9 ms·

Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

• tboyd47 9y ago
  It feels rather like we have too much software.
  • dspillett 9y ago
    An embarrassment of riches in the categories that are served does not preclude the possibility that there is a need that isn't well served at all yet.
• simonw 9y ago
  I'm still waiting for a rock-solid scalable open source graph database in the mold of the Freebase database engine or the amazing graph database that Facebook have built for themselves. I'm very excited about dgraph as an option here but I think it's still an area that is very open for new entrants.
  • rambojazz 9y ago
    This would be really useful. Now there are Fuseki and Janus[1]. Years ago there was 4store [2]. There is also gStore in development [3]. They all require a lot of help. Would be nice if somebody could pick up and help one of these. [1] https://jena.apache.org/index.html https://jena.apache.org/index.html http://janusgraph.org http://janusgraph.org [2] https://github.com/4store/4store https://github.com/4store/4store [3] https://github.com/Caesar11/gStore https://github.com/Caesar11/gStore
    • kawera 9y ago
      Adding Cayley to the mix: https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley
• thesmallestcat 9y ago
  Static website generators.
  • m_ke 9y ago
    This might be a joke but there's plenty of room for a good static wordpress alternative that focuses on bloggers instead of developers.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • pzk1 9y ago
      Netlify CMS?
  • Kagerjay 9y ago
    I would argue content management systems for static website generators like cloudcannon.com could be better. We already have jekyll and hugo
    • declnz 9y ago
      And Hakyll [1] [1] https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/
• maratd 9y ago
  > Nowadays it seems like there's nothing missing. There's lots of things missing. There's just nothing missing in established categories. Why would there be? Start your own category, create software for it, then convince everyone that the category is important.
  • tboyd47 9y ago
    This. If you want to create something, create something that simplifies things for us. Don't just create another tool to go on the tool belt.
  • thesmallestcat 9y ago
    Great advice! I'd venture that managing large files is an unsolved problem. It's a hack in most version control systems, and uploading/downloading files from a host, even S3, is a slow, serial process. Same for checksumming. Network speeds have more than caught up, and large files are a frequent process bottleneck. Something that makes it easy to manage and consume large files could be a big deal. It probably would require a new application protocol, maybe even a new filesystem similar to XFS.
    • imhoguy 9y ago
      Or maybe a file should stay where it is and processing logic itself should be deployed there. If file parts are distributed then processing could be suspended and migrated to place where next piece is stored. Something similar is done with Hadoop and HDFS.
• simonw 9y ago
  There might be something exciting to build to help implement ludicrously fast Google-style autocomplete / typeahead Search. I've tried using MySQL, elasticsearch, PostgreSQL with trigram indices... they can be made to work, but I've never felt that I'm anywhere near the quality of whatever it is Google are doing here.
  • lowry 9y ago
    You need to go deeper and use AnalyzingSuggester from Lucene. It is as fast as it gets. Also, do not forget about the web part of the equation. Using HTTP/2 helps, as well as disabling buffering all the way through.
  • btbright 9y ago
    Have you looked at Algolia?
• jastr 9y ago
  Some of the biggest advancements in recent years have come less from technological breakthroughs, and more from improvements in designs and abstractions. Tools like Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, and even AWS, while impressive technically, are breakthroughs because they improved developer efficiency. They also weren't "needed" until they were built, and have allowed many developers to work on broader parts of the stack. Also, today's tech solves today's problems.
• sphix0r 9y ago
  Before storing data we should have a good do not track / privacy respecting software for the data we store.
• simonw 9y ago
  An open-source platform for self-hosting function-as-a-service - something that provides the tooling for easily saying "deploy this function, auto scale it, route HTTP traffic to it, now atomically replace it with this new version" without having to lock yourself in to Google/AWS/Azure.
  • andrenotgiant 9y ago
    OpenWhisk is a bit clunky, but it does exist! https://openwhisk.apache.org/ https://openwhisk.apache.org/
    • simonw 9y ago
      That looks like exactly what I'm talking about: https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/blob/master/docs/actions.md https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/blob/master/do... The space is still early enough that there is a lot of value in competing options
  • bryanlarsen 9y ago
    https://github.com/openfaas/faas https://github.com/openfaas/faas I'm sure I've seen announcements for others pop up on HN too.
  • owyn 9y ago
    There are a few. flynn.io does this (it's a bit like heroku, using git push as a deployment action and a web ui to manage things). caveat: i hasn't used it...
