5 ms·

"That software we've got causes us so many problems, it's disaster! When we get the new software everything will be fixed." X to Y Y to X A to B B to C MongoD

by hoodoof 11y ago

"That software we've got causes us so many problems, it's disaster! When we get the new software everything will be fixed." X to Y Y to X A to B B to C MongoDB to this MySQL to that Why we switched Why we switched back blah blah It's one of the oldest themes in computers - man, this software is crap - that new software will fix all our problems! Until you find the problems with the new. Precisely the same age is the new software vendor harnessing all that negative energy about the competitor and megaphoning the "man, the new will fix the old, we're so excited!" Having said that, I have worked with the compute servers of all the major cloud vendors and Amazon must be credited for the quality and consistency of its AWS systems, and Google and Microsoft's cloud computing is in almost all respects equally good - there is as far as I can tell absolutely no reason to choose Amazon over Microsoft Azure (yes, even for Linux systems) or Google Compute Engine. In some areas of functionality GCE and Azure I found to work much more easily and smoothly than Amazon. When I went to work with OpenStack I immediately found the lack of completeness, inconsistency and lack of polish characteristic of many open source projects - trying to do simple things instantly became hard problems.

robzyb 11y ago
> "That software we've got causes us so many problems, it's disaster! When we get the new software everything will be fixed." This way of thinking isn't exclusive to software.
- hoodoof 11y ago
  Do you mean life partners? Anyhow its especially prevalent in software. Just search Google for "why we switched from". If anyone is thinking of writing yet another "why we switched from X to Y" blog post, I can save you the effort of a long blog post explaining the reasons. It's because "the old software was shit and the new is fricking awesome!" You don't need to explain the details.
  - robzyb 11y ago
    > Do you mean life partners? I mean everything. Almost literally everything. The most recent thing I can think of is seating arrangements. At my current workplace seating arrangements are mostly random. Someone here had the idea that we should group people by seniority so that people with related issues will be in close proximity. However, at my previous workplace we grouped by seniority, and someone had the idea that we should mix it up so that project teams would be in close proximity. [edit]: And lets not forget outsourcing vs. insourcing, grouping departments by geography vs. grouping departments by business type, etc., etc.
    - y4mi 11y ago
      haha, yes. ultimately everything has down- and upsides. but managers really like to implement changes and show how well they understand their work environment and how efficiently they are able to improve it. i often wonder if they actually believe what they are saying, or are just ... going with the flow and doing their best to look busy
      - robzyb 11y ago
        > i often wonder if they actually believe what they are saying They probably believe it. I fully expect that I've actually done it before without even realising.
rogeryu 11y ago
It's a common way to "solve" things. I live in the Netherlands. Ten or fifteen years ago we tried to cut education costs by merging schools into large school clusters. Small schools were too expensive. Now they go back and say that the large schools are too impersonal. In ten or twenty years they will go back to large schools. You can bet on this. Is it good or bad? It means that things are changing, and they are not going back to the same situation as ten years ago. It is a matter of evolving. There are new insights, new technologies, new people.
- gambiting 11y ago
  Yep, in Poland it's the same with schools. We used to have 9 years of primary school + 4 years of high school and that was it. In 1999 a new, 3-year long "middle school" was introduced,shortening primary school to 6 years and high school to 3 years. Now the new government elected this year has vowed to get rid of this system and go back to the old one, at some untold cost, "because old is bad, new will be better, except that in this case new is old".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- venomsnake 11y ago
  History does not repeat but often rhymes. It is a pendulum. After some major "black swan" cloud disaster people will begin to see value in de-consolidation.
jasode 11y ago
>It's one of the oldest themes in computers - man, this software is crap - that new software will fix all our problems! Until you find the problems with the new. Sure, it's a universal theme that people can get disillusioned with the promises of software (or any technology) but I don't think that criticism is relevant to this particular story. What I read in the article is that a few years ago, their hardware was end-of-life (we can speculate that as end-of-lease, or end-of-maintenance, whatever). It forced them into a big fork-in-the-road type of decision: do we attempt to build out an internal cloud or go with AWS? They decided to invest in their datacenter and do it themselves. It turned out that their internal engineering capability could not match the innovations of AWS. The Guardian isn't hoping for "magic software". Any CIO choosing AWS will know they'll still have "gaps" in functionality. (Netflix's OSS portfolio built on top of AWS with its staggering array of "housekeeping" software is a good example of highlighting those gaps.[0]) Instead, their multi-year "experiment" told them that their home grown team could not keep up with AWS.[1] This doesn't seem so strange since very few companies could hire and maintain the IT competencies to match AWS features even with OpenStack as a foundation. Facebook Inc and Google Inc have the hard core staff to innovate on their proprietary cloud stacks but The Guardian is a newspaper and not a technology firm. Maybe a lesson here is that OpenStack requires a commitment to supplemental software engineering that's beyond the reach of non-tech companies that treat IT as a "cost center". WalMart could be one of the few non-tech companies that would be able to innovate on top of OpenStack.[2] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2kKmMyqTfc&feature=youtu.be&t=35m07s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2kKmMyqTfc&feature=youtu.be... https://netflix.github.io/ https://netflix.github.io/ [1]from article: “We didn't manage to deliver self-service, we didn't manage to deliver decent load-balancing or autoscaling and actually all the benefits we get from AWS we simply did not get inside of the cloud that we were building internally,” he continued. [2]http://www.infoworld.com/article/2890873/cloud-computing/walmart-doubles-down-on-openstack.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2890873/cloud-computing/wal...

