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Since you brought up Keller, if anyone is interested here is a great podcast/conversation/interview with Lex Fridman: https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA https://yout

• jiggawatts 6y ago
  One of the best bits I took away from that interview is Jim's comment that a lot of things need to be "rearchitected every decade, or even faster". It's such a throwaway comment, but I think there's deep insight behind it from someone with extensive experience in the matter. I also feel it applies to many other things, not just ASIC design. For example, every customer I go to manages their VMware farm just like they managed their bare metal boxes in the past. Just as they're oh-so-slowly wrapping their heads around the design concepts that are a better fit for virtualisation, they're moving to the cloud. So of course, they deploy everything in the cloud just like they're used to in their on-premises VMware environment. It's shocking how much low-hanging fruit is out there, just waiting to be rearchitected by someone with understanding and a clear vision. As a random example: I just saw a bunch of Azure servers with empty 1TB "Application" D:\ drives. The team that built it was used to how VMware thin-provisioned drives only allocate 2MB blocks at a time, so the 1TB max capacity is just a high water mark that has no real cost. Meanwhile, Azure bills based on capacity, not usage, so that 1TB is burning money. It seems like a small thing, but if you store 1GB in a 1TB volume in the cloud, you're not paying $123/TB/month, you're actually paying $12,288 per terabyte of data stored per month! If you look around, it turns out that everywhere you look, people are doing "what they've always done", and it leads to crazy inefficiencies.
  • devonkim 6y ago
    The reality is most places keep running software architected for an era over 2 decades ago now and it’s ossifying harder if it’s still carrying enough business inertia. Those workflows of bootstrapping VMs and EC2 instances like it’s 1996 are not going away because to do anything cloud native in your architecture you need cloud native software, and usually if you can get a container you can get an RPM or Deb and play package jockey rejecting the new technologies literally meant to do half the work for you. In most of the cases where places just dump money it’s usually a question of labor cost spent to optimize vs the gains, and unless your business is built around scaling a lot of small customers like the usual SaaS unicorns customer acquisition is super long, painful, and technical inefficiency is the default for enterprise as a rule. It’s worth paying $200 for a $1 part because the overhead and risk of renegotiating anything is not worth it. When an hour long meeting essentially costs a minimum of $1000 to a company essentially, it’d better be worth it. When it comes to ASIC designs and VLSI the technical debt is pretty different because each generation of hardware has past benchmarks primarily to drive it forward. Oftentimes in software people tend to want to keep things the same which discourages innovation or touching.