  • jacques_chester 9y ago
    There are a lot of these underway at this point. I'm allocated to one (Project Riff). We also like to hear news from our nearest neighbours: Fn, Kubeless, Fission and OpenFaaS. A lot of what FaaSes give you is a basically a PaaS, with autoscale to zero and preconfigured event sources. If you don't need those -- actually need them -- then you can get away with a bog ordinary PaaS for the time being.
• biggodoggo 9y ago
  There's two ways to "fill a gap", either you create a gap that needs filling or you make an existing solution better. You don't see anything missing because you aren't looking at things from this perspective.
• chubot 9y ago
  I want a distributed (not cloud) file system that handles many files and WAN latency (i.e. not HDFS). It might be a cross between Git and BitTorrent. It feels like deb repos, PyPI, NPM, CPAN, CRAN, etc. should be put in there, with the addition of binaries for popular architectures. And probably Docker-like images, although I think if they are not opaque blobs, it would be better for rsync-like differential compression (which Git implicitly provides). There will be some small files and some big files. I want it to be like Git so I can clone locally, not just go to the cloud. The way that Git is trivial to set up and clone through SSH is nice too. It probably has to have a notion of "user", like a local file system. (This makes the problem a lot harder; git doesn't really have permissions.) BTW Julia's package manager just used git, but I watched a talk that said this ended up being a really bad idea, especially on Windows. As far as I understand IPFS has some of these properties. Has anybody used it? Could I use it for the package repository use case? I don't know much about it, but Project Atomic sounds similar too: https://www.projectatomic.io/ https://www.projectatomic.io/ Any other projects that seem like a close fit? BTW I think this would also be useful in the data center, as some companies like Twitter apparently use BitTorrent in data centers to start large jobs quickly (i.e replicate the same 500 MB binary to 1000 machines).
  • dsnuh 9y ago
    IPFS does sound like it might be close to what you are looking for, just based off my little experience playing with it. I want to try to leverage a private deployment for dataset sharing for analytics, etc.
  • antoncohen 9y ago
    Basically you want S3, which has BitTorrent BTW. S3 has multiple widely used command line tools that support syncing (cloning, pushing). There are multiple heavily used S3-like systems, open and closed source, some are S3 API compatible. Examples include Ceph and OpenStack Swift. The reason people use cloud services instead of running these themselves is because the cloud storage fee is usually less than paying someone to run a distributed system.
    • chubot 9y ago
• simonw 9y ago
  Serving machine learning models in production is still something that appears not to have an obvious correct solution.
  • agibsonccc 9y ago
    Hi fellow YC alumni! See the pitch here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399326 We'll be supporting PMML and the like as well. The goal is to hit the simple things rather than perpetuating the latest hype like the AutoML stuff people are going on about currently. If you'd be interested, would be happy to have a conversation to go over what we're trying to do. We hope to just provide a platform neutral tool for building and deploying models similar to sagemaker (but cloud agnostic)
• trjordan 9y ago
  10 years ago, I learned about the idea of elastic infrastructure. Services with load balancers in front of them, hosts that come and go easily, a structured way to communicate between services. At the time, that was nginx + manual autoscaling, then it was ELBs and autoscaling groups, now it's kubernetes and containers, maybe hosted. It's still not there. I'm excited about the software that makes that operable at scale. It seems like a service mesh is a good idea. It seems like mutual security between services is a good idea. It seems like storing routing configuration in a separate control plane that is executed in a data plane like Envoy is a good idea. There's a bag of software at CNCF that's loosely organized around this, but I don't think the "just deploy some code, it can scale and you can have tons of services doing that with good visibility and operability" is quite there. I'm really exicted about Envoy, but I don't think there's a good control plane for it. I'm part of a company that's working on a commercial implementation (turbinelabs.io), and Istio is in a similar space. There's still work to be done!
  • jacques_chester 9y ago
    I suspect this niche will emerge this year.
• m_ke 9y ago
  Machine learning model management and serving service. I haven't seen a decent open source framework that makes it easy to package a trained model with prepocessing and postprocessing steps and deploy it behind an API. Adding performance tracking and model validation on top of that would be great. Then there are things like queuing/batching and autoscaling. Closes thing that comes to mind right now is tensorflow serving and their k8s stuff (which it looks like they just renamed to tf-operator and moved to kubeflow org https://github.com/kubeflow/tf-operator https://github.com/kubeflow/tf-operator)
  • mpeter88 9y ago
    The model development pipeline is still a far cry from the maturity of the software development pipeline, and will have to get there in order to reduce the hands-on heavy lifting required for model development and deployment. Along with packaging a trained model are things like: Snapshot/versioning of the training and test data used to create the model, versioning of the model, storing versioned models in a model registry, auto-deploying models from the registry to target environments, telemetry from deployed models. Closest I've found is https://github.com/mitdbg/modeldb https://github.com/mitdbg/modeldb, and I've spoken to the woman leading the effort. They still have data versioning as an open question, and don't see the need. But there are training set modification, results RCA, and other use cases that drive the need to catalog training/test data with the model that results. It'll get there. Just a question of when and how.
