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You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

gorelay.co

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Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#61

Post by roflyear »

bin_bash wrote: post #59
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #34

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they in…

Local dev is great until production gets complex enough that you lose parity. That'll happen even earlier now that we run x86 on the server but ARM locally. At my company we don't support local dev nor have any sort of staging environment. We have development linux servers connected to prod services and dbs. There are no pragmas or build flags to perform things differently in "dev". Things are gated with feature flag…

Local dev isn't the end, it is the beginning. With it it allows you to get further than you would otherwise - and most importantly, when (not if) you do discover a problem on a lower environment (or prod) it gives you a place to try and replicate it. You run everything locally so hopefully you can make a change to mirror the problem... Not a guarantee but at least you have a good starting point.

Also your local dev should try and mirror prod as much as possible.

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#62

Post by bcrosby95 »

capkutay wrote: post #17

I wonder if a recession or bear market environment will quickly make this type of advice – that worked well for the 2010s boom – obsolete in a harsher climate. Might be hard to scale your go-to-market by depending on startups who don't want 'enterprise-ready' features to spend money on your product.

I think the opposite. Prematurely building things you don't need costs $$$$, and in a tight funding environment you don't want to burn cash you don't need to.

Also compared to the 00s, the 2010s were a decade of gold plating and planning for scales you don't need.

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#63

Post by yen223 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #62
capkutay wrote: post #17

I wonder if a recession or bear market environment will quickly make this type of advice – that worked well for the 2010s boom – obsolete in a harsher climate. Might be hard to scale your go-to-market by depending on startups who don't want 'enterprise-ready' features to spend money on your product.

I think the opposite. Prematurely building things you don't need costs $$$$, and in a tight funding environment you don't want to burn cash you don't need to. Also compared to the 00s, the 2010s were a decade of gold plating and planning for scales you don't need.

That already happened. A large part of why Fast collapsed so fast was their overly-high infrastructure and engineering spend

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#64

Post by roflyear »

cubes wrote: post #11

Hard agree. History is littered with dead startups that designed for scale before they had enough usage to justify it. Within reason, having users knock your site over resulting in failures like the Twitter Fail Whale is a good problem to have. With that said, you need to be prepared to scale up quickly once you have this problem. There's a reason Facebook counts its users in the billions, and Friendster is a footnot…

Facebook is a great example. They did tons of things not traditionally known as highly scalable. Like one repo with the project coded in php which was largely a monolith.

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#65

Post by ingenieroariel »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #34

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they in…

I saw a project get themselves in that position by using a lot of AWS services. At some point it seems they had a dev environment but it quickly faded.

Their solution was to have an anonymized copy of prod to a few (like 3 for 20 engineers) environment where features could be tested. Engineers usually paired in order use them concurrently for unrelated features and they were very expensive.

I did not live enough to see the on-demand environments arrive - devops was always busy with operations tickets to continue building those.

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#66

Post by gumby »

bob1029 wrote: post #35
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #34

I was interviewing for a platform engineer role for a company that from the outside their application doesn't seem too complex. Through the interview process, I find out that you cannot run much of their app locally to develop against and their staging environment does not reflect their production enviroment well. I asked them how they develop their new features if they cannot run the whole app locally and if they in…

> Is this common at other companies that you cannot run the whole app locally to develop and test against? Yes. I work in B2B banking software, so having an "authentic" environment to test against is extraordinarily complex. Even the big vendors in the space seem unable to maintain accurate facsimiles of production with their own decades-old core software, so smaller vendors stand no chance unless they adjust their e…

My gf works in UX for a major bank and they simply issued her a bank account in her name (with her SSN etc -- it's a real account, with ATM and debit cards and the like). If she and some co workers want to test something out relating to accounts they actually use these accounts to minimize this kind of problem.

They must have some special code that says that these accounts can have their fees zeroed and probably are subject to some special out of band audits. I don't really know the details of course but I was actually kind of impressed.

(no she is not actually a customer of her employer)

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#68

Post by fnordpiglet »

onion2k wrote: post #25
taylodl wrote: post #2

> "So unless your product legitimately only sells to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple, you probably don’t need to be 'enterprise ready'" What in the actual fsck? Check out this list of companies ranked by the number of employees they have - https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-o... . Okay, Amazon is #2 - but notice the top 100 doesn't include Apple. There's a lot more to business than FA…

If you're selling enterprise software then the important number is not "number of employees" but "number of employees who would use your software". In large retail, manufacturing, oil etc companies they have a lot of software of course, but each person is typically accessing 4 or 5 apps at most (email, office suite, HR, etc). In FAANG companies each employee involved in software development is often using closer to 3…

You’re better off focusing on banks, oil and gas, etc. Anything that uses a lot of technology to get its job done and operates at a massive scale. FAANG are a very small part of the ecosystem and tend to build vs buy.

A major bank employs between 50,000-10,000 software engineers and in the 250,000-50,000 employee range. Netflix has only 11,000 employees of all types.

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#69

Post by ketzo »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #8

Well it depends on what you're selling! Design for what you truly want to sell, and that will end up however it needs to end up, whether that's enterprise or not. This random blogger, and our random comments, can't tell you what you need. It has to emerge from the product development process like a sculpture from a block of marble.

I know, this is overly-general advice to the point of silliness.

It's a little like telling a construction worker "You don't need a super-powerful 'jackhammer' to do your work. A simple claw hammer is all you actually need."

Well... sure, that's definitely true if you're building a house.

But you might have a problem ripping up a sidewalk...

There are plenty of companies building houses, and plenty who are working with concrete! Neither one of them are "the big kids."

They're not even necessarily different-size markets, either -- you can make a lot of money building houses or making sidewalks -- it's just that different problems require different solutions, and different software companies are going to have different challenges to the problem of "get bigger."

Re: You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

#70

Post by Spooky23 »

onion2k wrote: post #25
taylodl wrote: post #2

> "So unless your product legitimately only sells to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple, you probably don’t need to be 'enterprise ready'" What in the actual fsck? Check out this list of companies ranked by the number of employees they have - https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-o... . Okay, Amazon is #2 - but notice the top 100 doesn't include Apple. There's a lot more to business than FA…

If you're selling enterprise software then the important number is not "number of employees" but "number of employees who would use your software". In large retail, manufacturing, oil etc companies they have a lot of software of course, but each person is typically accessing 4 or 5 apps at most (email, office suite, HR, etc). In FAANG companies each employee involved in software development is often using closer to 3…

Task workers use 5 apps, but if you’re one of them, that might be 10,000 people.

I knew a guy who sold a $2M solution to track MSDS sheets in a prison system. Stupid simple application.

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