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"a system not designed to support maintenance is not properly architected" Indeed, but who cares about the system design anymore? How many companies/ teams can

by amtamt 4y ago

"a system not designed to support maintenance is not properly architected" Indeed, but who cares about the system design anymore? How many companies/ teams can claim honestly they even had a person with proper DBA competency, while features over features were added in sprints doing the minimum required to get the feature shipped out at the soonest possible (usually one DB schema change with feature and then one or more to add index due to performance regressions)? DBA competency is only sought when DB schema has fubar'd to an extent that frequent outages are norms or the version used is EOL'd by a few months at least. And by that time the people who "designed" the system are gone, not having documented ever why a given decision was made. And that is how my friend... DB upgrades are hard.

tluyben2 4y ago
Indeed you can get away with a lot now but just paying (a lot) more money; it feels like design is no longer needed as it works. It is how I make some money; people come to me with; ‘we run some trivial online shop made by our team and with 100k uniques a month we pay $15k+ for rds, is that normal?’. So I go in and fix it. Usually it is bad or no design of the db schemas which was countered by picking heavy rds instances. Fun times considering I expect this to be the case in a very high % of all rds deployments (all that I have seen so far, so for me it’s 100%), not only the ones that asked me for help. When asked, the story is the usual ‘people are more expensive than hardware’ blah. It usually takes me around $1000 in fees to cut half the costs so that is blatantly false. Not to mention that the human costs are one off; if someone pays me 20k to bring 15k/mo to 1k/mo (which is typical), it is worth it. Unfortunately that’s not the break everything and go bankrupt way of working I guess! Still I notice that in current harder Financial Times, I do get more requests.

by amtamt 4y ago

tluyben2 4y ago

Indeed you can get away with a lot now but just paying (a lot) more money; it feels like design is no longer needed as it works. It is how I make some money; people come to me with; ‘we run some trivial online shop made by our team and with 100k uniques a month we pay $15k+ for rds, is that normal?’. So I go in and fix it. Usually it is bad or no design of the db schemas which was countered by picking heavy rds instances. Fun times considering I expect this to be the case in a very high % of all rds deployments (all that I have seen so far, so for me it’s 100%), not only the ones that asked me for help. When asked, the story is the usual ‘people are more expensive than hardware’ blah. It usually takes me around $1000 in fees to cut half the costs so that is blatantly false. Not to mention that the human costs are one off; if someone pays me 20k to bring 15k/mo to 1k/mo (which is typical), it is worth it. Unfortunately that’s not the break everything and go bankrupt way of working I guess! Still I notice that in current harder Financial Times, I do get more requests.