  • agibsonccc 9y ago
    This is basically all we do (Disclaimer: This is mainly meant for bigger companies, not startups): https://skymind.ai/platform https://skymind.ai/platform - reach out if you have any questions. Mail in profile. One thing I'll say is "just k8s" isn't realistic. You need a lot more than that. It should run within k8s but should also be minimalistic. Not a lot of platforms provide that. A lot of our docs on the internals are still being built out yet, but we provide everything ranging from an offline install of anaconda to managed connectivity gateway to hadoop and spark clusters. We also have built in model serving and experiment tracking (which in reality is just a relational database with a rest api automatically integrated in to the platform) - if you're interested in learning more please reach out.
• stocktech 9y ago
  I feel like we're in a consolidation phase. We have a ton of tools/software and the big developments have been in how we use those tools aka devops. I'd put things like kubernetes/docker in this category, but there's obviously huge room for growth around this tech. I do think there's room for new tools tho, but by definition, they're on the cutting edge and not especially visible if you're not looking. Things like stream processing are already incredibly useful and only getting better. Machine learning could be in this list too. It might not be a 1000% improvement like caching, but that's part of a maturing industry.
• ntolia 9y ago
  I believe the problem has now shifted to a slightly higher level and especially when working in a microservice/containerized world. For example, given the number of specialized services you mentioned, we see more applications with polyglot persistence stacks underneath. If they form a part of the same application, how do you collectively manage them? What does it mean to take a consistent snapshot? These and a bunch of other similar questions need to be answered. There is some work we are doing (https://kanister.io https://kanister.io) to help with these issues but there are a lot of emerging solutions in this space. Look at CNCF's landscape for some more detail.
• CryoLogic 9y ago
  1. Static Website generators for non-blogs 2. Half decent wrapper libraries for tools like FFMPEG in NPM 3. Plug and Play game server with stat tracking that can be easily used for any game 4. More versatile compression formats for media, ability to serve up 360/720/1080 from the same file?
  • freeone3000 9y ago
    (4) can already be done with MKV... technically. You actually end up with 4 alternate video streams in the same MKV, which you remux for clients that can't handle it.
  • revicon 9y ago
    >Static Website generators for non-blogs We use Jekyll for more than one site which is not a blog, works great for us so far. What features do you think are missing that you wish it had?
  • TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
    1. It's hard to give constructive help without more information. Why not write a script that compiles a bunch of pages into html? As the other comment said, there's also stuff like jekyll. Maybe you could provide some use-cases? 2. Explain your use-cases? Why not call ffmpeg directly? You'll need to familiarize yourself with the original library functionality anyway, no? 3. No opinion. Not particularly interested in games. Might be hard to generalize, maybe? 4. Versatile in what sense? What are your complaints with existing media formats? I think licensing is an issue, but stuff like VP9 and Opus seem to take care of that matter. I'm not an expert, but I think both MP4 and MKV can already hold an unlimited number of media files.
• djswartz 9y ago
  I haven't found a good authorization service (fine grain roles, acls, etc). I always find myself having build it for every new project/company.
• gfodor 9y ago
  I don't think anyone has solved the issues raised in Out of the Tar Pit in the data storage space. We still spend a ton of effort, perhaps more than ever before, wrangling incidental complexity. In 2018, I should be able to define a simple relational schema in 30 seconds and start using it with effectively zero constraints around data access patterns, transaction volume, and data scale, and with no design decisions needing to be made around these bits of incidental complexity. There should be one gigantic knob I can turn to spend more money to increase more resource consumption of the system, and it should be damned cheap. We are so far from that reality that it seems obvious there is still a ton of work to do. You can see bits and pieces of solutions but if your product asks me to define indexes, tune queries, determine sharding keys, write against computer-centric (vs human-centric) APIs, cannot deal with change easily, requires babysitting, or falls over after hitting some incidental tipping point relative to the resources available to a single machine, you've not hit it. I have not used Google Spanner but at 30k/ft it seems like the closest thing out there to the idealized case -- but being closed source and centralized it is not really a "solved problem" imho.
