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My take is that it's exhausting because everything is so damn SLOW. "Back to the 70's with Serverless" is a good read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25
by chubot 5y ago
My take is that it's exhausting because everything is so damn SLOW.
"Back to the 70's with Serverless" is a good read:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25482410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25482410
The cloud basically has the productivity of a mainframe, not a workstation or PC. It's big and clunky.
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I quote it in my own blog post on distributed systems
http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/07/blog-backlog-2.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/07/blog-backlog-2.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27903720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27903720 - Kubernetes is Our Generation's Multics
Basically I want basic shell-like productivity -- not even an IDE, just reasonable iteration times.
At Google I saw the issue where teams would build more and more abstraction and concepts without GUARANTEES. So basically you still have to debug the system with shell. It's a big tower of leaky abstractions. (One example is that I had to turn up a service in every data center at Google, and I did it with shell invoking low level tools, not the abstractions provided)
Compare that with the abstraction of a C compiler or Python, where you rarely have to dip under the hood.
IMO Borg is not a great abstraction, and Kubernetes is even worse. And that doesn't mean I think something better exists right now! We don't have many design data points, and we're still learning from our mistakes.
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Maybe a bigger issue is incoherent software architectures. In particular, disagreements on where authoritative state is, and a lot of incorrect caches that paper over issues. If everything works 99.9% of the time, well multiple those probabilities together, and you end up with a system that requires A LOT of manual work to keep running.
So I think the cloud has to be more principled about state and correctness in order not to be so exhausting.
If you ask engineers working on a big distributed system where the authoritative state in their system is stored, then I think you will get a lot of different answers...