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Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

erikbern.com

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Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#41

Post by emteycz »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #36
mikewarot wrote: post #27

Virtualization eventually will be seen as the unnecessary layer added to make up for operating systems that lack capability based security. It's going to take a decade to refactor things to remove that layer. Once done, you'll be able to safely run a process against a list of resources.

Agreed 100%, but you still are going to get the old-timers who insist that virtualization and containers just make things more difficult and that their old school approach is the best.

Good, that's a very universal interview question that will get me a practically direct answer to the actual question. It's not easy today... I'm asking about JS/HTML/CSS if the candidate isn't web-oriented, but what do I ask the JS guys? Perhaps a view layer bait?

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#42

Post by chii »

mikewarot wrote: post #27

Virtualization eventually will be seen as the unnecessary layer added to make up for operating systems that lack capability based security. It's going to take a decade to refactor things to remove that layer. Once done, you'll be able to safely run a process against a list of resources.

going by how the web is doing today, the refactor you refer to will never be done.

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#43

Post by __jem »

bob1029 wrote: post #31
edoceo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you still have unit tests and similar right? and maybe test in a staging env lightly first? or, right to Live?

Yes we have a 2 stage process with the customer. There is still a test & production environment, but test talks to all production business systems too. Only a few people are allowed into this environment. We test with 1-5 users for a few days then decide to take it to the broader user base.

> but test talks to all production business systems too

I'm not sure I understand this, would you mind explaining more? Do you mean you have multi-tenancy in databases and application (the "tenants" being stage/test and prod)?

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#44

Post by mLuby »

edoceo wrote: post #29
ngngngng wrote: post #21

> but it takes 45 steps in the console and 12 of them are highly confusing if you never did it before. I am constantly amazed that software engineering is as difficult as it is in ways like this. Half the time I just figure I'm an idiot because no one else is struggling with the same things but I probably just don't notice when they are.

many things are confusing if you've never done it before. my first HAproxy setup wasn't great, my 10th is rock solid, just needed a bit of context-specific learning. same with PG replication (locical and archive) but 3rd go was awesome. its a flawed expectation to get it right the first time.

> its a flawed expectation to get it right the first time.

If your toilet overflows when you push the lever down and flushes when you pull the lever up, you'll learn pretty quickly how to use it. And other users will too, after they screw up or after you carefully explain so they're sure to understand. But it's just a shitty design! The fact that you've learned to deal with it doesn't excuse it or mean it shouldn't be fixed for all future users.

I want to get it right the first time; I don't expect to only because I've been hurt too many times by shoddy UIs. A good UI, whether a GUI, API, CLI, or other TLA, guides users through their workflow as effortlessly as possible by means of sensible defaults, law of least surprise, and progressive reveal of power features.

Relevant http://xkcd.com/1168

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#45

Post by XorNot »

dragonwriter wrote: post #37
XorNot wrote: post #24

Some of this I agree with, even if the overall is to me asking for "magic" (I wouldn't mind trying to get there though). For me the one I really want is "serverless" SQL databases. On every cloud platform at the moment, whatever cloud SQL thing they're offering is really obviously MySQL or Postgres on some VMs under the hood. The provisioning time is the same, the way it works is the same, the outage windows are the…

> Basically, why isn't there just a Postgres-protocol socket I connect to as a user that will make tables on demand for me? No upfront sizing or provisioning, just bill me for what I'm using at some rate which covers your costs and colocate/shared host/whatever it onto the type of server hardware which can respond to that demand. How isn’t RDS Aurora Serverless from AWS, available in both MySQL-and Postgres-compatibl…

Huh I missed that particular annoucement I guess?

I'll look into it next time I'm building something.

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#46

Post by deepzn »

zmmmmm wrote: post #30

This post mingles different interpretations of "serverless" - the current fad of "lambda" style functions etc and premium / full stack managed application offerings like Heroku. Although they are both "fully managed" they have a lot of differences. Both though assume the "hard" problem of infrastructure is the one-time setup cost, and that your architecture design should be centered around minimising that cost - even…

what would you say is the architectural sacrifice of pushing things out to the edge, or using lambda functions per say in your opinion?

