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I would wager that Etsy (and most big cloud-native unicorns) probably has far, far, far superior infra, SW & ops in place than just about any gov agency... and

I would wager that Etsy (and most big cloud-native unicorns) probably has far, far, far superior infra, SW & ops in place than just about any gov agency... and the ones that don't (Zoom) get called out and are forced to fix it.

bink 5y ago
I don't think you'd find many people who'd argue with that. But Etsy's requirements are far different from a lot of DoD systems.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  The requirements may be different, but the end result of the DoD project may well be worse (and not meet all the requirements, but somehow still tick all the boxes).
_bnmd 5y ago
I'm not at all trying to crap on Etsy. I'm just saying these stories about industry leaders that are deploying to prod 100,000 times a day are able to do this because they own applications that can break and it's not really that big a deal. HBO Max, Prime Video, and Netflix pretty consistently just crash every now and again and reboot. Whatever. It comes back up and you can watch your show. Bizarre bugs are at worst minor annoyances. You can't do the same thing with a weapons platform control module. You need to test the hell out of it and know for certain it works, in every possible edge case. Releases to production are heavily gated for a very good reason.
- burrows 5y ago
  You’re just banally pointing out that different applications have different correctness requirements.
- mpyne 5y ago
  DoD applications break all the time though! Yes, even weapons consoles! I served on a submarine whose fire control system would literally crash and reboot if we encountered a situation that was especially frequent for the class of boat I was on. We worked around it, like the users always do, but please do not confuse 'DoD unique requirements' with 'Etsy can't do this'. > You can't do the same thing with a weapons platform control module. You need to test the hell out of it and know for certain it works, in every possible edge case. Releases to production are heavily gated for a very good reason. Do you really think Etsy doesn't run tests? Let me tell you as someone who has run reactor restart procedures a hundred times on a real live submarine, really under the water when the reactor was scrammed: the best way to get good at something is to do it a lot. Whether that's starting up a reactor, or deploying to production.

bink 5y ago

I don't think you'd find many people who'd argue with that. But Etsy's requirements are far different from a lot of DoD systems.

Aeolun 5y ago
The requirements may be different, but the end result of the DoD project may well be worse (and not meet all the requirements, but somehow still tick all the boxes).

_bnmd 5y ago

I'm not at all trying to crap on Etsy. I'm just saying these stories about industry leaders that are deploying to prod 100,000 times a day are able to do this because they own applications that can break and it's not really that big a deal. HBO Max, Prime Video, and Netflix pretty consistently just crash every now and again and reboot. Whatever. It comes back up and you can watch your show. Bizarre bugs are at worst minor annoyances. You can't do the same thing with a weapons platform control module. You need to test the hell out of it and know for certain it works, in every possible edge case. Releases to production are heavily gated for a very good reason.

burrows 5y ago
You’re just banally pointing out that different applications have different correctness requirements.
mpyne 5y ago
DoD applications break all the time though! Yes, even weapons consoles! I served on a submarine whose fire control system would literally crash and reboot if we encountered a situation that was especially frequent for the class of boat I was on. We worked around it, like the users always do, but please do not confuse 'DoD unique requirements' with 'Etsy can't do this'. > You can't do the same thing with a weapons platform control module. You need to test the hell out of it and know for certain it works, in every possible edge case. Releases to production are heavily gated for a very good reason. Do you really think Etsy doesn't run tests? Let me tell you as someone who has run reactor restart procedures a hundred times on a real live submarine, really under the water when the reactor was scrammed: the best way to get good at something is to do it a lot. Whether that's starting up a reactor, or deploying to production.