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Every Nodejitsu app is down

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Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#21

Post by trevor-rollin »

sparkle202 wrote: post #10

This is the kind of downtime that would never happen again: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rk8FQr-... The employee page is unavailable right now. But if you look through the bios, they have a bunch of young open source hackers, but virtually zero operations experience, and virtually zero ops culture, unless you count hanging out in an IRC channel sometimes.

They are evidently a bunch of amateur, let's-change-the-world hipster types, as are most of the JavaScript and Node communities. The current "leader" of the Node.js project is a former vacuum cleaner salesman, hahahaha.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#22

Post by ChuckMcM »

sparkle202 wrote: post #10

This is the kind of downtime that would never happen again: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rk8FQr-... The employee page is unavailable right now. But if you look through the bios, they have a bunch of young open source hackers, but virtually zero operations experience, and virtually zero ops culture, unless you count hanging out in an IRC channel sometimes.

Operations, like management, is something that engineers who haven't been directly involved in, under estimate. It's like Python programmers telling an embedded systems guy that an ad-hoc database is pretty straightforward, just use a b-tree for heavens sake, everyone learns how to build a basic tree.

That said, there is also a tremendous seduction in leaving the problems to others. Nobody really wants their programming or configuration mistakes to call them up in the middle of the night.

Scaling is hard and it's why many products die when they find they can't scale. But it also keeps good devops people in high demand. So I really can't complain.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#23

Post by niggler »

seldo wrote: post #7
dschwartz88 wrote: post #5

I think the main issue with this is the status page. It should be hosted off their normal infrastructure, Heroku went through this a year or two ago if I recall correctly. I don't mind downtime with a PaaS (within reason), it's having zero visibility into the problems, what exactly they are doing to remedy them, and what the ETA for the fixes are.

As is often the case, their Twitter stream is a backup for news: https://twitter.com/nodejitsu

So then what happens if twitter also fail-whales?

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#24

Post by trevor-rollin »

btipling wrote: post #19
coenhyde wrote: post #15

Nodejitsu is incredibly unreliable. I use them only because they are so cheap and quick. Anything of value should not be hosted on Nodejitsu. This disappoints me greatly as Nodejitsu is a company i want to love.

Can you please give some details because that's quite a damning statement for a company that professes to be build on enterprise ready infrastructure. I would default to be skeptical of statements like yours, everyone has downtime.

What the profess and reality don't seem to agree. The world is bursting at the seams with hucksters who will proclaim anything you want to hear. You should judge based on what people do, not what they say. Anything less is incredibly naive.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#25

Post by Fauntleroy »

btipling wrote: post #19
coenhyde wrote: post #15

Nodejitsu is incredibly unreliable. I use them only because they are so cheap and quick. Anything of value should not be hosted on Nodejitsu. This disappoints me greatly as Nodejitsu is a company i want to love.

Can you please give some details because that's quite a damning statement for a company that professes to be build on enterprise ready infrastructure. I would default to be skeptical of statements like yours, everyone has downtime.

Here's what I can remember off the top of my head:

- Deployments often fail with a nonspecific 500 error. I'd say near 50% of my deploys end up failing because of this.

- Downtime occurs at random times. It's usually just a few minutes (maybe 10)

- In the past I've had problems with certain routes always returning 500 errors when loaded in groups, but not alone. This problem hasn't happened for a while.

- The admin panel is at its best only "kind of" responsive. Most of the time it's a complete mystery as to whether commands issued there ever make it out to your instance(s).

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#26

Post by roberthahn »

seldo wrote: post #6
benatkin wrote: post #3

So far its uptime seems comparable to other PaaS services. Curious what opinions HNers have on this is, though: How important is it to have pretty downtime screens, or nothing at all? In this case it's 404-ing, which is inaccurate. Would it be better to just not respond to the HTTP request than to show this? Also have other PaaS services like Heroku got these messages right?

This is one of those perennial problems: if you're spending engineering time making your "we're down" screen look good, you're really optimizing for the wrong thing, but on the other hand, some downtime is unavoidable and you don't want to look unprofessional. An HTTP 500 would definitely be more appropriate in this case, but it seems a 400 is accurate -- it's down because it has somehow forgotten where the apps are…

I know I'm getting in the weeds here but no, 400 is not appropriate -- all 4xx errors indicate an issue with user input (with the possible exception of 418). 5xx errors indicate the problem is occurring on the server side.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#27

Post by film42 »

seldo wrote: post #12

https://twitter.com/nodejitsu/status/321775765962240000 "Sorry for the inconveniences, we found that our database provider (@IrisCouch) is down at the moment, we are bringing up the cloud." I'm pretty surprised to learn that they don't run their own databases (and also that their database is CouchDB, but maybe I'm just old fashioned).

My two cents: CouchDB is great in that it allows you to remove the backend and rely solely on a database with REST baked in. However, it has its drawbacks, like database queries can be costly do to transactions over http.

It's like every other argument in the community, how much control over ease do you want?

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#28

Post by bgriggs1 »

coenhyde wrote: post #15

Nodejitsu is incredibly unreliable. I use them only because they are so cheap and quick. Anything of value should not be hosted on Nodejitsu. This disappoints me greatly as Nodejitsu is a company i want to love.

We also really wanted to love Nodejitsu, but our patience on the downtime has been exhausted. SSL has been down at least once a day recently from load balancing issues.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#30

Post by arjunbajaj »

Come on guys, every provider goes down some time or the other! Unfortunately, today it was their turn.

Let's just give them some space to improve and they will!

I think Nodejitsu is a great company! They are cheap, and awesome in support! :)

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