4 ms·

They're not selling a blogging platform, as long as pub/sub works it's fair to say that they're up.

rvz 5y ago
Well said. Their main service and offering is still up. They are not hosting blogs or websites as their business. This reaction is a storm in a tea cup left inside of a sunny cottage. Downvoters: I don't see anyone screaming at this stock trading app that also stopped using Kubernetes [0]. [0] https://freetrade.io/blog/killing-kubernetes https://freetrade.io/blog/killing-kubernetes
mountainriver 5y ago
This is the face of your company, if you can’t handle the increased load on your blog why should I trust your other systems. I run on k8s and it works really well
- Nicksil 5y ago
  >This is the face of your company, if you can’t handle the increased load on your blog why should I trust your other systems. I suspect the sort of individual visiting this website and reading the blog will know that their services and blog do not run on the same machines.
  - mountainriver 5y ago
    I suspect that when someone’s website is down it looks bad on them
- rvz 5y ago
  I would have agreed with you if 'their blog AND their main service' also went down; Not just the website. But their main service is still up. 95% of the comments here parade about a hiccup of this service having a blog going down when that is not even their main service but continues to use an unreliable service like GitHub even when that goes down every month and they also don't use K8s either. GitHub (and GitHub Actions) was proven to be very unreliable and the whole service went down multiple times and somehow that gets a pass? Even GitHub's status page returned 500s due to panicking developers DOSing the site. Same with GitHub pages. But a single blog getting 500s but the whole service didn't go down? Nope.
  - gbe52 5y ago
    It’s to be expected. Criticism of Kubernetes is taken personally by people who have dedicated themselves to it since it’s in vogue. It is very much showing the cracks in its perceived perfection and this company is far from the only one bucking the trend. We are seeing the long tail of people who don’t realize (or acknowledge) that Kubernetes is already on the other side of the hype cycle. That long tail is currently driving this conversation because commenting on a 500 is the lowest effort imaginable, but they do not speak for the industry. (Source: 24 years in FAANG-scale ops. I remember this cycle for many, many other fetish tools.) Seriously, a Wordpress blog goes down (like that’s never happened under HN load) and all of HN is saying “lol what dogshit if only they used k8s for basically static content, the morons” which tells you a lot about the psychology going on here. A LOT. Otherwise smart engineers just can’t help themselves and redefine “irony” even though it contributes absolutely nothing to the discussion and doesn’t even address the fundamental criticism. We are in a thread that essentially started with “the blog is down, how can I trust the product?” If you can figure out that logic please let me know. That’s basically saying “I don’t understand operations at all,” but here we are, listening to it and its Strong Opinions on a resource allocator and orchestrator. This thread basically confirmed for me that Kubernetes is losing air. I already knew that, but the signal is getting a little bit stronger every month.
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      Very well said and agreed.
    - mountainriver 5y ago
      You assume A LOT, personally I’m tired of the “don’t use kubernetes” edgy blog posts that have very little substance to offer and mostly seem like people who haven’t studied distributed systems Kubernetes isn’t perfect but it’s the best we have. Losing air to what?
      - vp8989 5y ago
        The blog post itself explains it's existence: "the following question comes up a lot: “So… do you use Kubernetes?” This has been asked by current and potential customers, by developers interested in our platform, and by candidates interviewing for roles at Ably. We have even had interesting candidates walk away from job offers citing the fact that we don’t use Kubernetes as the reason!" Why do you think this is an "edgy blog post"? This is a piece of Marketing, both recruitment and regular. The implied subtext of the post is: "we don't use Kubernetes but its not because we don't know what we are doing". Separately, what does having studied distributed systems or not have to do with Kubernetes?
- foobiekr 5y ago
  Auto scaling to cover insane unpredicted load like this is t really representative of anything other than a failure to have cost management in place.
- foresto 5y ago
  > This is the face of your company, if you can’t handle the increased load on your blog why should I trust your other systems. https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/
remram 5y ago
They are selling a highly-available product. You don't pay for pub/sub, anybody can run that, you pay for reliability and scalability. Their approach to other parts of their infrastructure definitely can and should inform your decision to buy into their product. In addition to insight in their infrastructure practices, this gives you a unique opportunity to look into how they deal with outages, whether they update their status page honestly (and automatically), and how fast they can solve technical issues.

