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Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

cep.dev

91–100 of 644 posts

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#91

> EKS My contrarian view is that EC2 + ASG is so pleasant to use. It’s just conceptually simple: I launch an image into an ASG, and configure my autoscale policies. There are very few things to worry about. On the other hand, using k8s has always been a big deal. We built a whole team to manage k8s. We introduce dozens of concepts of k8s or spend person-years on “platform engineering” to hide k8s concepts. We publish…

K8S is a disastrous complexity bomb. You need millions upon millions of lines of code just to build a usable platform. Securing Kubernetes is a nightmare. And lock-in never really went away because it's all coupled with cloud specific stuff anyway.

Many of the core concepts of Kubernetes should be taken to build a new alternative without all the footguns. Security should be baked in, not an afterthought when you need ISO/PCI/whatever.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#92
post #22

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…

Interesting. Atlassian also just launched an integration with OpsGenie. I have the same opinion of JIRA. I've tried many competitors (not Linear so far) and regretted it every time.

> Atlassian also just launched an integration with OpsGenie.

Given Atlassian bought OpsGenie in 2018, this either somewhere between quite late and unsurprising.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#93

It is a shame karpenter is AWS only. I was thinking about how our k8s autoscaler could be better and landed on the same kind of design as karpenter where you work from unschedulable pods backwards. Right now we have an autoscaler which looks at resource utilization of a node pool but that doesn’t take into account things like topology spread constraints and resource fragmentation.

https://github.com/Azure/karpenter-provider-azure there is this in the works for karpenter on aks

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#94

If you are startup that can can’t afford a DBA, then why why why are you using Kubernetes?

This is my case. I’m one man show ATM so no DBA. I’m still using Kubernetes. Many things can be automated as simply as helm apply. Plus you get the benefit of not having a hot mess of systemd services, ad hoc tools which you don’t remember how you configured, plethora bash scripts to do common tasks and so on.

I see Kubernetes as one time (mental and time) investment that buys me somehow smoother sailing plus some other benefits.

Of course it is not all rainbows and unicorns. Having a single nginx server for a single /static directory would be my dream instead of MinIO and such.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#95
post #91

> EKS My contrarian view is that EC2 + ASG is so pleasant to use. It’s just conceptually simple: I launch an image into an ASG, and configure my autoscale policies. There are very few things to worry about. On the other hand, using k8s has always been a big deal. We built a whole team to manage k8s. We introduce dozens of concepts of k8s or spend person-years on “platform engineering” to hide k8s concepts. We publish…

K8S is a disastrous complexity bomb. You need millions upon millions of lines of code just to build a usable platform. Securing Kubernetes is a nightmare. And lock-in never really went away because it's all coupled with cloud specific stuff anyway. Many of the core concepts of Kubernetes should be taken to build a new alternative without all the footguns. Security should be baked in, not an afterthought when you need…

This isn't my experience at all. Maybe three or four years ago?

Who exactly needs millions of lines of code?

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is then you have many, many DBs to fight with, to monitor, to tune, etc. This is rarely a problem when things are small, but as they grow, the bad schema decisions made by empowering DBA-less teams to run their own infra become glaringly obvious.

Not a downside to me. Each team maintains their own DB and pays for their own choices. In the kitchen sink model all teams are tied together for performance and scalability, and some bad apple applications can ruin the party for everyone. Seen this countless times doing due diligence on startups. The universal kitchen sink DB is almost always one of the major tech debt items.

> Not a downside to me. Each team maintains their own DB and pays for their own choices.

This is how you end up with the infamous "jira and confluence have two different markdown flavors" issue.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#97
post #91

> EKS My contrarian view is that EC2 + ASG is so pleasant to use. It’s just conceptually simple: I launch an image into an ASG, and configure my autoscale policies. There are very few things to worry about. On the other hand, using k8s has always been a big deal. We built a whole team to manage k8s. We introduce dozens of concepts of k8s or spend person-years on “platform engineering” to hide k8s concepts. We publish…

K8S is a disastrous complexity bomb. You need millions upon millions of lines of code just to build a usable platform. Securing Kubernetes is a nightmare. And lock-in never really went away because it's all coupled with cloud specific stuff anyway. Many of the core concepts of Kubernetes should be taken to build a new alternative without all the footguns. Security should be baked in, not an afterthought when you need…

kinda like openshift?

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#98
post #16

Who's using Pulumi here and how mature is it in comparison to terraform?

I'm using Pulumi in production pretty heavily for a bunch of different app types (ECS, EKS, CloudFront, CloudFlare, Vault, Datadog monitors, Lambdas of all types, EC2s with ASGs, etc.), it's reasonably mature enough.

As mentioned in the other comment, the most commonly used providers for terraform are "bridged" to pulumi, so the maturity is nearly identical to Terraform. I don't really use Pulumi's pre-built modules (crossroads), but I don't find I've ever missed them.

I really like both Pulumi and Terraform (which I also used in production for hundreds of modules for a few years), which it seems like isn't always a popular opinion on HN, but I have and you absolutely can run either tool in production just fine.

My slight preference is for Pulumi because I get slightly more willing assistance from devs on our team to reach in and change something in infra-land if they need to while working on app code.

We do still use some Pulumi and some Terraform, and they play really nicely together: https://transcend.io/blog/use-terraform-pulumi-together-migr...

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a downside to me. Each team maintains their own DB and pays for their own choices. In the kitchen sink model all teams are tied together for performance and scalability, and some bad apple applications can ruin the party for everyone. Seen this countless times doing due diligence on startups. The universal kitchen sink DB is almost always one of the major tech debt items.

I’m a DBRE, which means it’s somehow always my fault until proven otherwise. And even then, it’s usually on me to work around the insane schema dreamt up by the devs. Multi-tenant DBs can work fine as long as every app has its own users, everyone goes through a connection pooler / load balancer, and every user has rate limits. You want to write shitty queries that time out? Not my problem. Your GraphQL BFF bullshit i…

I agree. My gripe was everybody in the same schema with a global “app” user.
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