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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

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Re: I am building a cloud

#201

Post by rantanplan »

littlestymaar wrote: post #180
adamtulinius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you spin up Kubernetes for "a couple of containers to run your web app", I think you're doing something wrong in the first place, also coupled with your comment about adding SDN to Kubernetes. People use Kubernetes for way too small things, and it sounds like you don't have the scale for actually running Kubernetes.

I have nom doubt that there are legit use cases for something like k8s at Google or other multi-billion companies. But if its use was confined to this use case, pretty much nobody would be using it (unless as a customer of the organization's infra) and barely would be talking about it (like how there isn't too much talk about Borg). The reason k8s is a thing in the first place is because it's being used by way too ma…

The legit use case for companies like Google/Amazon etc is only to sell it to customers. None of these companies use K8s internally for real critical workloads.

Re: I am building a cloud

#202

Post by tete »

ororoo wrote: post #143
Thanemate wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that "resume-driven development" exists, where the tradeoffs between approaches aren't about the technical fit of the solution but the career trajectory. I've seen people making plain workstation preparation scripts using Rust, only to have something to flex about in interviews. I'm not surprised even in the slightest that DevOps workers will slap k8s on everything, to show "real industry experience" in a job…

there are alsp people with devops title that do not know anything else than the hammer, and then everything is a hammer problem. I mean, I worked with people who were suprised that you can run more applications inside ec2 vm than just 1 app.

> there are alsp people with devops title that do not know anything else than the hammer, and then everything is a hammer problem.

To be fair though, that's true for every profession or skill.

> I mean, I worked with people who were suprised that you can run more applications inside ec2 vm than just 1 app.

I've seen something similar where people were surprised that you can use an object storage (so effectively "make HTTP requests") from every server.

Re: I am building a cloud

#204

Post by dns_snek »

barrkel wrote: post #109
jeffrallen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to spell this out more clearly for the back row.of the classroom: The price is what the customer will pay, regardless of your costs.

Economics teaches us that a big difference between cost and price attracts competition which should make the price trend towards the cost.

Practice taught me that that "should" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and it's often not the case, even across long time periods (years) that should allow competitors to emerge.

For example I calculated the cost of a solar install to be approximately: Material + Labour + Generous overhead + Very tidy profit = 10,000€

In practice I keep getting offers for ~14,000€, which will be reduced to 10,000€ with a government subsidy and my request for an itemized invoice is always met with radio silence.

Re: I am building a cloud

#205

Post by swingboy »

faangguyindia wrote: post #9

i just use Hetzner. Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime. i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us. i don't know…

Do you run containers? What orchestrator or deploy tool do you use?

Re: I am building a cloud

#206

Post by whyagaindavid »

mrweasel wrote: post #95
Manfred wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.

In some sense I'm starting to think it has more to do with accounting. Hardware, datacenters and software licenses (unless it's a subscription, which is probably is these days) are capital expenses, cloud is an operation expense. Management in a lot of companies hates capital expenditures, presumable because it forces long term thinking, i.e. three to five years for server hardware. Better to go the cloud route and h…

Another point (but my common observation) is the responsibility. By going SaaS or using cloud - any kind of data protection, rules/responsibility etc is moved away. and in many ways it is better - Google, dropbox or Onedrive will have better PR to take the pain if something goes crazy. Tickbox compliance is easy.

Re: I am building a cloud

#207

Post by chrisweekly »

darkwater wrote: post #145
dajonker wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree, but that's not what happens in reality: the average devops knows k8s and will slap it onto anything they see (if only so they can put in on their resume). The average manager hears about k8s, gets convinced they need and hires beforementioned devops to build it.

And the average developer doesn't even know where to start to deploy things in prod. When the feature product asks passes QA... to the next sprint! we are done!

Whose responsibility is it to establish the prerequisite CICD pipelines, HITL workflows, and Observability infr in order for devs to shepherd changes to prod (and track their impact)? Hint: it's not the developer's.

Re: I am building a cloud

#209

Post by dijit »

regularfry wrote: post #197
hkt wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DevOps here. The trouble is that we are literally expected to do this everywhere we go. I've personally advocated for approaches which use say, a pair of dedicated servers, or VMs as in GPs example. If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing depar…

There is a kernel of validity lurking in the heart of all this, which is that immutable images you have the ability to throw away and refresh regularly are genuinely better than long-running VMs with an OS you've got to maintain, with the scope for vulnerabilities unrelated to the app you actually want to run. Management has absorbed this one good thing and slapped layer after layer of pointless rubbish on it, like a…

Sure.

The challenge is convincing people that "golden images" and containers share a history, and that kubernetes didn't invent containers: they just solved load balancing and storage abstraction for stateless message architectures in a nice way.

If you're doing something highly stateful, or that requires a heavy deployment (game servers are typically 10's of GB and have rich dynamic configuration in my experience) then kubernetes starts to become round-peg-square-hole. But people buy into it because the surrounding tooling is just so nice; and like GP says: those cloud sales guys are really good at their jobs, and kubernetes is so difficult to run reliably yourself that it gets you hooked on cloud.

There's a literal army of highly charismatic, charming people who are economically incentivised to push this technology and it can be made to work so- the odds, as they say, are against you.

Re: I am building a cloud

#210

Post by phrotoma »

tlb wrote: post #165

I think clouds pay a huge abstraction penalty to allow tiny VMs. I guess it helps with onboarding and $10 personal VPNs. But I have never needed a fraction of a computer. I want to rent some number of full computers of various sizes, consisting of CPU, memory, and flash disk. Hetzner is closer than AWS, and I think/hope that’s what Crawshaw is aiming for.

Allow? I understood tiny VM's to be something (at least AWS) added to try to squeeze more utilization out of idle hardware.
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