There are issues about resolving state at the edge, though Cloudflare has solved some of that with durable objects, and Fastly is working on something too. Think there are memory constraints as of now however. Security too is better in these platforms at the edge - true zero trust models.

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#47

Post by jiggawatts »

Years and years ago I saw an advertisement by a SAN array vendor where their gimmick was that they supported very cheap read/write snapshots of very large datasets, in combination with a set of transforms such as data masking or anonymisation.

Their target market was same as the OP: developers that need rapid like-for-like clones of production. The SAN could create a full VM server pool with a logical clone of hundreds of terabytes of data in seconds, spin it up, and blow it away.

The idea was that instead of the typical "DEV/TST/PRD" environments, you'd have potentially dozens of numbered test environments. It was cheap enough to deploy a full cluster of something as complex as SAP or a multi-tier Oracle application for a CI/CD integration test!

Meanwhile, in the Azure cloud: Practically nothing has a "copy" option. Deploying basic resources such as SQL Virtual Machines or App Service environments can take hours. Snapshotting a VM takes a full copy. Etc...

It's like the public cloud is in a weird way ahead of the curve, yet living with 1990s limitations.

Speaking of limitations: One reason cheap cloning is "hard" is because of IPv4 addressing. There are few enough addresses (even in the 10.0.0.0/8 private range) that subnets have to be manually preallocated to avoid conflicts, addresses have to be "managed" and carefully "doled out". This makes it completely impossible to deploy many copies of complex multi-tier applications.

The public cloud vendors had their opportunity to use a flat IPv6 address space for everything. It would have made hundreds points of complexity simply vanish. The programming analogy is like going from 16-bit addressing with the complexity of near & far pointers to a flat 64-bit virtual address space. It's not just about more memory! The programming paradigms are different. Same thing with networking. IPv6 simply eliminates entire categories of networking configuration and complexity.

PS: Azure's network team decided to unnecessarily use NAT for IPv6, making it exactly (100%!) as complex as IPv4...

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#48

Post by philipswood »

mikewarot wrote: post #27

Virtualization eventually will be seen as the unnecessary layer added to make up for operating systems that lack capability based security. It's going to take a decade to refactor things to remove that layer. Once done, you'll be able to safely run a process against a list of resources.

Agreed. Operating systems abstract resources, the fact that we needed containers and VMs point to the fact that the first set of implementations weren't optimal and needs to be refactored.

For VMs, security is the one concern, the others would be more direct access to lower levels and greater access to the hardware and internals than just a driver model.

For containers I'd say that the abstraction/interface presented to an application was too narrow: clearly network and filesystem abstractions needed to be included as well (not just memory, OS APIs and hardware abstractions).

I imagine that an OS from the far future could perform the functions of a hypervisor and a container engine and would allow richer abilities to add code to what we consider kernel space, one could write a program in Unikernel style, as well as have normal programs look more container-like.

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#49

Post by philipswood »

philipswood wrote: post #48
mikewarot wrote: post #27

Virtualization eventually will be seen as the unnecessary layer added to make up for operating systems that lack capability based security. It's going to take a decade to refactor things to remove that layer. Once done, you'll be able to safely run a process against a list of resources.

Agreed. Operating systems abstract resources, the fact that we needed containers and VMs point to the fact that the first set of implementations weren't optimal and needs to be refactored. For VMs, security is the one concern, the others would be more direct access to lower levels and greater access to the hardware and internals than just a driver model. For containers I'd say that the abstraction/interface presented…

(I'm not holding my breath for the refactor though... We're stuck at a local maximum and we're better at adding stuff,rather than removing/refactoring them.

Also- just about EVERYTHING is built on top of these current layers)

Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

#50

Post by sneak »

mikewarot wrote: post #27

Virtualization eventually will be seen as the unnecessary layer added to make up for operating systems that lack capability based security. It's going to take a decade to refactor things to remove that layer. Once done, you'll be able to safely run a process against a list of resources.

I am fairly certain that virtualization is going to be a core tenet of computing up to and including the point where the atoms of the gas giants and Oort cloud are fused into computronium for the growing Dyson solar swarm to run ever more instances of people and the adobe flash games they love.
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