6 ms·

I see a lot of technical jargon but wondering how all of this relates and fits in with (if at all) the redesign?

by yourduskquibble 8y ago

soonbesleeping 8y ago
Agreed, it was hard to read from all the jargon. Also seems overly complex.
- pm90 8y ago
  The original architecture seemed overly complex IMO. Maintaining a fleet of HAProxys and their configs seems daunting... it seems like they're gaining both flexibility (maintaining configs easily) and observability (request/response metrics for thirft requests)
  - ckwang 8y ago
    Per-service proxy deployments are a bit complex for the infrastructure but provide a nice abstraction for the service and service developers themselves. The configuration scheme is indeed daunting, which is what we're hoping Envoy and its xDS APIs + centralized configs can help us solve for developer teams.
- rhizome 8y ago
  Like the redesign.
- dalyons 8y ago
  if you arent familiar with the "jargon" in this post then you're probably not in a position to reasonably judge whether its "overly complex". Most everything in here would be familiar to anyone with experience working on modern high volume web properties.
- ojhughes 8y ago
  Regardless of whether Service Mesh is overly complex, the industry seems to have entered an era of "Complexity Worship". I was speaking to some engineers at a small startup the other day with only a handful of customers. They have invested significant resource building there own K8S cluster, ensuring it runs on multi-cloud etc, sounds a lot like premature optimisation.
  - lykr0n 8y ago
    That's insane. I feel like at a small scale you get a product out the door and refine it until you start growing. It's really not hard to use ansible to deploy your stuff onto EC2 and add more nodes as you grow. But, K8s is the new hotness and people are going to use it.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    I have a theory that Complexity Worship is a product of boredom by CS degrees who would rather not spend their time implementing WYSIWYG editors or whatever anymore.
AlexB138 8y ago
Envoy is a networking tool. Wouldn't have much to do with a frontend redesign. They're very far apart in a tech stack.
- paganel 8y ago
  > They're very far apart in a tech stack. Which I think is kind of OP's point, i.e. that maybe reddit is focusing its resources on the wrong issues. Afaik the website was and still is generally responsive from a networking point of view, there are some 503s here and there from time to time but nothing that could throw me away as a regular user, on the other hand the redesign (if it manages to overwrite all the present ways of getting past it, such as using old.reddit or i.reddit) will definitely turn me away as a regular user, and I say that as a really long-time user of that website. The more general issue is that there are a lot of technical people around SV that do, well, technical stuff, because they are really, really good at what they're doing (so I'm in no way downplaying this post). The issue is that focusing only on technical stuff and ignoring how users actually use your website/product might turn those users away and you're left with a technical behemoth which has no users (see Google+ for a relatively recent example).
  - AlexB138 8y ago
    I would be very surprised if the people working on UI/UX and the people working on network visibility and routing were the same group. I suspect you are mentally constructing a zero sum situation where there is not one. I don't use reddit much, or know that much about it, so I maybe be wrong, but unless they are a very small shop those are generally pretty separate disciplines.
    - paganel 8y ago
      > I suspect you are mentally constructing a zero sum situation where there is not one. Generally speaking companies do have limited economic resources and also generally speaking yes, there is "a zero sum situation" when it comes to allocating resources inside a specific company. The management doesn't generally have infinite time and resources at its disposal and a focus on the technical side of things (or on any other specific side of a particular business) has many times resulted in neglecting the rest of the business not related to that particular topic. A very good such example is the same Google+ case, with the now famous motto "all arrows pointed in the same direction" or some such which imho made them lose focus on a ton of other important stuff going on at the same time (Amazon and aws, most of the google products have become a chore to use since then etc)
ckwang 8y ago
We're actually looking to put Envoy in front of the redesign stack at some point in the near future! The major services backing the redesign can be isolated into a few smaller pieces, and we'd like to have Envoy be a routing layer that can abstract this for the central browser client as we evolve the backend.

I see a lot of technical jargon but wondering how all of this relates and fits in with (if at all) the redesign?

soonbesleeping 8y ago

Agreed, it was hard to read from all the jargon. Also seems overly complex.

pm90 8y ago
The original architecture seemed overly complex IMO. Maintaining a fleet of HAProxys and their configs seems daunting... it seems like they're gaining both flexibility (maintaining configs easily) and observability (request/response metrics for thirft requests)
- ckwang 8y ago
  Per-service proxy deployments are a bit complex for the infrastructure but provide a nice abstraction for the service and service developers themselves. The configuration scheme is indeed daunting, which is what we're hoping Envoy and its xDS APIs + centralized configs can help us solve for developer teams.
rhizome 8y ago
Like the redesign.
dalyons 8y ago
if you arent familiar with the "jargon" in this post then you're probably not in a position to reasonably judge whether its "overly complex". Most everything in here would be familiar to anyone with experience working on modern high volume web properties.
ojhughes 8y ago
Regardless of whether Service Mesh is overly complex, the industry seems to have entered an era of "Complexity Worship". I was speaking to some engineers at a small startup the other day with only a handful of customers. They have invested significant resource building there own K8S cluster, ensuring it runs on multi-cloud etc, sounds a lot like premature optimisation.
- lykr0n 8y ago
  That's insane. I feel like at a small scale you get a product out the door and refine it until you start growing. It's really not hard to use ansible to deploy your stuff onto EC2 and add more nodes as you grow. But, K8s is the new hotness and people are going to use it.
- rhizome 8y ago
  I have a theory that Complexity Worship is a product of boredom by CS degrees who would rather not spend their time implementing WYSIWYG editors or whatever anymore.

AlexB138 8y ago

Envoy is a networking tool. Wouldn't have much to do with a frontend redesign. They're very far apart in a tech stack.

paganel 8y ago
> They're very far apart in a tech stack. Which I think is kind of OP's point, i.e. that maybe reddit is focusing its resources on the wrong issues. Afaik the website was and still is generally responsive from a networking point of view, there are some 503s here and there from time to time but nothing that could throw me away as a regular user, on the other hand the redesign (if it manages to overwrite all the present ways of getting past it, such as using old.reddit or i.reddit) will definitely turn me away as a regular user, and I say that as a really long-time user of that website. The more general issue is that there are a lot of technical people around SV that do, well, technical stuff, because they are really, really good at what they're doing (so I'm in no way downplaying this post). The issue is that focusing only on technical stuff and ignoring how users actually use your website/product might turn those users away and you're left with a technical behemoth which has no users (see Google+ for a relatively recent example).
- AlexB138 8y ago
  I would be very surprised if the people working on UI/UX and the people working on network visibility and routing were the same group. I suspect you are mentally constructing a zero sum situation where there is not one. I don't use reddit much, or know that much about it, so I maybe be wrong, but unless they are a very small shop those are generally pretty separate disciplines.
  - paganel 8y ago
    > I suspect you are mentally constructing a zero sum situation where there is not one. Generally speaking companies do have limited economic resources and also generally speaking yes, there is "a zero sum situation" when it comes to allocating resources inside a specific company. The management doesn't generally have infinite time and resources at its disposal and a focus on the technical side of things (or on any other specific side of a particular business) has many times resulted in neglecting the rest of the business not related to that particular topic. A very good such example is the same Google+ case, with the now famous motto "all arrows pointed in the same direction" or some such which imho made them lose focus on a ton of other important stuff going on at the same time (Amazon and aws, most of the google products have become a chore to use since then etc)

ckwang 8y ago

We're actually looking to put Envoy in front of the redesign stack at some point in the near future! The major services backing the redesign can be isolated into a few smaller pieces, and we'd like to have Envoy be a routing layer that can abstract this for the central browser client as we evolve the backend.