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This right here; but even more so. Eventually, whatever platform / tool you use will need to be upgraded. Security vulnerabilities, new features, etc happen an

This right here; but even more so. Eventually, whatever platform / tool you use will need to be upgraded. Security vulnerabilities, new features, etc happen and projects like these can get abandoned within a 5-year timeframe. When you have to migrate to either a new or upgraded platform, you have to figure it all out yourself. When the config is broken by an upstream dependency, you’re on the hook too. Who knows if the build tools you used still work on current versions of things. Like it or not, we’re all kind of stuck on these platforms we don’t control. The alternative is to become fluent in yet another technical stack, but one that will be used infrequently and won’t really translate to anything else unless you’re trying to build your own cloud service on consumer-grade hardware.

mooman219 6y ago
Long term platform stability seems to be moving from relying on the OS to higher up in the stack with the advent of Docker. It feels like Docker is being used more and more in cases where I would have considered something like CentOS.
- isaacgreyed 6y ago
  Seems like there's a probably reasonable trend of piling some other tool on top of the stack because dealing with underlying layers is hard. Like electron apps and docker images. Or just web browsers. Kind of worrisome to abandon lower layers with their problems and build on top of them, but what can you do, but get good at jenga.
- deckard1 6y ago
  Docker feels like the equivalent of the teenager that doesn't want to clean his room so he just pushes all his mess under the bed. The complexity is still under the bed. We're all going to have to dig under that bed one day. Or we're just going to end up buying new hockey sticks, football pads, etc. Which is to say, we're going to end up with Linux on top of Docker on top of Linux.
  - therealx 6y ago
    Amen. I find generic scripts to be way more mangemaable. You can still use them with docker, but you can also just buy any Linux VM and go. Also, easy to backup.
  - resonious 6y ago
    I'm not sure I follow the analogy. I'm guessing the mess represents a messy filesystem/environment. What does the bed represent? A Dockerfile? Dockerfiles are way more transparent than, say, a random server's / directory. That's just my opinion of course. It's possible to write confusing Dockerfiles but really they're mostly just shell scripts. And the idea of "Linux on top of Docker" seems a bit odd - there's only ever one Linux kernel no matter how many containers you have running. Docker is built on Linux.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    If your application doesn't rely on hardware details (such as GPU acceleration or networking) that bypasses well-defined OS APIs, it's actually a very good approach.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    It's closer to owning a car factory making disposable cars and getting a new one when it gets dirty. At some point your supplier shuts down and you cannot make a specific part anymore, which prevents you from building another car. You are now stuck with the dirty car.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  But when you do Kubernetes or Docker, there’s almost always another stack beneath you that you have to build and maintain. Whether that’s bare metal (yikes), VMWare ($$$) or AWS/Azure (not self-hosting) you still have to deal with upgrades / API changes / hardware refresh there. Container solutions really only get you out of “doing the work” if you can leverage a prepackaged container management solution from a cloud provider. Self-hosted containers are frequently more trouble than they’re worth since the solutions for managing them are either insanely complex (Kubernetes) or so simplistic you have to write some custom logic to build/deploy them. Agree with the point about CentOS though; at this point the idea of a Linux “distro” is dead. The way forward is a hypervisor model where the kernel is protected from application code (including all dependencies from the userland) with barebones Docker images like Alpine used as the basis for a declaratively-defined system. The one thing Docker does very well is isolate dependencies which reduces integration complexity and lets you modularuse the whole thing. Incidentally this actually makes it harder for hobbyists to get into as the mental model for it has a lot more complexity and you need more expert knowledge to write the scripts to build and configure your app automatically.
lrem 6y ago
Today I've heard fellow SREs discussed whether RRDTool is the best solution for monitoring private things. Its only merit: it stopped evolving. Might or might not outweigh the decades of progress.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  RRDTool is great for exactly this reason! I actually still use it to plot time series data on a raspberry pi for various projects. It hasn’t changed in at least a decade and it will run with good performance on any hardware. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

mooman219 6y ago

Long term platform stability seems to be moving from relying on the OS to higher up in the stack with the advent of Docker. It feels like Docker is being used more and more in cases where I would have considered something like CentOS.

isaacgreyed 6y ago
Seems like there's a probably reasonable trend of piling some other tool on top of the stack because dealing with underlying layers is hard. Like electron apps and docker images. Or just web browsers. Kind of worrisome to abandon lower layers with their problems and build on top of them, but what can you do, but get good at jenga.
deckard1 6y ago
Docker feels like the equivalent of the teenager that doesn't want to clean his room so he just pushes all his mess under the bed. The complexity is still under the bed. We're all going to have to dig under that bed one day. Or we're just going to end up buying new hockey sticks, football pads, etc. Which is to say, we're going to end up with Linux on top of Docker on top of Linux.
- therealx 6y ago
  Amen. I find generic scripts to be way more mangemaable. You can still use them with docker, but you can also just buy any Linux VM and go. Also, easy to backup.
- resonious 6y ago
  I'm not sure I follow the analogy. I'm guessing the mess represents a messy filesystem/environment. What does the bed represent? A Dockerfile? Dockerfiles are way more transparent than, say, a random server's / directory. That's just my opinion of course. It's possible to write confusing Dockerfiles but really they're mostly just shell scripts. And the idea of "Linux on top of Docker" seems a bit odd - there's only ever one Linux kernel no matter how many containers you have running. Docker is built on Linux.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  If your application doesn't rely on hardware details (such as GPU acceleration or networking) that bypasses well-defined OS APIs, it's actually a very good approach.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's closer to owning a car factory making disposable cars and getting a new one when it gets dirty. At some point your supplier shuts down and you cannot make a specific part anymore, which prevents you from building another car. You are now stuck with the dirty car.
wayoutthere 6y ago
But when you do Kubernetes or Docker, there’s almost always another stack beneath you that you have to build and maintain. Whether that’s bare metal (yikes), VMWare ($$$) or AWS/Azure (not self-hosting) you still have to deal with upgrades / API changes / hardware refresh there. Container solutions really only get you out of “doing the work” if you can leverage a prepackaged container management solution from a cloud provider. Self-hosted containers are frequently more trouble than they’re worth since the solutions for managing them are either insanely complex (Kubernetes) or so simplistic you have to write some custom logic to build/deploy them. Agree with the point about CentOS though; at this point the idea of a Linux “distro” is dead. The way forward is a hypervisor model where the kernel is protected from application code (including all dependencies from the userland) with barebones Docker images like Alpine used as the basis for a declaratively-defined system. The one thing Docker does very well is isolate dependencies which reduces integration complexity and lets you modularuse the whole thing. Incidentally this actually makes it harder for hobbyists to get into as the mental model for it has a lot more complexity and you need more expert knowledge to write the scripts to build and configure your app automatically.

lrem 6y ago

Today I've heard fellow SREs discussed whether RRDTool is the best solution for monitoring private things. Its only merit: it stopped evolving. Might or might not outweigh the decades of progress.

wayoutthere 6y ago
RRDTool is great for exactly this reason! I actually still use it to plot time series data on a raspberry pi for various projects. It hasn’t changed in at least a decade and it will run with good performance on any hardware. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it