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Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

thestack.technology

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Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#41

Post by hamandcheese »

mrweasel wrote: post #27
sofixa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kubernetes on top of OpenStack on top of Kubernetes (yes, that's what they are doing). OpenStack's services are running in Kube? And Kube itself is ran as an OpenStack thing? Why? Why not use the same tooling used to deploy that initial Kube to deploy as many as needed? Still a massive maintenance burden, but you don't need to add OpenStack into the mix.

Because you can't necessarily run everything in Kubernetes, or in the same cluster. OpenStack probably provides VMs, private networks and bunch of other stuff to run legacy systems, 3rd. party software, Windows application, tons of stuff that can't be containerized. You can have a large Kubernetes cluster running OpenStack, because it's probably the easiest way to deploy and maintain OpenStack. You then build smaller…

I get why you might want to use open stack.

And I get why you might want to use open stack on Kubernetes.

What I don't get is why you would want Kubernetes on open stack on kubernetes.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#42

Post by bluGill »

x0x0 wrote: post #11
bluGill wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your data center isn't large enough to need at least 5 people full time admins then you should just go cloud. With a part time person you will see downtime when a machine fails. With 1 person that person will sometimes be on vacation when a zero day takes you down. With 2 people 1 will be on vacation when the second gets sick. You end up needing at least 5 people before you have enough people that you have redunda…

> With a part time person you will see downtime when a machine fails. Many data centers offer remote hands services. And I don't believe this is at all true. I worked at a place that managed thousands of boxes in dozens of pops with 1.5 fulltime people. If you design it for this from the beginning, with cattle not pets and netboot everywhere, this is very doable. And a large cost savings vs cloud.

The assertion was about bringing this onprem so you don't get that offer of remote hands service. A data center instead of onprem is a valid option and might be best - check the contract and services the provide for you carefully.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#43

Post by alexjplant »

whatever1 wrote: post #2

If you don't have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud? It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs. Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

Disclaimer: this is anecdotal so n=1. All opinions are my own. No value judgment one way or another is expressed or implied.

Professional developers these days are primarily concerned with 1) getting their service running 2) as quickly as possible 3) someplace where they have instant access and control of it. Clicking around a cloud console accomplishes all three of these and allows you to write "Delivered the ____ service in 3 months that generates $XX M/year" on a performance review in short order. Having to build, rack, and configure a physical server or deal with "IT" (which has somehow become something separate from software engineering) does not. Because the developers are the ones delivering value they get to decide how it's done. AWS gets it done. A server in a datacenter in Texas that requires an SSH keypair to reach doesn't.

Your average SDE L4 does know or care about init systems or SANs or colos or 802.1q or any of the myriad of things required to run on-prem infra. They write software. Software makes money and so the business makes money - wash, rinse, repeat. Why would you have people on the front lines of your revenue stream worrying about these things when you can have a hyperscaler with a control plane do it for a nominal fee?

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#44

Post by fragmede »

hamandcheese wrote: post #41
mrweasel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can't necessarily run everything in Kubernetes, or in the same cluster. OpenStack probably provides VMs, private networks and bunch of other stuff to run legacy systems, 3rd. party software, Windows application, tons of stuff that can't be containerized. You can have a large Kubernetes cluster running OpenStack, because it's probably the easiest way to deploy and maintain OpenStack. You then build smaller…

I get why you might want to use open stack. And I get why you might want to use open stack on Kubernetes. What I don't get is why you would want Kubernetes on open stack on kubernetes.

