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You make it sound as though there’s some obscene sprawl of interrelated tooling, barely held together with shell scripts, and only OP knows how it all works. N

You make it sound as though there’s some obscene sprawl of interrelated tooling, barely held together with shell scripts, and only OP knows how it all works. Nothing described is that weird, nor should it have difficulty horizontally scaling when and if the time comes - add another node, and front it with a load balancer. The problem is that DevOps has shifted so heavily to Dev that “I’m running services natively on a Linux box” is somehow seen as Byzantine and arcane. > when you use shell scripts for deploys… can’t as easily prove things to auditors as you can with a CI/CD system What do you think a CI/CD system is running? Also, if /var/log/auth.log isn’t enough, there are other auditing systems available that could make this more granular. > industry compliance standards IME, these are a joke, and auditors routinely miss a dizzying amount of glaring problems, because they don’t look beyond records that humans generated. > every hour you spend upgrading a database or patching an OS… Patching the OS should be automated. If it isn’t, that’s on you. Ansible isn’t hard to learn. As to the database, if you can’t read docs (both MySQL and Postgres have excellent documentation on this procedure) and perform them as written, frankly you shouldn’t be dealing with RDS either. It’s not like AWS docs aren’t confusing, spread over a million pages, and sometimes contradictory. Pardon the seething undertone, but as an ops-heavy SRE/DBRE, I’m very tired of seeing people lambast ops as being somehow beneath modern practices, not worthy of their time, or worse, not cost-effective. A well-written app can absolutely run just fine on a tiny server, and does not need the miasma of shit that is cloud-native. Computers are blindingly fast. Stop demanding infinitely-scaling vCPUs because optimization is hard. Stop pretending that your time is more valuable than minutiae like “my ORM is producing garbage queries resulting in hideous latency because I don’t understand SQL or schema design.”

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dangus 3y ago
Try to see the forest for the trees here: ask yourself how does the business make money? If I throw my application on some PaaS thing and put the database on RDS, let’s say I can hire 5 developers who know almost nothing about infrastructure to develop and deploy the application. Each developer working on the application delivers valuable business logic. Let’s say each developer makes $200,000 total compensation and they bring in $500,000 in revenue. This setup makes me $1,500,000 in operating income per year. Now you’re saying I should find someone who knows enough about infrastructure architecture who database administration and all the other bare metal Linux fundamental topics to manage it in house rather than paying AWS all this wasteful money. So now I have 4 developers and 1 Ops/DBA person. My AWS bill was eliminated, saving $100,000 thanks to the infrastructure and database expert doing a wonderful job cost optimizing. But now my 4 developers have one less person to deliver features that motivate customers to sign deals with us, so now we’re making $1,300,000 operating income. (Losing $300k from the loss of a developer and gaining $100k back from cost savings. Obviously this is a made up scenario in my favor but that’s basically how it works. Businesses shopping for employees can’t get every skill they want in a job description. One of the most important parts of business strategy is making trade-offs. This scenario reminds me of a landlord that I had who fixed a simple problem with my dishwasher by just replacing it with a new one. They didn’t give a shit that a little bit of extra knowledge and a spare part would have fixed it for no exaggeration 100x lower cost, because resolving the problem quickly with no risk was worth more to them. In any event, I was giving that landlord many times the cost of that dishwasher every month. The compliance certifications are kind of like the real estate agent that has a big car payment on their Mercedes so that they can sell more expensive houses to wealthier clients. Yes, we all know that buying a Mercedes isn’t the most cost effective way to get from point A to B, but you can’t sell mansions if you show up in a Kia Rio.
- sgarland 3y ago
  So hire an SRE. You’re gonna have garbage / non-existent CI/CD, IaC, and all the other stuff that makes expansion (and audits, apparently) easier. Bonus, any decent SRE should also be able to code. I don’t think you _need_ a DBA/DBRE initially, but I do think if you’re in the range of hiring five devs, one of them should know about infrastructure.
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dangus 3y ago

Try to see the forest for the trees here: ask yourself how does the business make money? If I throw my application on some PaaS thing and put the database on RDS, let’s say I can hire 5 developers who know almost nothing about infrastructure to develop and deploy the application. Each developer working on the application delivers valuable business logic. Let’s say each developer makes $200,000 total compensation and they bring in $500,000 in revenue. This setup makes me $1,500,000 in operating income per year. Now you’re saying I should find someone who knows enough about infrastructure architecture who database administration and all the other bare metal Linux fundamental topics to manage it in house rather than paying AWS all this wasteful money. So now I have 4 developers and 1 Ops/DBA person. My AWS bill was eliminated, saving $100,000 thanks to the infrastructure and database expert doing a wonderful job cost optimizing. But now my 4 developers have one less person to deliver features that motivate customers to sign deals with us, so now we’re making $1,300,000 operating income. (Losing $300k from the loss of a developer and gaining $100k back from cost savings. Obviously this is a made up scenario in my favor but that’s basically how it works. Businesses shopping for employees can’t get every skill they want in a job description. One of the most important parts of business strategy is making trade-offs. This scenario reminds me of a landlord that I had who fixed a simple problem with my dishwasher by just replacing it with a new one. They didn’t give a shit that a little bit of extra knowledge and a spare part would have fixed it for no exaggeration 100x lower cost, because resolving the problem quickly with no risk was worth more to them. In any event, I was giving that landlord many times the cost of that dishwasher every month. The compliance certifications are kind of like the real estate agent that has a big car payment on their Mercedes so that they can sell more expensive houses to wealthier clients. Yes, we all know that buying a Mercedes isn’t the most cost effective way to get from point A to B, but you can’t sell mansions if you show up in a Kia Rio.

sgarland 3y ago
So hire an SRE. You’re gonna have garbage / non-existent CI/CD, IaC, and all the other stuff that makes expansion (and audits, apparently) easier. Bonus, any decent SRE should also be able to code. I don’t think you _need_ a DBA/DBRE initially, but I do think if you’re in the range of hiring five devs, one of them should know about infrastructure.
- deleted 3y ago
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