: > Moving off JIRA onto linear I don't get the hype. Linear is fine and all but I constantly find things I either can't or don't know how to do. How do I make different ticket types with different sets of fields? No clue. > Not using Terraform Cloud No Regrets I generally recom…

> Cost is the most common complaint and it's almost always from people who don't have it configured correctly (which to be fair Datadog makes it far too easy to misconfigure things and blow up costs). I loved Datadog 10 years ago when I joined a company that already used it where I never once had to think about pricing. It was at the top of my list when evaluating monitoring tools for my company last year, until I go…

I’m a big fan of Datadog from multiple angles.

Their pricing setup is evil. Breaking out by SKUs and having 10+ SKUs is fine, trialing services with “spot” prices before committing to reserved capacity is also fine.

But (for some SKUs, at least) they make it really difficult to be confident that the reserved capacity you’re purchasing will cover your spot use cases. Then, they make you contact a sales rep to lower your reserved capacity.

It all feels designed to get you to pay the “spot” rate for as long as possible, and it’s not a good look.

I understand the pressures on their billing and sales teams that lead to these patterns, but they don’t align with their customers in the long term. I hope they clean up their act, because I agree they’re losing some set of customers over it.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#62

Post by coffeebeqn »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #57
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer (aka next gen aka Team-managed) Jira projects are pretty solid.

Do jira pages still take 30 seconds to load, and have all the interaction speed of cold molasses? Does it have nice keyboard shortcuts yet? Do I still need to perform an arcane ritual of setup to get the ticket statuses to be what I want? Linear has been such a breath of fresh air, with such a solid desktop app (on Mac OS) that I don’t ever want to go back. Stuff happens instantly , the layout and semantics are an ex…

At one of the bigger companies I was at we had an on-prem JIRA in the same office building and it was still so slow that I would often forget why I was loading that page

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#63

Post by DiggyJohnson »

steveBK123 wrote: post #11
electroly wrote: post #6

> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…

RDS pricing is deranged at the scales I've seen too. $60k/year for something I could run on just a slice of one of my on-prem $20k servers. This is something we would have run 10s of. $600k/year operational against sub-$100k capital cost pays DBAs, backups, etc with money to spare. Sure, maybe if you are some sort of SaaS with a need for a small single DB, that also needs to be resilient, backed up, rock solid bullet…

The US DoD for sure.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#64

Post by nitwit005 »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #3

The kitchen sink database used by everybody is such a common problem, yet it is repeated over and over again. If you grow it becomes significant tech debt and a performance bottleneck. Fortunately, with managed DBs like RDS it is really easy to run individual DB clusters per major app.

The moment you have two databases is the moment you need to deal with data consistency problems.

If you can't do something like determine if you can delete data, as the article mentions, you won't be able to produce an answer to how to deal with those problems.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#65

Post by infecto »

electroly wrote: post #6

> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…

The problem you have here is by the time you reach the size of this DB, you are on a special discount rate within AWS.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#66

Post by steveBK123 »

viraptor wrote: post #50
steveBK123 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDS pricing is deranged at the scales I've seen too. $60k/year for something I could run on just a slice of one of my on-prem $20k servers. This is something we would have run 10s of. $600k/year operational against sub-$100k capital cost pays DBAs, backups, etc with money to spare. Sure, maybe if you are some sort of SaaS with a need for a small single DB, that also needs to be resilient, backed up, rock solid bullet…

Lots of cases. It doesn't even have to be a tiny database. Within Also, Aurora gives you the block level cluster that you can't deploy on your own - it's way easier to work with than the usual replication.

Once you commit to more deeply Amazon flavored parts of AWS like Aurora, aren't you now fairly committed to hoping your scale never exceeds the cost-benefit tradeoff?

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#67

Post by gen220 »

breckenedge wrote: post #23

> There are no great FaaS options for running GPU workloads, which is why we could never go fully FaaS. I keep wondering when this is going to show up. We have a lot of service providers, but even more frameworks, and every vendor seems to have their own bespoke API.

I don’t think anybody should go “fully FaaS”, it’s like saying screwdrivers are useless, all you need is a hammer.

That being said, Cloudflare is on the path to offering a great GPU FaaS system for inference.

I believe it’s still in beta, but it’s the most promising option at the moment.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#68

Post by rmccue »

> Not using Terraform Cloud

We adopted TFC at the start of 2023 and it was problematic right from the start; stability issues, unforeseen limitations, and general jankiness. I have no regrets about moving us away from local execution, but Terraform Cloud was a terrible provider.

When they announced their pricing changes, the bill for our team of 5 engineers would have been roughly 20x, and more than hiring an engineer to literally sit there all day just running it manually. No idea what they’re thinking, apart from hoping their move away from open source would lock people in?

We ended up moving to Scalr, and although it hasn’t been a long time, I can’t speak highly enough of them so far. Support was amazing throughout our evaluation and migration, and where we’ve hit limits or blockers, they’ve worked with us to clear them very quickly.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#69

Post by compumike »

colechristensen wrote: post #53
CSMastermind wrote: post #10

So by and large I agree with the things in this article. It's interesting that the points I disagree with the author on are all SaaS products: > Moving off JIRA onto linear I don't get the hype. Linear is fine and all but I constantly find things I either can't or don't know how to do. How do I make different ticket types with different sets of fields? No clue. > Not using Terraform Cloud No Regrets I generally recom…

PagerDuty’s cheapest plan is $21 per user month OpsGenie’s cheapest is $9 per user month but arbitrarily crippled, the plan anybody would want to use is $19 per user month So instead of a factor of ten it’s ten percent cheaper. And i just kind of expect Atlassian to suck. Datadog is ridiculously expensive and on several occasions I’ve run into problems where an obvious cause for an incident was hidden by bad behavior…

Heii On-Call is $32 per month total for your team — not per user. https://heiioncall.com/ (Full disclosure: part of the team building it)
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