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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

#141

Post by jiggawatts »

Something I’ve noticed with PaaS services like RDS or Azure SQL is that people arguing against it are assuming that the alternative is “competence”.

Even in a startup, it’s difficult to hire an expert in every platform that can maintain a robust, secure system. It’s possible, but not guaranteed, and may require a high pay to retain the right staff.

Many government agencies on the other hand are legally banned from offering a competitive wage, so they can literally never hire anyone that competent.

This cap on skill level means that if they do need reliable platforms, the only way they can get one is by paying 10x the real market rate for an over-priced cloud service.

These are the “whales” that are keeping the cloud vendors fat and happy.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#142

Post by charred_patina »

kevinqi wrote: post #138
charred_patina wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be negative, but this post reads like a list of things that I want to avoid in my career. I did a brief stint in cloud stuff at a FAANG and I don't care to go back to it. Right now I'm engineer No. 1 at a current startup just doing DDD with a Django monolith. I'm still pretty Jr. and I'm wondering if there's a way to scale without needing to get into all of the things the author of this article mentio…

I work at a startup and most of the stuff in the article covers things we use and solve real world problems. If you're looking for successful businesses, indie hackers like levelsio show you how far you can get with very simple architectures. But that's solo dev work - once you have a team and are dealing with larger-scale data, things like infrastructure as code, orchestration, and observability become important. Ku…

How many people if I may ask? And how many TPS for your services? I am hoping I can get away with a simple monolith for a very long time.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#143

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#144

Post by DannyBee »

ndjshe3838 wrote: post #78

I’m imagining a developer in the 90s/00s reading this list and being baffled by the complexity/terminology

Yeah, I read the " My general infrastructure advice is “less is better”.", and was like "when did this list of stuff become the definition of 'less'"

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#145

Post by revscat »

avemg wrote: post #113
compumike wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

How do you pronounce that?

“Hey”.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#146

Post by jacurtis »

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…

I mostly agreed with OP's article, but you basically nailed all of the points of disagreement I did have.

Jira: Its overhyped and overpriced. Most HATE jira. I guess I don't care enough. I've never met a ticket system that I loved. Jira is fine. Its overly complex sure. But once you set it up, you don't need to change it very often. I don't love it, I don't hate it. No one ever got fired for choosing Jira, so it gets chosen. Welcome to the tech industry.

Terraform Cloud: The gains for Terraform Cloud are minimal. We just use Gitlab for running Terraform pipelines and have a super nice custom solution that we enjoy. It wasn't that hard to do either. We maintain state files remotely in S3 with versioning for the rare cases when we need to restore a foobar'd statefile. Honestly I like having Terraform pipelines in the same place as the code and pipelines for other things.

GitHub Actions: Yeah switch to GitLab. I used to like Github Actions until I moved to a company with Gitlab and it is best in class, full stop. I could rave about Gitlab for hours. I will evangelize for Gitlab anywhere I go that is using anything else.

DataDog: As mentioned, DataDog is the best monitoring and observability solution out there. The only reason NOT to use it is the cost. It is absurdly expensive. Yes, truly expensive. I really hate how expensive it is. But luckily I work somewhere that lets us have it and its amazing.

Pagerduty: Agree, switch to OpsGenie. Opsgenie is considerably cheaper and does all the pager stuff of Pager duty. All the stuff that PagerDuty tries to tack on top to justify its cost is stuff you don't need. OpsGenie does all the stuff you need. Its fine. Similar to Jira, its not something anyone wants anyway. No ones going to love it, no one loves being on call. So just save money with OpsGenie. If you're going to fight for the "brand name" of something, fight for DataDog instead, not a cooler pager system.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#147

Post by iimblack »

morsecodist wrote: post #131

> Picking AWS over Google Cloud I know this is an unpopular opinion but I think google cloud is amazing compared to AWS. I use google cloud run and it works like a dream. I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud. The services all have sensible names, there are fewer more important services compared to the mess of AWS services, and the UI is more intuitive. The only downside I ha…

I don’t have as much experience with aws but I do hate gcp. The ui is slow and buggy. The way they want things to authenticate is half baked and only implemented in some libraries and it isn’t always clear what library supports it. The gcloud command line tool regularly just doesn’t work; it just hangs and never times out forcing you to kill it manually wondering if it did anything and you’ll mess something up running it again. The way they update client libraries by running code generation means there’s tons of commits that aren’t relevant to the library you’re actually using. Features are not available across all client libraries. Documentation contradicts itself or contradicts support recommendations. Core services like bigquery lack any emulator or Docker image to facilitate CI or testing without having to setup a separate project you have to pay for.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#148

Post by klooney »

sroussey wrote: post #51

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

Helm is the only infrastructure package manager I've ever used where you could reliably get random third party things running without a ton of hassle. It's a huge advantage.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#149

Post by eduction »

dalyons wrote: post #121
eduction wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Management problem masquerading as a tech problem. Being shared between applications is literally what databases were invented to do. That’s why you learn a special dsl to query and update them instead of just doing it in the same language as your application. The problem is that data is a shared resource. The database is where multiple groups in an organization come together to get something they all need. So it nee…

Why would you make it a shared resource if you don’t have to? Decades of experience have shown us the massive costs of doing so - the crippled velocity and soul crushing agony of dba change control teams, the overhead salary of database priests, the arcane performance nightmares, the nuclear blast radius, the fundamental organizational counter-incentives of a shared resource . Why on earth would we choose to pay thos…

You wouldn’t but in any decent sized organization you will have to. If it is an organization that needs to exist there will be some common set of critical data.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#150

Post by benced »

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…

After their ridiculous outage, I wouldn’t touch OpsGenie with a 10ft pole.
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