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Cost is not only measured in dollars for servers. The cost of doing a massive, irreversible migration that doesn’t work seamlessly the first time is significan
by tyre 6y ago
Cost is not only measured in dollars for servers.
The cost of doing a massive, irreversible migration that doesn’t work seamlessly the first time is significant. And often more significant in engineering time, lost revenue from services going offline, trust both from external users and internal teams watching the shitshow, and possibly data loss or backwards-incompatible changes than those server dollars.
It’s funny that one consistent theme of the best engineers I’ve worked with is less their “amazing 10x ideas” than the number of “sounds like a good idea if you’ve never done it” ideas that they shut down. Huge migrations are one.
- acdha 6y agoI had an example of that recently: we’ve been buying grocery boxes from Hungry Harvest. They announced a new website was coming a couple of weeks ago and had the usually puffery about how it’d be better in vague ways (the old one was not noticeably bad). Then the site was down longer than expected. Then everyone was told their order customizations were lost. Now it’s so bad that they’re skipping an entire week’s delivery for all of their customers. I don’t know how they got there but that’s expensive, disrupts their supply chain, and I suspect they’d cheerfully pay four times as much not to have to slog through this mess.