5 ms·

So if anything, they are not running “serverless”, far from it: they really dig their hands into the OS and system engineering. Just recently they did kernel en

So if anything, they are not running “serverless”, far from it: they really dig their hands into the OS and system engineering. Just recently they did kernel engineering on FreeBSD to push the networking as close to 100 Gbps per interface as possible. You picked a bad example to make your point, a point which I do not, from experience of doing this for several decades, recognize as valid anyway. By the by, I’m that guy who runs a private datacenter in the basement, from designing one’s own rack mountable servers to crimping the network cables and running the fiber. Infrastructure is not something one should entrust to others, because these others cannot be trusted, as has been proven by AWS outages time and time again. And yes, I system engineer my own operating system as well. Well I did, it’s all been running automatically for years now.

scarface74 8y ago
You were making a point about people should run their own data centers. Netflix is not running their own data centers. Can you run your own data center in 90 areas around the world? Can you run your own globally distributed CDN? Your own globally distributed DNS? Are you saying that you never had any downtime? Can you stand up a replica of your object store, your caching and your database in both Europe and Asia so it can be closer to your outsourced developers and foreign customers? Does your data center in your basement allow me to set up subnets that span regions (not AWS “regions”, geographic areas - “Availability Zones”) just in case your basement floods? What if I don't want a replica of data, what if I want to duplicate my entire infrastructure in Asia so the developers there can have a clone of our infrastructure - databases, storage, VMs, load balancers, multiple availability zones, etc. How long would it take you to do that? I could do it with a JSON script and run a command. How fast can you provision a half dozen load balancers and five or ten dedicated computers - not VMs “dedicated hosts”? I can do it by creating a JSON file and running one command from my terminal. And why should I trust you to set up a more reliable, redundant, network than AWS? Again Netflix didn’t trust themselves to create more reliable infrastructure and decided to trust a competitor to do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and the guy who lead the transition is now a VP at AWS, so I think he knows something about infrastructure.
- Annatar 8y ago
  You were making a point about people should run their own data centers. I'm making the point that one can never write high quality software if one does not master system administration and then system engineering first. It's impossible to write high quality software without understanding the substrate on which software is built. That's my message.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    It could easily be said that one cannot write quality software if they don't understand how compilers work, how to write assembly language, how processors are fabbed, etc. How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? It's not a matter of "not understanding" how it works, it's a matter of focusing on your core competency and even if you know how to do something, it's about where you can add value and where is it best to outsource. AWS has a dozens of services across dozens of areas across the globe to handle infrastructure. Why waste time doing the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" that you can't do as well? No matter how good you think you are, you can't efficiently setup infrastructure as fast and as reliable as AWS. How quickly could you setup duplicate data centers on opposite sides of the continent for disaster recovery and/or to reduce latency? I can do it by running a CloudFormation template.
    - Annatar 8y ago
      How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? All the way down to the hardware.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - dang 8y ago
    Can you please not do technical flamewars on HN? The value that should drive discussions here is intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), not nitpicking or irritable fault-finding.

scarface74 8y ago

You were making a point about people should run their own data centers. Netflix is not running their own data centers. Can you run your own data center in 90 areas around the world? Can you run your own globally distributed CDN? Your own globally distributed DNS? Are you saying that you never had any downtime? Can you stand up a replica of your object store, your caching and your database in both Europe and Asia so it can be closer to your outsourced developers and foreign customers? Does your data center in your basement allow me to set up subnets that span regions (not AWS “regions”, geographic areas - “Availability Zones”) just in case your basement floods? What if I don't want a replica of data, what if I want to duplicate my entire infrastructure in Asia so the developers there can have a clone of our infrastructure - databases, storage, VMs, load balancers, multiple availability zones, etc. How long would it take you to do that? I could do it with a JSON script and run a command. How fast can you provision a half dozen load balancers and five or ten dedicated computers - not VMs “dedicated hosts”? I can do it by creating a JSON file and running one command from my terminal. And why should I trust you to set up a more reliable, redundant, network than AWS? Again Netflix didn’t trust themselves to create more reliable infrastructure and decided to trust a competitor to do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and the guy who lead the transition is now a VP at AWS, so I think he knows something about infrastructure.

Annatar 8y ago
You were making a point about people should run their own data centers. I'm making the point that one can never write high quality software if one does not master system administration and then system engineering first. It's impossible to write high quality software without understanding the substrate on which software is built. That's my message.
- scarface74 8y ago
  It could easily be said that one cannot write quality software if they don't understand how compilers work, how to write assembly language, how processors are fabbed, etc. How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? It's not a matter of "not understanding" how it works, it's a matter of focusing on your core competency and even if you know how to do something, it's about where you can add value and where is it best to outsource. AWS has a dozens of services across dozens of areas across the globe to handle infrastructure. Why waste time doing the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" that you can't do as well? No matter how good you think you are, you can't efficiently setup infrastructure as fast and as reliable as AWS. How quickly could you setup duplicate data centers on opposite sides of the continent for disaster recovery and/or to reduce latency? I can do it by running a CloudFormation template.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? All the way down to the hardware.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- dang 8y ago
  Can you please not do technical flamewars on HN? The value that should drive discussions here is intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), not nitpicking or irritable fault-finding.