by hoodoof 11y ago

robzyb 11y ago

> "That software we've got causes us so many problems, it's disaster! When we get the new software everything will be fixed." This way of thinking isn't exclusive to software.

hoodoof 11y ago
Do you mean life partners? Anyhow its especially prevalent in software. Just search Google for "why we switched from". If anyone is thinking of writing yet another "why we switched from X to Y" blog post, I can save you the effort of a long blog post explaining the reasons. It's because "the old software was shit and the new is fricking awesome!" You don't need to explain the details.
- robzyb 11y ago
  > Do you mean life partners? I mean everything. Almost literally everything. The most recent thing I can think of is seating arrangements. At my current workplace seating arrangements are mostly random. Someone here had the idea that we should group people by seniority so that people with related issues will be in close proximity. However, at my previous workplace we grouped by seniority, and someone had the idea that we should mix it up so that project teams would be in close proximity. [edit]: And lets not forget outsourcing vs. insourcing, grouping departments by geography vs. grouping departments by business type, etc., etc.
  - y4mi 11y ago
    haha, yes. ultimately everything has down- and upsides. but managers really like to implement changes and show how well they understand their work environment and how efficiently they are able to improve it. i often wonder if they actually believe what they are saying, or are just ... going with the flow and doing their best to look busy
    - robzyb 11y ago
      > i often wonder if they actually believe what they are saying They probably believe it. I fully expect that I've actually done it before without even realising.

rogeryu 11y ago

It's a common way to "solve" things. I live in the Netherlands. Ten or fifteen years ago we tried to cut education costs by merging schools into large school clusters. Small schools were too expensive. Now they go back and say that the large schools are too impersonal. In ten or twenty years they will go back to large schools. You can bet on this. Is it good or bad? It means that things are changing, and they are not going back to the same situation as ten years ago. It is a matter of evolving. There are new insights, new technologies, new people.

gambiting 11y ago
Yep, in Poland it's the same with schools. We used to have 9 years of primary school + 4 years of high school and that was it. In 1999 a new, 3-year long "middle school" was introduced,shortening primary school to 6 years and high school to 3 years. Now the new government elected this year has vowed to get rid of this system and go back to the old one, at some untold cost, "because old is bad, new will be better, except that in this case new is old".
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
venomsnake 11y ago
History does not repeat but often rhymes. It is a pendulum. After some major "black swan" cloud disaster people will begin to see value in de-consolidation.

jasode 11y ago

>It's one of the oldest themes in computers - man, this software is crap - that new software will fix all our problems! Until you find the problems with the new. Sure, it's a universal theme that people can get disillusioned with the promises of software (or any technology) but I don't think that criticism is relevant to this particular story. What I read in the article is that a few years ago, their hardware was end-of-life (we can speculate that as end-of-lease, or end-of-maintenance, whatever). It forced them into a big fork-in-the-road type of decision: do we attempt to build out an internal cloud or go with AWS? They decided to invest in their datacenter and do it themselves. It turned out that their internal engineering capability could not match the innovations of AWS. The Guardian isn't hoping for "magic software". Any CIO choosing AWS will know they'll still have "gaps" in functionality. (Netflix's OSS portfolio built on top of AWS with its staggering array of "housekeeping" software is a good example of highlighting those gaps.[0]) Instead, their multi-year "experiment" told them that their home grown team could not keep up with AWS.[1] This doesn't seem so strange since very few companies could hire and maintain the IT competencies to match AWS features even with OpenStack as a foundation. Facebook Inc and Google Inc have the hard core staff to innovate on their proprietary cloud stacks but The Guardian is a newspaper and not a technology firm. Maybe a lesson here is that OpenStack requires a commitment to supplemental software engineering that's beyond the reach of non-tech companies that treat IT as a "cost center". WalMart could be one of the few non-tech companies that would be able to innovate on top of OpenStack.[2] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2kKmMyqTfc&feature=youtu.be&t=35m07s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2kKmMyqTfc&feature=youtu.be... https://netflix.github.io/ https://netflix.github.io/ [1]from article: “We didn't manage to deliver self-service, we didn't manage to deliver decent load-balancing or autoscaling and actually all the benefits we get from AWS we simply did not get inside of the cloud that we were building internally,” he continued. [2]http://www.infoworld.com/article/2890873/cloud-computing/walmart-doubles-down-on-openstack.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2890873/cloud-computing/wal...