4 ms·

A lot of super sophisticated engineering goes into solving problems which were created by the engineers themselves and obviously didn't need to be. I remember

A lot of super sophisticated engineering goes into solving problems which were created by the engineers themselves and obviously didn't need to be. I remember hearing that Oscar (a health insurance startup whose main differentiation was having a decent app) ran their own mesos cluster for some reason creating tons of cost and complexity with little to no reason (also operated tons of microservices with startup headcount).

riwsky 4y ago
Context (I work at Oscar): Oscar (no longer a startup; IPO'd last year) ran their own mesos cluster for the same reasons anyone uses k8s today: to help teams deliver in parallel. "Startup headcount" can mean different things to different people, but the company employs hundreds of software engineers, and has been around for over a decade. Kubernetes was not an option when they hit those scaling constraints—but now that k8s has established itself so firmly, Oscar's moving to a managed k8s setup. My experience before Oscar was mainly in a Spring monolith—which, yes, made some microservice overreaches pretty clear in my team's corner of the codebase—but even so, it'd be madness to coordinate all the org's development through e.g. a Jenkins instance and a bunch of ansible.
- dalyons 4y ago
  Agreed - 100s of engineers is an absolutely reasonable level at which to invest in k8s (or a precursor). At that size I would be very concerned if you weren’t, it would be hindering delivery in a modern software org. It really annoys me on HN how people can be so judgmental about something they know so little about.
bsnnkv 4y ago
The larger story that I will be telling through this series of posts is the re-integration of the cast that powers Notado back into a monolith; hopefully it's something you and other readers will find interesting!

4 ms·

A lot of super sophisticated engineering goes into solving problems which were created by the engineers themselves and obviously didn't need to be. I remember

by radicaldreamer 4y ago

riwsky 4y ago
Context (I work at Oscar): Oscar (no longer a startup; IPO'd last year) ran their own mesos cluster for the same reasons anyone uses k8s today: to help teams deliver in parallel. "Startup headcount" can mean different things to different people, but the company employs hundreds of software engineers, and has been around for over a decade. Kubernetes was not an option when they hit those scaling constraints—but now that k8s has established itself so firmly, Oscar's moving to a managed k8s setup. My experience before Oscar was mainly in a Spring monolith—which, yes, made some microservice overreaches pretty clear in my team's corner of the codebase—but even so, it'd be madness to coordinate all the org's development through e.g. a Jenkins instance and a bunch of ansible.
- dalyons 4y ago
  Agreed - 100s of engineers is an absolutely reasonable level at which to invest in k8s (or a precursor). At that size I would be very concerned if you weren’t, it would be hindering delivery in a modern software org. It really annoys me on HN how people can be so judgmental about something they know so little about.
bsnnkv 4y ago
The larger story that I will be telling through this series of posts is the re-integration of the cast that powers Notado back into a monolith; hopefully it's something you and other readers will find interesting!