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There's the "Plumber Problem[1]" by John Siracusa where you watch a story and see a problem in your specific domain that leads you to mistrust the whole story.

by cduzz 3y ago

There's the "Plumber Problem[1]" by John Siracusa where you watch a story and see a problem in your specific domain that leads you to mistrust the whole story. With the 12 factor nonsense, I see the guidance of "Dump unformatted logs into stdout and make it someone else's problem; they'll hadoop or splunk it and everyone wins." There is no magic splunk that absolve you (the developer) of generating useful data to logs, if you expect useful data out of your logs. You can't reverse "cow -> burger -> sewage" and shouldn't expect some magic hadoop to reverse entropy without a ton of work. So -- I guess the 12 factor app dictum is fine for some trivial "I rewrote twitter in 80 lines of erlang" app, but in my opinion it is a "if we can land a man on the moon we can land a man on the sun" misstatement of complexity in actually getting things done in the real world. [1] https://hypercritical.co/2023/08/18/the-plumber-problem https://hypercritical.co/2023/08/18/the-plumber-problem

morelisp 3y ago
Spoken like someone who has never had to work on a Java application with 22 custom log files, not including stdout, stderr, and two separate syslogs. Yes, if you want useful data from logs you'll need to log useful data, but this is a case where 12 factor is so successful / dominant today I don't think you even know what it's arguing against anymore.
- cduzz 3y ago
  No, writing files is nearly as bad as writing to stdout -- both imply someone else has to parse the output. If the logs matter -- write them to an API that retains log structure by serializing it. If the logs don't matter, then they don't matter, but typically the logs are used for all sorts of analytics processes after the fact. Asking someone else to parse your data is rude.
  - nightpool 3y ago
    Again, "this is a case where 12 factor is so successful / dominant today I don't think you even know what it's arguing against anymore"
    - cduzz 3y ago
      The twelve factor app says: A twelve-factor app never concerns itself with routing or storage of its output stream. It should not attempt to write to or manage logfiles. Instead, each running process writes its event stream, unbuffered, to stdout. During local development, the developer will view this stream in the foreground of their terminal to observe the app’s behavior. That guidance is deeply foolish; I have to assume the rest of the guidance is just as silly for anything but a toy application.
      - lexicality 3y ago
        Where does it say "unformatted"? All it says is that your logs should be sent to stdout. You write your logs in whatever structure you want and have something in the runtime environment (k8s, systemd, file redirection in bash whatever) forward them to the eventual storage location. I don't see the issue.
        cduzz 3y ago
        So -- there's a file, that's created by some something in a container emitting a string of bytes. A file must go through a parsing and serialization phase to be useful to a logging infrastructure. Just because you decorate the contents of that file with { and } and other punctuation doesn't make that file a string of json records, until something's read and verified it. I'm supposed to just load it into memory hoping it's json or avro or whatever? Nope, errors happen; there's a limit to the number of bytes that can be sent from one place to another before the kernel may interrupt it (you're writing an application log and your runtime emits it's own debugging message; they get intermingled because they're both being written to a fifo). Maybe this is fine (usually it's fine) but eventually it isn't fine. Use a logging library, categories your logs, maybe start off with stdout but eventually put on some big person pants and use a logging api and use the stderr/stdout for high cardinality exceptions, not "all my logs"
        jameshart 3y ago
        12 factor does not say ‘don’t use a logging library’ Use a logging library. Configure it to output well formed and categorized log messages to stdout. Let the runtime environment take that stream of data from there.
- jameshart 3y ago
  > this is a case where 12 factor is so successful / dominant today I don't think you even know what it's arguing against anymore Thank you! This is the same thing people miss when they read things like the Agile Manifesto, or about DevOps, or even architectural choices like React's original pitch for one-way data binding - or, dare I say, microservices. You can read these things today, and see flaws - holes in the argument, mistaken assumptions, or misread them as claiming to be superior to things that have been developed since. No - to understand what they are talking about you need to know what was current common knowledge or accepted wisdom in the world when they were written.
jeremyjh 3y ago
The reason people pay outrageous prices for Splunk is you can get some pretty decent burgers out of sewage if you know what you are doing, and from personal experience the results can be totally game-changing if you are stuck with a mishmash of different log formats and have to support a large distributed application.

by cduzz 3y ago

morelisp 3y ago

Spoken like someone who has never had to work on a Java application with 22 custom log files, not including stdout, stderr, and two separate syslogs. Yes, if you want useful data from logs you'll need to log useful data, but this is a case where 12 factor is so successful / dominant today I don't think you even know what it's arguing against anymore.

cduzz 3y ago
No, writing files is nearly as bad as writing to stdout -- both imply someone else has to parse the output. If the logs matter -- write them to an API that retains log structure by serializing it. If the logs don't matter, then they don't matter, but typically the logs are used for all sorts of analytics processes after the fact. Asking someone else to parse your data is rude.
- nightpool 3y ago
  Again, "this is a case where 12 factor is so successful / dominant today I don't think you even know what it's arguing against anymore"
  - cduzz 3y ago
    The twelve factor app says: A twelve-factor app never concerns itself with routing or storage of its output stream. It should not attempt to write to or manage logfiles. Instead, each running process writes its event stream, unbuffered, to stdout. During local development, the developer will view this stream in the foreground of their terminal to observe the app’s behavior. That guidance is deeply foolish; I have to assume the rest of the guidance is just as silly for anything but a toy application.
    - lexicality 3y ago
      Where does it say "unformatted"? All it says is that your logs should be sent to stdout. You write your logs in whatever structure you want and have something in the runtime environment (k8s, systemd, file redirection in bash whatever) forward them to the eventual storage location. I don't see the issue.
      - cduzz 3y ago
        So -- there's a file, that's created by some something in a container emitting a string of bytes. A file must go through a parsing and serialization phase to be useful to a logging infrastructure. Just because you decorate the contents of that file with { and } and other punctuation doesn't make that file a string of json records, until something's read and verified it. I'm supposed to just load it into memory hoping it's json or avro or whatever? Nope, errors happen; there's a limit to the number of bytes that can be sent from one place to another before the kernel may interrupt it (you're writing an application log and your runtime emits it's own debugging message; they get intermingled because they're both being written to a fifo). Maybe this is fine (usually it's fine) but eventually it isn't fine. Use a logging library, categories your logs, maybe start off with stdout but eventually put on some big person pants and use a logging api and use the stderr/stdout for high cardinality exceptions, not "all my logs"
        jameshart 3y ago
        12 factor does not say ‘don’t use a logging library’ Use a logging library. Configure it to output well formed and categorized log messages to stdout. Let the runtime environment take that stream of data from there.
jameshart 3y ago
> this is a case where 12 factor is so successful / dominant today I don't think you even know what it's arguing against anymore Thank you! This is the same thing people miss when they read things like the Agile Manifesto, or about DevOps, or even architectural choices like React's original pitch for one-way data binding - or, dare I say, microservices. You can read these things today, and see flaws - holes in the argument, mistaken assumptions, or misread them as claiming to be superior to things that have been developed since. No - to understand what they are talking about you need to know what was current common knowledge or accepted wisdom in the world when they were written.

jeremyjh 3y ago

The reason people pay outrageous prices for Splunk is you can get some pretty decent burgers out of sewage if you know what you are doing, and from personal experience the results can be totally game-changing if you are stuck with a mishmash of different log formats and have to support a large distributed application.