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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

#571

Post by flemhans »

maccard wrote: post #103
sroussey wrote: post #51

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

Because I can go from main.go to a load balanced, autoscaling app with rolling deploys, segeregated environments, logging & monitoring in about 30 minutes, and never need to touch _any_ of that again. Plus, if I leave, the guy who comes after me can look at a helm chart, terraform module + pipeline.yml and figure out how it works. Meanwhile, our janq shell script based task scheduler craps out on something new every…

You'll need to touch it again. These paid services tend to change all the time.

You also need to pay them which is an event.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#572

Post by lijok »

Solvency wrote: post #485
mschuster91 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have all of that neatly extracted into a Terraform module. Write it once and now EKS clusters are essentially disposable.

You just added yet another Thing in that huge pile of things representing millions of lines of code. That's the point.

Why is that inherently a problem?

How many LOCs in the linux kernel again?

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#573

Post by AtlasBarfed »

kunley wrote: post #318
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…

RDS is not so bulletproof as advertised, and the support is first arrogant then (maybe) helpful. People pay for RDS because they want to believe in a fairy tale that it will keep potential problems away and that it worked well for other customers. But those mythical other customers also paid based on such belief. Plus, no one wants to admit that they pay money in such irrational way. It's a bubble

Plus aws outright lie to us about zero downtime upgrades.

Come time for force major upgrade shoved down our throat? Downtime, surprise, surprise

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#574

Post by lijok »

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 generally recommend Terraform Cloud

I'll be dead in the ground before I use TFC. 10 cents per resource per month my ass. We have around 100k~ resources at an early-stage startup I'm at, our AWS bill is $50~/mo and TFC wants to charge me $10k/mo for that? We can hire a senior dev to maintain an in-house tool full time for that much.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#575

Post by AtlasBarfed »

jabradoodle wrote: post #439
nightfly wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of this expense goes away when they migrate to cloud. Just to pay someone else enough money to provide the same service and make a profit while do it

That's how nearly every aspect of every business works; would you you start a bakery by learning construction and building it yourself?

Construction is a one time cost. It infrastructure is in constant use.

It's like accounting and finance. Yeah a lot of companies use tax firms, but they all have finance and accounting in-house.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#576

Post by AtlasBarfed »

jq-r wrote: post #392
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…

> "regular cadence meetings with our AWS account manager" and I am not sure what could be discusse. As being on a number of those calls, its just a bunch of crap where they talk like a scripted bot reading from corporate buzzword bingo card over a slideshow. Their real intention is two fold. To sell you even more AWS complexity/services, and to provide "value" to their person of contact (which is person working in yo…

This. This is the reality.

I am so tired of the support team having all the real metrics, especially in io and throttling, and not surfacing it to us somehow.

And cadence is really an opportunity for them to sell to you, the parent is completely right.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#577

Post by AtlasBarfed »

mdaniel wrote: post #526
iimblack wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 runnin…

Oh, friend, you have not known UI pain until you've used portal.azure.com. That piece of junk requires actual page reloads to make any changes show up. That Refresh button is just like the close-door elevator button: it's there for you to blow off steam, but it for damn sure does not DO anything. I have boundless screenshots showing when their own UI actually pops up a dialog saying "ok, I did what you asked but it's…

Aws refactored their console to use modern wen spa and it is TERRIBLE.

It amazes me a company that makes that much money has such a crappy client.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#578

Post by davedx »

marcinzm wrote: post #398
davedx wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve implemented such a process for companies multiple times, bro. I know what I’m talking about.

And that's the problem. "It's easy for me because I've done it a dozen times so it's easy for everyone" is a very common fallacy.

This is an oversimplification, but! Dumping postgres to a file is one command. scp the file to a different server is two commands. (Granted you need to setup ssh keys there too). I have implemented backups this way.

With sqlite you only need the scp part.

You can even push your backup file to an S3 bucket... with one command!

Honestly, this argument mystifies me.

Of course you can make it as complicated as you want to, too. I've also worked on replicating anonymized data from a production OLTP database to a data warehouse. That's a lot more work.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#579

Post by lijok »

LispSporks22 wrote: post #89
ndjshe3838 wrote: post #78

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

I agree. I’m afraid I’m one of those 00s developers and can relate. Back then many startups were being launched on super simple stacks. With all of that complexity/word salad from TFA, where’s the value delivered? Presumably there’s a product somewhere under all that infrastructure, but damn, what’s left to spend on it after all the infrastructure variable costs? I get it’s a list of preferences, but still once you’v…

For simplicity, software must be well built. Unfortunately, the software development practice is perpetually underskilled so we release buggy crap which we compensate for in infrastructure.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#580

Post by charred_patina »

daxfohl wrote: post #539
charred_patina wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a coincidence! I've got my dream job too! The things I did to get here are honestly kind of stupid. I started out at a defense contractor after graduating and left in the first six months because all the software devs were jumping ship. Went to a small business defense contractor (yep that's a thing) and learned to build web apps with React and Django. Then the pace of business slowed so after about 18 months I…

I did this myself for a good 15 years or so, but eventually with a family, money became a bit more of a priority, and it's hard to get a good job if all you've worked at is small shops. Any next role in a larger tech company will likely be a downgrade until you can prove yourself out, which of course you may not be able to because things are so different, and motivation will run low because you're being tasked with a…

I think that my work is honestly the most important factor in my happiness. I spend 8 hours a day (probably for the rest of my life) at work so it's going to be the thing that impacts me the most psychologically in my life.

After realizing that, I decided I'd try as hard as I possibly could to never have to work at a job that I didn't like. I already didn't want kids so that part is easy. The other part of the equation is saving lots of money. I'm not an ascetic by any means, but I live well below my means on a SWE salary which means I can save quite a bit of money each year.

I also recognize that not wanting to go corporate severely limits my options down the line. But capitalism is all about making money for other people. If I can make someone a lot of money, they're not going to care about if I have the chops to stand up a Kubernetes cluster or write a Next.js app or whatever (I hope).

I don't think I'm super smart, I'd say I'm pretty average for this line of work. But I reckon that most SWEs are focused on learning new technologies to get to their next job, or are overly concerned with technical problems. I like to think that I am pragmatic enough about only doing things that are going to deliver business value to make up for being average in smarts.

Anyways, there's not really a point to this rant. These are just some thoughts I have had about optimizing my career for my own happiness, and how I hope I can stay a hot commodity even though I hate working in the cloud and my software skills aren't bleeding edge.

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