4 ms·

Very much this. People time is always the biggest cost. Docker and Kubernetes have been a game changer in time-to-production. Unless you need maximum performanc

Very much this. People time is always the biggest cost. Docker and Kubernetes have been a game changer in time-to-production. Unless you need maximum performance out of the biggest iron available, it's cheaper to buy the next tier of EC2 instance than to waste developer and operations staff time trying to squeeze more out of existing servers. There are many levels of abstraction, but...who cares? It's about productivity per dollar.

otabdeveloper1 8y ago
> People time is always the biggest cost. False. > Docker and Kubernetes have been a game changer in time-to-production. False. > ...it's cheaper to buy the next tier of EC2 instance than to waste developer and operations staff time trying to squeeze more out of existing servers. Only if your management is completely clueless. You can't solve people problems by buying machines or installing containers. > It's about productivity per dollar. No. Or, rather, only if by "productivity" you mean "clueless management KPI, meaning wasted company dollars per hour". The root problem is higher-up management being unable to any set useful goals except "let's get investment capital and waste it ASAP to get more investment capital next year, growth, #yolo lol".
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  how can you say these are false when they're quite evidently true in some circumstances? I'm on a team that provides a kubernetes-based internal SaaS thing and personnel costs seem to be easily recouped by the money we save from having autoscaling and a common node pool instead of 2 machines per service. This has been going on for a number of years now and the most important part has always been to be backwards compatible with whatever developers have been doing for those years. That is productivity. That's not to mention the leverage Kubernetes gives you to optimize and discover costs. Being able to see where optimization yields the best results is much better than optimizing everything. Sometimes it just isn't worth it.
rbanffy 8y ago
> People time is always the biggest cost It really depends on scale. If I spend 15 minutes improving the utilization of my home cluster by 10%, the only payoff I get is experience. If I do the same to Google's indexing infrastructure, I probably delayed the collapse of civilization by global warming by a full year. This attitude leaves a lot of low-hanging fruit that, as the operation grows, can shave a couple million dollars off the operating costs.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

otabdeveloper1 8y ago

> People time is always the biggest cost. False. > Docker and Kubernetes have been a game changer in time-to-production. False. > ...it's cheaper to buy the next tier of EC2 instance than to waste developer and operations staff time trying to squeeze more out of existing servers. Only if your management is completely clueless. You can't solve people problems by buying machines or installing containers. > It's about productivity per dollar. No. Or, rather, only if by "productivity" you mean "clueless management KPI, meaning wasted company dollars per hour". The root problem is higher-up management being unable to any set useful goals except "let's get investment capital and waste it ASAP to get more investment capital next year, growth, #yolo lol".

sascha_sl 8y ago
how can you say these are false when they're quite evidently true in some circumstances? I'm on a team that provides a kubernetes-based internal SaaS thing and personnel costs seem to be easily recouped by the money we save from having autoscaling and a common node pool instead of 2 machines per service. This has been going on for a number of years now and the most important part has always been to be backwards compatible with whatever developers have been doing for those years. That is productivity. That's not to mention the leverage Kubernetes gives you to optimize and discover costs. Being able to see where optimization yields the best results is much better than optimizing everything. Sometimes it just isn't worth it.

rbanffy 8y ago

> People time is always the biggest cost It really depends on scale. If I spend 15 minutes improving the utilization of my home cluster by 10%, the only payoff I get is experience. If I do the same to Google's indexing infrastructure, I probably delayed the collapse of civilization by global warming by a full year. This attitude leaves a lot of low-hanging fruit that, as the operation grows, can shave a couple million dollars off the operating costs.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]