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An Unlikely Database Migration

tailscale.com

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Re: An Unlikely Database Migration

#2

Post by npiit »

Unfortunately this company is known for its shady agressive marketing on hacker news. The upvotes count is really suspicious and this is not the first time.

EDIT: Why is the downvoting? the post was given like 9 upvotes in the first 5 minutes. I frequently go to "new" and this is a highly suspicious behaviur.

Re: An Unlikely Database Migration

#3

Post by jamescun »

This post touches on "innovation tokens". While I agree with the premise of "choose boring technology", it feels like a process smell, particularly of a startup whose goal is to innovate a techology. Feels demotivating as an engineer if management says our team can only innovate an arbitrary N times.

Re: An Unlikely Database Migration

#4

Post by hfern »

npiit wrote: post #2

Unfortunately this company is known for its shady agressive marketing on hacker news. The upvotes count is really suspicious and this is not the first time. EDIT: Why is the downvoting? the post was given like 9 upvotes in the first 5 minutes. I frequently go to "new" and this is a highly suspicious behaviur.

I don't think it's shady marketing. The company is composed of several prominent software engineers (eg Brad Fitzpatrick of memcached fame). I think many folks on HN (myself included) are interested to see what they are working on. Especially as Brad left Google to work on it.

Re: An Unlikely Database Migration

#5

Post by bob1029 »

I do like putting .json files on disk when it makes sense, as this is a one-liner to serialize both ways in .NET/C#. But, once you hit that wall of wanting to select subsets of data because the total dataset got larger than your CPU cache (or some other step-wise NUMA constraint)... It's time for a little bit more structure. I would have just gone with SQLite to start. If I am not serializing a singleton out to disk, I reach for SQLite by default.

Re: An Unlikely Database Migration

#6

Post by crawshaw »

jamescun wrote: post #3

This post touches on "innovation tokens". While I agree with the premise of "choose boring technology", it feels like a process smell, particularly of a startup whose goal is to innovate a techology. Feels demotivating as an engineer if management says our team can only innovate an arbitrary N times.

It is a tricky tradeoff for startups. On the one hand, a startup has very limited resources and so has to focus on the business. On the other hand, a startup has to experiment to find the business. I don't think there's an easy answer.

In our case, the control plane data store really should be as boring as possible. It was real stretch using anything other than MySQL. We tried to lay out the arguments in the post, but the most compelling was we had lots of unit tests that spun up a DB and shut it down quickly. Maybe a hundred tests whose total execution time was 1.5s. The "boring" options made that surprisingly difficult.

(Tailscaler and blog post co-author)

Re: An Unlikely Database Migration

#7

Post by jeff-davis »

This post illustrates the difference between persistence and a database.

If you are expecting to simply persist one instance of one application's state across different runs and failures, a database can be frustrating.

But if you want to manage your data across different versions of an app, different apps accessing the same data, or concurrent access, then a database will save you a lot of headaches.

The trick is knowing which one you want. Persistence is tempting, so a lot of people fool themselves into going that direction, and it can be pretty painful.

I like to say that rollback is the killer feature of SQL. A single request fails (e.g. unique violation), and the overall app keeps going, handling other requests. You application code can be pretty bad, and you can still have a good service. That's why PHP was awesome despite being bad -- SQL made it good (except for all the security pitfalls of PHP, which the DB couldn't help with).

Re: An Unlikely Database Migration

#9

Post by npiit »

hfern wrote: post #4
npiit wrote: post #2

Unfortunately this company is known for its shady agressive marketing on hacker news. The upvotes count is really suspicious and this is not the first time. EDIT: Why is the downvoting? the post was given like 9 upvotes in the first 5 minutes. I frequently go to "new" and this is a highly suspicious behaviur.

I don't think it's shady marketing. The company is composed of several prominent software engineers (eg Brad Fitzpatrick of memcached fame). I think many folks on HN (myself included) are interested to see what they are working on. Especially as Brad left Google to work on it.

I understand. But given the product features compared to the rest of the industry, Tailscale brings no real value compared to Zero-tier hen it comes to meshes, it's not zerotrust like Cloudflare, Twingate, and many others, it claims to be open source while only the client is and it cannot be used without their closed source control plane where most of the feature are behind paywall, it's way more expensive than reputable offerings like Citrix, Cloudflare and others. Their security is very dubious to me (they can in fact inject their own public keys to connect to clients machines and there is no way but to trust their word that they won't). I mean, what's the innovation compared to the industry in order to get that systemically excessive coverage here?
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