  • foobarchu 9y ago
    This has always been my biggest complaint with Cassandra. It performs and works fantastic if you have the right usage patterns, but if you don't fit into that pattern then you need to mold your usage so that it will fit, or risk the consequences. Using Cassandra effectively is pretty much impossible without knowledge of it's internals and consideration of what effect your usage patterns will have on those internals, which IMO kind of defeats the purpose of a database (keep my data, give it back when I ask).
  • chubot 9y ago
    Personally, I would like something like sqlite that you can sync like git. Though it probably should enforce its schema more than sqlite does. I would use it for replicated / distributed storage for data frames (e.g. R or Pandas), which is somewhat related to my other request [1] The difference here is that there is structure to the files. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394048
  • ariwilson 9y ago
• freehunter 9y ago
  I'm a big believer in logging, and I find it hard to believe that collecting and monitoring logs needs to have a server with 32GB of RAM and massive Java and ElasticSearch back-ends like ELK, Splunk, Graylog, or similar monitoring software. I've been searching for something self-hosted that can run in my server's spare capacity and monitor the OS and application logs with a simple searching interface (just a web interface to grep would be handy) and come up short. If I can't host it on the cheapest DO plan, it's out of my budget. I really don't want to have to build it myself but I'm just about at that point.
  • mseebach 9y ago
    Sounds like you want something like syslog-ng paired with Nagios. The "big" solutions require some hardware because they do a lot more than merely collecting your logs.
  • Artemis2 9y ago
    oklog might be for you? https://github.com/oklog/oklog https://github.com/oklog/oklog It’s still new, but the architecture is sound and it worked well for me on a small single-node deployment (about 30 clients sending logs).
    • Blindedwino 9y ago
      It looks promising. Now if it could integrate easily with syslog-ng/rsyslog, that would be perfect.
  • hobofan 9y ago
    I used to do something similar (but a bit less fancy), with logs processed by Heka + bash scripts using jq. Heka has now been phased out in favor of hindsight[0], but I haven't personally tried that one out yet. [0]: https://github.com/mozilla-services/hindsight https://github.com/mozilla-services/hindsight
  • odonnellryan 9y ago
    Nagios is not-so-easy to configure, but probably will get you most of the way there.
• tmaly 9y ago
  Given the sheer number of services on AWS, I would like an expert system that would query me for requirements and then suggest a set of possible services to use together to solve my problem.
  • wenc 9y ago
    Meanwhile you can use this to get a quick overview of the services offered. Amazon should put this up on their AWS main page. AWS in Plain English https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
• pmohan6 9y ago
  I don't have great suggestions for you but I think software needs are ever evolving. As more of the world comes online, there are more data requirements, newer business requirements, etc. We would need even more scalable systems on various dimensions.
• Kagerjay 9y ago
  I would say anything in the video / 3D / imaging service platforms always have a lot of things left to be desired for. Anything that potentially touches FFMPEG basically I can name a few examples that I still think need improvements - Online gif editors - Video editing / clipping - Background image editing / online photoshop equivalents - Better alternatives than lucidpress / adobeIndesign for catalog page / brochure creation - Machine learning / deepfake online tool, this is all driven client side mostly - Pretty much anything client side thats not yet server-side is open game I would say - PDF markup tools could be better for online-based services, especially for architectural design - CAD-based online programs for retails so customers can DIY build their own warehouse or layout schemas is lacking - Better online RDBMS. Currently, there's just airtable, its lacking some core features like refential integrity - Integrating space-repetition learning in most educational based services (lynda.com,pluralsight, etc) - Managed ecommerce cart / hosting services. Its a well understood problem that should technically be easy for a client to do. Again, I would say, almost every profitable service touches some form FFMPEG for video / image editing / 3D is definitely still out there. There's such a huge untapped market out there combining all of theses services in one package.
  • imhoguy 9y ago
    I would add on-the-fly video transcoding. FFMPEG would need some efficient context state serialization to bring resumability/seekability and at the same time to stay low on resources.