My money's on Conway's law. There's a hardware team that's in charge of the hardware, and they need to orchestrate ask the nodes, then there's the openstack team that's their customer who’s in charge of providing a cloud-like environment to the rest of the company including windows VMs, then there’s an applications kube team that provides kube for services that run on kube, with finally kube-ized applications teams that run on the very top.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#45

Post by stackskipton »

kkielhofner wrote: post #39
stackskipton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the downside of on premise hardware isn't hardware swap out, it's just dealing with hardware in general. All hardware needs updates which is downtime for that hardware. Also, anyone in this industry long enough has been around for "Oh, we will just replace that broken piece of hardware" that ended up "WHY IS EVERYTHING ON FIRE?" because versions didn't match up, hardware was rejected or just plain "Actually, T…

> Also, anyone in this industry long enough has been around for "Oh, we will just replace that broken piece of hardware" that ended up "WHY IS EVERYTHING ON FIRE?" because versions didn't match up, hardware was rejected I've been doing this for 25 years and I'm not sure what this means. Dell isn't going to come back to you and say "sorry but we can't fix this". With the warranty SLA worst case scenario they'll just r…

>I've been doing this for 25 years and I'm not sure what this means. Dell isn't going to come back to you and say "sorry but we can't fix this".

Dell/EMC says "Hey, here is drive replacement." We do it, 2 hours later, the volume is knocked offline. Apparently, there was mismatch between backplane version, drive version and through some weird edge case, it knocked the volume offline. Yes, they fixed it, no it wasn't pretty since a bunch of applications had to be recovered.

No, public clouds are not 100% reliable either. It's just their failures tend to be you twiddling your thumbs vs hair on fire on phone with the vendor trying to get it resolved.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#46

Post by mrweasel »

hamandcheese wrote: post #41
mrweasel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can't necessarily run everything in Kubernetes, or in the same cluster. OpenStack probably provides VMs, private networks and bunch of other stuff to run legacy systems, 3rd. party software, Windows application, tons of stuff that can't be containerized. You can have a large Kubernetes cluster running OpenStack, because it's probably the easiest way to deploy and maintain OpenStack. You then build smaller…

I get why you might want to use open stack. And I get why you might want to use open stack on Kubernetes. What I don't get is why you would want Kubernetes on open stack on kubernetes.

One reason could be that you use Kubernetes as a deployment tool, but you don't actually need to full capacity of three bare metal servers. So you need to slice up the physical servers in some way, and Kubernetes can't do that.

From experience most Kubernetes clusters are actually large enough, in terms of capacity required, to justify using an entire modern server and companies are very reluctant to run a mix if various application on the same cluster. There are very very few organisations large enough to need bare metal servers as Kubernetes worker nodes. Unless you use them to run OpenStack.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#47

Post by whatever1 »

alexjplant wrote: post #43
whatever1 wrote: post #2

If you don't have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud? It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs. Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

Disclaimer: this is anecdotal so n=1. All opinions are my own. No value judgment one way or another is expressed or implied. Professional developers these days are primarily concerned with 1) getting their service running 2) as quickly as possible 3) someplace where they have instant access and control of it. Clicking around a cloud console accomplishes all three of these and allows you to write "Delivered the ____ s…

If the hyperscaler asks for 200% of my revenue then yes.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#48

Post by alexjplant »

whatever1 wrote: post #47
alexjplant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: this is anecdotal so n=1. All opinions are my own. No value judgment one way or another is expressed or implied. Professional developers these days are primarily concerned with 1) getting their service running 2) as quickly as possible 3) someplace where they have instant access and control of it. Clicking around a cloud console accomplishes all three of these and allows you to write "Delivered the ____ s…

If the hyperscaler asks for 200% of my revenue then yes.

But they don't. They ask for a deterministic usage-based amount.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#49

Post by chronid »

delusional wrote: post #36

What a shame that the most interesting thing we can discuss about software now is where the computer its running on is located. I must admit. The computer was never the part of software that interested me.

Even software (at least outside academia) eventually has to fight physics and the thing with most gravity of it all, money.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#50

Post by [deleted] »

hamandcheese wrote: post #41
mrweasel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can't necessarily run everything in Kubernetes, or in the same cluster. OpenStack probably provides VMs, private networks and bunch of other stuff to run legacy systems, 3rd. party software, Windows application, tons of stuff that can't be containerized. You can have a large Kubernetes cluster running OpenStack, because it's probably the easiest way to deploy and maintain OpenStack. You then build smaller…

I get why you might want to use open stack. And I get why you might want to use open stack on Kubernetes. What I don't get is why you would want Kubernetes on open stack on kubernetes.

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