5 ms·

Of course it is not $100, but it is a lot less than the salaries of a team of infrastructure engineers most of the times

by midrus 5y ago

sascha_sl 5y ago
Anecdotally, when my entire team started leaving over the span of 5 months or so after a new CEO attempted to force a move to every service provider he had previously worked with (GCP over AwS, Cloudflare over Akamai, MS Teams over Slack), the non-cloud costs for the platform jumped to about 6 times the teams combined salary when they decided to hire specialist contractors, and even they had a hard time matching the raw performance of that cluster. The typical case of feature teams not being allowed to refactor / reduce technical debt was extreme. Some frontend requests would result in hundreds of backend requests for no good reason. We've always been ignored by management, so cluster was on the verge of coming apart at the (mostly "spending half the cpu time in conntrack") seams for years. So close, it'd sometimes just die for a minute, probably because someone decided to use HTTP way too liberally (network is free, right?). I had a pcap file from a sample of 10 machines, and a 30 second sample was so large, it was impossible to analyze with any real-time tools. No managed Kubernetes could match this out of the box. Adding a mesh to do more directed requests for this to be fixed failed even when we tried it. As far as I know they're still using the platform as is (in maintenance mode, with the contractor assisting) and fired that CEO pretty soon after. Is this a bit of a special case? Sure! Does it still happen a lot, no matter your infrastructure? Count on it.
- midrus 5y ago
  I don't know why would you need contractors, maybe that is what went wrong? A company I worked for years ago moved our custom built platform to AppEngine Flex and it was the best thing we could have done. We embaraced DevOps as it should be done (not with "devops people" but with developers understanding their production environment). No need for contractors. Just the documentations and an easy to use, well tested and battle proof platform. Similar experience many, many years ago with Tsuru, which is a kind of smaller self hosted heroku, although this was a company of about 30 enhineers
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    Scale, in terms of diversity of use-cases rather than requests per second, seems to be a very important factor in choosing custom, semi-custom or ready-made. Kubernetes being "a platform for building platforms" still rings true to me, and it is extremely good at that. One major issue was that the culture wasn't great. SREs without teeth and Platform Engineers that fix the shortcomings of development teams with glue more than anything. As for why contractors, this was the IT division of a big retail business that refused to pay competitive salaries in solidarity with their other workers, but never fired anyone for underperforming (or not performing at all), so the people that actually get work done tend to leave pretty fast. They tried to compensate this with contractors. Some departments were fine, and I loved the team (high standards, created lots of value for teams), but it wasn't a great long term workplace.

Of course it is not $100, but it is a lot less than the salaries of a team of infrastructure engineers most of the times

by midrus 5y ago

Of course it is not $100, but it is a lot less than the salaries of a team of infrastructure engineers most of the times

sascha_sl 5y ago

Anecdotally, when my entire team started leaving over the span of 5 months or so after a new CEO attempted to force a move to every service provider he had previously worked with (GCP over AwS, Cloudflare over Akamai, MS Teams over Slack), the non-cloud costs for the platform jumped to about 6 times the teams combined salary when they decided to hire specialist contractors, and even they had a hard time matching the raw performance of that cluster. The typical case of feature teams not being allowed to refactor / reduce technical debt was extreme. Some frontend requests would result in hundreds of backend requests for no good reason. We've always been ignored by management, so cluster was on the verge of coming apart at the (mostly "spending half the cpu time in conntrack") seams for years. So close, it'd sometimes just die for a minute, probably because someone decided to use HTTP way too liberally (network is free, right?). I had a pcap file from a sample of 10 machines, and a 30 second sample was so large, it was impossible to analyze with any real-time tools. No managed Kubernetes could match this out of the box. Adding a mesh to do more directed requests for this to be fixed failed even when we tried it. As far as I know they're still using the platform as is (in maintenance mode, with the contractor assisting) and fired that CEO pretty soon after. Is this a bit of a special case? Sure! Does it still happen a lot, no matter your infrastructure? Count on it.

midrus 5y ago
I don't know why would you need contractors, maybe that is what went wrong? A company I worked for years ago moved our custom built platform to AppEngine Flex and it was the best thing we could have done. We embaraced DevOps as it should be done (not with "devops people" but with developers understanding their production environment). No need for contractors. Just the documentations and an easy to use, well tested and battle proof platform. Similar experience many, many years ago with Tsuru, which is a kind of smaller self hosted heroku, although this was a company of about 30 enhineers
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  Scale, in terms of diversity of use-cases rather than requests per second, seems to be a very important factor in choosing custom, semi-custom or ready-made. Kubernetes being "a platform for building platforms" still rings true to me, and it is extremely good at that. One major issue was that the culture wasn't great. SREs without teeth and Platform Engineers that fix the shortcomings of development teams with glue more than anything. As for why contractors, this was the IT division of a big retail business that refused to pay competitive salaries in solidarity with their other workers, but never fired anyone for underperforming (or not performing at all), so the people that actually get work done tend to leave pretty fast. They tried to compensate this with contractors. Some departments were fine, and I loved the team (high standards, created lots of value for teams), but it wasn't a great long term workplace.