rvz 5y ago

Well said. Their main service and offering is still up. They are not hosting blogs or websites as their business. This reaction is a storm in a tea cup left inside of a sunny cottage. Downvoters: I don't see anyone screaming at this stock trading app that also stopped using Kubernetes [0]. [0] https://freetrade.io/blog/killing-kubernetes https://freetrade.io/blog/killing-kubernetes

mountainriver 5y ago

This is the face of your company, if you can’t handle the increased load on your blog why should I trust your other systems. I run on k8s and it works really well

Nicksil 5y ago
>This is the face of your company, if you can’t handle the increased load on your blog why should I trust your other systems. I suspect the sort of individual visiting this website and reading the blog will know that their services and blog do not run on the same machines.
- mountainriver 5y ago
  I suspect that when someone’s website is down it looks bad on them
rvz 5y ago
I would have agreed with you if 'their blog AND their main service' also went down; Not just the website. But their main service is still up. 95% of the comments here parade about a hiccup of this service having a blog going down when that is not even their main service but continues to use an unreliable service like GitHub even when that goes down every month and they also don't use K8s either. GitHub (and GitHub Actions) was proven to be very unreliable and the whole service went down multiple times and somehow that gets a pass? Even GitHub's status page returned 500s due to panicking developers DOSing the site. Same with GitHub pages. But a single blog getting 500s but the whole service didn't go down? Nope.
- gbe52 5y ago
  It’s to be expected. Criticism of Kubernetes is taken personally by people who have dedicated themselves to it since it’s in vogue. It is very much showing the cracks in its perceived perfection and this company is far from the only one bucking the trend. We are seeing the long tail of people who don’t realize (or acknowledge) that Kubernetes is already on the other side of the hype cycle. That long tail is currently driving this conversation because commenting on a 500 is the lowest effort imaginable, but they do not speak for the industry. (Source: 24 years in FAANG-scale ops. I remember this cycle for many, many other fetish tools.) Seriously, a Wordpress blog goes down (like that’s never happened under HN load) and all of HN is saying “lol what dogshit if only they used k8s for basically static content, the morons” which tells you a lot about the psychology going on here. A LOT. Otherwise smart engineers just can’t help themselves and redefine “irony” even though it contributes absolutely nothing to the discussion and doesn’t even address the fundamental criticism. We are in a thread that essentially started with “the blog is down, how can I trust the product?” If you can figure out that logic please let me know. That’s basically saying “I don’t understand operations at all,” but here we are, listening to it and its Strong Opinions on a resource allocator and orchestrator. This thread basically confirmed for me that Kubernetes is losing air. I already knew that, but the signal is getting a little bit stronger every month.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    Very well said and agreed.
  - mountainriver 5y ago
    You assume A LOT, personally I’m tired of the “don’t use kubernetes” edgy blog posts that have very little substance to offer and mostly seem like people who haven’t studied distributed systems Kubernetes isn’t perfect but it’s the best we have. Losing air to what?
    - vp8989 5y ago
      The blog post itself explains it's existence: "the following question comes up a lot: “So… do you use Kubernetes?” This has been asked by current and potential customers, by developers interested in our platform, and by candidates interviewing for roles at Ably. We have even had interesting candidates walk away from job offers citing the fact that we don’t use Kubernetes as the reason!" Why do you think this is an "edgy blog post"? This is a piece of Marketing, both recruitment and regular. The implied subtext of the post is: "we don't use Kubernetes but its not because we don't know what we are doing". Separately, what does having studied distributed systems or not have to do with Kubernetes?
foobiekr 5y ago
Auto scaling to cover insane unpredicted load like this is t really representative of anything other than a failure to have cost management in place.
foresto 5y ago
> This is the face of your company, if you can’t handle the increased load on your blog why should I trust your other systems. https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/

remram 5y ago

They are selling a highly-available product. You don't pay for pub/sub, anybody can run that, you pay for reliability and scalability. Their approach to other parts of their infrastructure definitely can and should inform your decision to buy into their product. In addition to insight in their infrastructure practices, this gives you a unique opportunity to look into how they deal with outages, whether they update their status page honestly (and automatically), and how fast they can solve technical issues.