• ex3ndr 9y ago
  I really want to simplify writing backend logic and implement everything like functions that reacts on some events and produce another one's. This is a very very looks like, Actor Model (Akka) plus Redux's Reduces: We have just a bunch of a state changing rules and they can be executed reliably and with decent performance. Something very simple (for example for Build Server): Build Failed (Event) -> Assign responsible user for a crash -> Send Notification -> Deliver Notification via user's configured notification systems (email, push, sms..) This is a Event Sourcing, but event sourcing works well only for one part of the platform - write side, but reader side is sometimes too hard to implement. Sometimes there are a problems with eventual consistency and you actually need to wait while some of the reducers in chain will process this event and starting from this point everything became toooo slow to develop and you basically start to redevelop the wheel - this is just a database engine de-factor. Meh.
  • jacques_chester 9y ago
    I'm a one-eyed Concourse fan, which implements a separation of state and logic that allows designs like this. I've been pitching pretty heavily the concept of creating or converging to parity with the FaaS I'm assigned to work on. So: maybe. We might pull this off.
• deepnotderp 9y ago
  I want a way to use AWS Lambda/GCF but with cluster level network locality.
  • boulos 9y ago
    Interesting. Do you mean for functions to call each other (so that it’s sub-ms) or for some other reason?
    • deepnotderp 9y ago
      Yeah, basically low latency versions of FaaS.
• dozzie 9y ago
  > It seems like there are so many choices in each category that there's nothing left to do. Log storage and search for structured logs (e.g. JSON or CEE, not merely stringblobs). We have paid solutions (Splunk, Loggly, Papertrail), and then we have Elasticsearch, which gets worse in this use scenario with every release. Message stream processing engine that doesn't require restarting to add a query or data sink, so you could build monitoring system around it. In fact, a monitoring system designed to allow you to easily add your custom processing or data sink. Infrastructure inventory that can be both filled by hand and kept updated by machine and that can be queried from script or browsed by human. For that it would be useful to have a good topic maps engine, which is another missing thing. OS updates manager that can handle more than just Red Hat/CentOS (Red Hat Satellite or Spacewalk) or just Ubuntu (Canonical Landscape), and while at it, one that doesn't try to be underdeveloped configuration management tool (like CFEngine or Puppet) and underdeveloped deployment tool (like Ansible), but can cooperate with them. And there's much more where these came from.
• jedberg 9y ago
  A workload-aware data distribution proxy. Let me explain. A lot of people talk about multi-cloud these days. Either AWS and Azure, or AWS and their own datacenter, or whatever. While it's really easy to send compute jobs to one cloud or the other based on which one is best suited for the job, the big issue is that your compute job will need data. Right now your choices are to have a copy of all your data in all the clouds (a very expensive proposition since you'd be constantly shipping updates across very expensive outbound connections) or to have all your data in one place and have the compute jobs reach out across the internet to get it (also expensive and now there is latency for every job too). I want a proxy that is smart enough to say "Workload X is usually done on AWS, and requires data points Y and Z, so make sure Y and Z are always up to date on AWS, but lazy update Y and Z to GCE in batches through the cheapest direct connect possible".
  • matteuan 9y ago
    One project that is aiming in this direction: http://seaclouds-project.eu/ http://seaclouds-project.eu/
    • jedberg 9y ago
      That's an interesting start! Scanning briefly it looks like I still have to tell it what data and workloads go where -- it isn't figuring it out automatically. Which is the holy grail I'm looking for.
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  I remember when databases were only for highly paid experts and needed a lot of customization and configuration. I think we need a similar development for AI and ML to make them accessible to the average developer.
• DannyB2 9y ago
  The missing piece? It is a new project, it enables your server to use all other front end and back end technologies at the same time! That is what makes it so fantastic! You get all front end JavaScript frameworks, and all back end server technologies, all for one low price. Just install this new component into your project. It will download the other few gigabytes and hook it into your project.
• LeonidBugaev 9y ago
  Area of automated testing and developer tools, in general, is hugely underestimated. Tools that help you write, format, verify code, automatically detect issues from stacktraces, or any other sources like tcpdumps, smart fuzzers, and etc. The market is huge. I have a personal project for 5 years in this area https://goreplay.org https://goreplay.org, and investigating ways to automatically find issues in web applications. Project get traction, but I do not see any competition so far. And there is a lot of reasons for this because in such under-researched areas being a pioneer for both project owner and end user require them a different set of mind. And this is really hard to market.
• mabynogy 9y ago
  A schemaless and automated middleware for scripting languages (js, php, lua...). The tool inspects the source code and wraps calls across processes (no IDL). I wrote a (beginning of) a description here: http://dpt.slasheva.com/project-ideas.html#middleware http://dpt.slasheva.com/project-ideas.html#middleware
• lowry 9y ago
  I miss a decent self-hosted photo/video library.
