The Best DevOps Is NoOps • Hacker News Board

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#51

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

dankohn1 wrote: post #21

cjsuk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree with you. No one accounts for portability. The common mantra is that if portability becomes a problem you will be rolling in VC cash so you can just afford to restart everything from scratch and shrug it off. Basically defer the complicated decisions to later on. That never accounts for the "grey phase" which a lot of products seem to slide into permanently which is where they are just about scraping by wi…

The message of the cloud native software stack, most often built around Kubernetes, is that cloud portability enables you to avoid vendor lock-in. A look at the stack: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/landscape/master/land... (Disclosure: I'm the executive director of CNCF and helped make this image.)

[deleted]

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#52

Post by HeroOfAges » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 3:08 PM UTC

phatbyte wrote: post #10

Maybe I'm old school, but I really hope developers give a serious thought before jumping into this vendor lock-in trap. This is specially concerning if not scary, when you start to "outsource" the backend business rules to something like Firebase or other BaaS systems. Using these as PoC or for an MVP, I'm 100% behind it, but using it on production ready products, it's a disaster waiting to happen, as it basically pu…

I thought solutions like Cloud Foundry and adhering to the "Twleve-Factor App" methodology help eliminate the risk of vendor lock-in.

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#53

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 3:31 PM UTC

dankohn1 wrote: post #21

cjsuk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree with you. No one accounts for portability. The common mantra is that if portability becomes a problem you will be rolling in VC cash so you can just afford to restart everything from scratch and shrug it off. Basically defer the complicated decisions to later on. That never accounts for the "grey phase" which a lot of products seem to slide into permanently which is where they are just about scraping by wi…

The message of the cloud native software stack, most often built around Kubernetes, is that cloud portability enables you to avoid vendor lock-in. A look at the stack: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/landscape/master/land... (Disclosure: I'm the executive director of CNCF and helped make this image.)

Agreed, at the very least, anything I've made in the last year can be containerized and retargeted pretty easily from there.

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#54

Post by gaius » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

phatbyte wrote: post #10

Maybe I'm old school, but I really hope developers give a serious thought before jumping into this vendor lock-in trap. This is specially concerning if not scary, when you start to "outsource" the backend business rules to something like Firebase or other BaaS systems. Using these as PoC or for an MVP, I'm 100% behind it, but using it on production ready products, it's a disaster waiting to happen, as it basically pu…

really hope developers give a serious thought before jumping into this vendor lock-in trap

... and these are the people who refuse to write SQL incase they get locked into a particular database...

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#55

Post by gaius » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 3:47 PM UTC

dankohn1 wrote: post #21

cjsuk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree with you. No one accounts for portability. The common mantra is that if portability becomes a problem you will be rolling in VC cash so you can just afford to restart everything from scratch and shrug it off. Basically defer the complicated decisions to later on. That never accounts for the "grey phase" which a lot of products seem to slide into permanently which is where they are just about scraping by wi…

The message of the cloud native software stack, most often built around Kubernetes, is that cloud portability enables you to avoid vendor lock-in. A look at the stack: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/landscape/master/land... (Disclosure: I'm the executive director of CNCF and helped make this image.)

Using cloud as a glorified hypervisor isn't really getting the benefits. To be cost effective you really do need to be using the value-added or layered features, and those are proprietary.

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#56

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

"A few examples of NoOps platforms that fit the above criteria are Heroku, Amazon Lambda, and Google Firebase."

I don't know about Lambda and Firebase, but Heroku is not "NoOps" in my experience. You still have to deal with dyno configurations and linking things together, and even have to deal with security updates every once in awhile (Heroku's "stacks" are not supported forever).

Meanwhile, this sort of vendor lock-in is a great way to murder a startup before it even learns how to walk. These services are not cheap; hiring a "devops engineer" or a proper sysadmin will almost always pay off in the long run, since they'll be much cheaper (and much better at their intended purpose) than the likes of Heroku when you actually do need to scale beyond the prototyping stage.

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#57

Post by mgrennan » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

johnpython wrote: post #49

If you think being a "software engineer" means you only write code and ops/security is none of your concern, you are terrible. The best software engineers understand the importance of operations and security for the code they release to production.

And if the went so busy putting as steering wheel on the skateboard they might have some time to thing about how the seatbelt fits and bumpers. Speed Kills.

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#58

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #45

scaryclam wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the feeling the OP was talking more about things like Firebase than EC2 or Cloud Compute. Of course, GCP and AWS will allow you to do things that lock you in, but as you stated, you don't have to do that to use their other products. The idea that some people are using other companies backend systems to build their own company that completely relies on those systems creeps me out. If I hire a backend developer w…

Salesforce has been running essentially a BaaS for nearly two decades and they show no sign of slowing down. IMHO their platform is garbage compared to something like Firebase, but no businesses seem to be worried about portability. In fact most are doubling down on building teams to build and support Salesforce.

"In fact most are doubling down on building teams to build and support Salesforce."

I'd sooner attribute that to Stockholm syndrome, in much the same way that Oracle shops tend to double down on Oracle products - not because Oracle products are actually good, mind you (they're absolutely abysmal, in my observation, and even the ones acquired from Sun are rotting corpses at this point, Java being perhaps the sole exception), but because it's cheaper to keep buying in than to break out of the vendor lock-in.

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#59

Post by dankohn1 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:29 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #55

dankohn1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The message of the cloud native software stack, most often built around Kubernetes, is that cloud portability enables you to avoid vendor lock-in. A look at the stack: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/landscape/master/land... (Disclosure: I'm the executive director of CNCF and helped make this image.)

Using cloud as a glorified hypervisor isn't really getting the benefits. To be cost effective you really do need to be using the value-added or layered features, and those are proprietary.

I disagree (obviously). There are huge advantages to using the data stores from your cloud provider, but you can pick Postgres or similar options that avoid lock-in. If you use DynamoDB or Spanner, you can work to avoid non-portable features. Many other services like SNS can be replicated with software like NATS.

That said, switching from one cloud to another will never be trivial, so it may be worth using some proprietary services up front if it gets you to market faster. The key thing is to have your eyes open about the choices you make, to ensure you have the ability to switch (or, perhaps more importantly, threaten to switch) in the future if you need to.

Re: The Best DevOps Is NoOps

#60

Post by gaius » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

dankohn1 wrote: post #59

gaius wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using cloud as a glorified hypervisor isn't really getting the benefits. To be cost effective you really do need to be using the value-added or layered features, and those are proprietary.

I disagree (obviously). There are huge advantages to using the data stores from your cloud provider, but you can pick Postgres or similar options that avoid lock-in. If you use DynamoDB or Spanner, you can work to avoid non-portable features. Many other services like SNS can be replicated with software like NATS. That said, switching from one cloud to another will never be trivial, so it may be worth using some propr…

Sure, but if you restrict yourself to lowest-common-denominator features so you can migrate between Spanner and CosmosDB then you are paying for features you aren't using and are at a competitive disadvantage to those that can leverage them.