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I think that this is the problem. No one understands what is going on. So instead of trying to find the root cause of anything, they add another tool or another
by Ma8ee 5y ago
I think that this is the problem. No one understands what is going on. So instead of trying to find the root cause of anything, they add another tool or another layer. And then we have 45 micro services running on a lot of expensive hardware (somewhere) doing less and with worse performance than what we used to do 15 years ago in a monolith on a single server.
- mschuster91 5y ago> And then we have 45 micro services running on a lot of expensive hardware (somewhere) doing less and with worse performance than what we used to do 15 years ago in a monolith on a single server. And yet, the "expensive" hardware of now is cheaper than your single server from over a decade if you look at the whole picture... a lot of development trends are based on capitalism incentives: - Outsourcing stuff like server hardware management to AWS is 1-3 FTEs less on your payroll, plus saving of datacenter related cost (climate control, UPS maintenance, Internet uplink, redundant equipment/spare parts) - "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers and CI pipelines until it works Good Enough" is yet another saving of specialized expert staff (SysOp / SRE) - "microservices" got popular because it's easier to onboard developers and treat them like disposable cogs if your work packages can be really small, with clearly defined interfaces
- bluedino 5y ago> "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers I saw a script written by a devops employee where they zeroed out all the partitions when they added a new web server.
- Bellyache5 5y agoIf this web server was running on AWS EC2 with attached EBS volumes then zeroing out a new partition was actually AWS' recommended practice to initialize the disk for performance reasons. EBS no longer requires this. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-initialize.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-init...
- bluedino 5y agoThese were just plain-jane docker images, but it's interesting that this could be the source of it.
- hnlmorg 5y ago> "DevOps" aka "let people who have never heard of Unix cobble together Docker containers and CI pipelines until it works Good Enough" is yet another saving of specialized expert staff (SysOp / SRE) There's plenty of us old UNIX greybeards working in DevOps. And frankly in most fields of IT you're going to see your fair share of younger engineers because that's literally how life works: people get old and retire while younger people look for work. Moaning that kids don't know the tech they don't need to know is a little like trying to piss in the wind: you might get some short term relief but ultimately you're only going to soil yourself. edit: It's also funny that you moan about AWS as outsourcing while saying "people don't remember Unix" yet Unix itself comes from a heritage of time sharing services which are the same basic principles of cloud computing. If you're old enough you'll eventually see all trends in computing repeat themselves.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoI know people who were running commercial sites from an average PC in a spare bedroom over ADSL in the early 2000s. A bit graphic design, a bit of PHP, a bit of email management, MySQL, a "pay now" page imported from a payment provider, and they were making good money for a minimal startup cost. All the code written by one or two people, often some external help with the graphics, and sometimes the business concept was someone else's idea. Obviously the services weren't scalable, they didn't have hundreds of millions of users, and they didn't operate globally. But they didn't need to. And that's still true of many startups today. A few of them sold up for large sums.
- pjmlp 5y agoI agree with everything, just wanted to nitpick that microservices have been a thing at enterprise level since Sun RPC. The "microservice" name just seems to be the modern way to make all forms of distributed RPC hipster fashionable.
- Ma8ee 5y agoDistributed systems is certainly not new. But the whole notion that we need to use them for absolutely everything is new.
- Pamar 5y agoYeah, and outsourcing sw development to India is a great idea, until ...
- Ma8ee 5y agoWe are currently paying quite much more than I'm used to, and our throughput is a small fraction. I don't mind managed servers, it just that we didn't use to need so much of it. Unix isn't that hard. And Docker containers and CI/CD pipelines open other cans of worms, and since no one seems to understand what is going on under the surface (because no one wants to touch Unix), they just add more monitoring tools and scaling. But we suddenly need five times as many developers because 80% of the code is just dealing with interfaces and communication and handling race conditions and recovering from failed network calls.