• fooyc 9y ago
  ACID databases that can scale easily on multiple machines still don’t exist.
  • btown 9y ago
    https://cloud.google.com/spanner/ https://cloud.google.com/spanner/ and the open-source https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/cockroachdb/ both provide scalable ACID transactions; however, both introduce added latency compared to traditional databases.
• joshavant 9y ago
  I'm a front-end developer. I'd like an OSS solution that will allow me to deploy an arbitrary server-side service - be it a Ruby, Python application or even a package like OpenVPN - to some cloud infrastructure, easily. This solution should spin up a hardened OS distro (CIS-compliant, maybe?), provision it with my arbitrary services (using Ansible or Chef or something), and deploy it to AWS or some cloud infrastructure for me (using Terraform or something). All these component pieces exist, but nothing ties all of them together for an easy deploy for a front-end developer like me. (And, I know things like Heroku and CodeDeploy exist, but I dislike lock-in and they nearly universally come with their own restrictions, like lack of support for server-side Swift applications or custom services like OpenVPN or git-annex.) EDIT - I'm strongly considering taking some time off to write this soon, so get in touch if this is something you're interested in! Contributing or using!
  • jacques_chester 9y ago
    There's an overlap with what BOSH does. Starts with a stemcell, compiles your packages against it, spins up whole VMs configured with those packages. It also adds monitoring for both VMs and processes. Don't underestimate what you get from a PaaS like Heroku, though. If you're able to stick to 12-factor apps, the lockin is pretty mild -- you should be able to hoist your skirts and move to Cloud Foundry or even OpenShift without too much pain. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we work on BOSH and Cloud Foundry. We compete with Red Hat and Heroku.
  • rloewenherz 9y ago
    We're actually about to release a product that does exactly this! We're in private beta right now, but will have something available to the public soon. If you're interested, check out www.nucleus.codes. And if you want to join the beta, email us at hi@nucleus.codes.
• takinola 9y ago
  I should be able to copy and paste a server configuration and create an identical copy of my server. Right now, the only solutions I see are generating images (too big and cumbersome) or writing scripts (too complex). I would like to be able to type in a single command and replicate all the packages, services and configuration present in a particular server to a new target system.
  • hathathat 9y ago
    Doesn't Puppet(.com) do something like this?
  • noir_lord 9y ago
    You can get a fair way down that path with ansible if you are very careful but it still requires too much work, modern operating systems and packaging where not built for idempotent rollbacks. We try to treat pets like cattle then wonder why they bite us (to reverse the usual refrain). I agree though, it should be declarative but everything shits everything else all over the filesystem.
  • rs86 9y ago
    Maybe you will find Nix useful.
  • sjellis 9y ago
    I think there's a general problem that the incentives are for building big tools, so small problems like this are handled by everybody writing their own ad-hoc scripts.
  • viraptor 9y ago
    Software that does it: puppet, chef, salt, ansible, ... You can have chef as a service in AWS via OpsWorks. Alternatively almost every cloud provider supports cloud-config at boot time.
  • deathtrader666 9y ago
    Check out NixOS and NixOps https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/nixops/ https://nixos.org/nixops/
• rs86 9y ago
  I wish we had more statically typed web backend frameworks as usable as rails or phoenix. I have used Elm a lot recently and it rocks. I wish I had something as incredible for the server side.
  • davidjnelson 9y ago
    I do too! Seems like the play framework with java and the sails framework with typescript are a few existing options. I'd love to see something rails-ish for go.
    • 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
      .net core?
• mrfusion 9y ago
  Even though we have Postgres and MySQL they really don’t seem well configured out of the box and you’ve got to wade through a bunch of settings files and understand what vacuuming is. I think we need a self tuning rdms. It could watch and adapt to usage patterns and available resources.
  • davidjnelson 9y ago
    Isn't that what aws aurora and google cloud spanner offer?
• ioddly 9y ago
  I think what I've been missing, and trying to do a better job at, is understanding the awesome power of existing and mature solutions. Things like postgres's LISTEN/NOTIFY and so on.
• slake 9y ago
  Security probably requires quite a bit of OSS on it. Lot's of proprietary software. There are a lot of penetration testing devices, not so many securing software.
• slake 9y ago
  A CMS backend to which I can sew on any template based frontend I want without having to follow the strict workflow set by the backend. The backend would just serve content when asked (JSON prolly), the frontend could be anything you desired.
• slake 9y ago
  A plugin to handle all of GDPR requirements?