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Company forgets why they exist after 11-week migration to Kubernetes (2020)
- tjpnz 3y ago>The CEO now seeks help from Phutar Afrayughum, a psychic and extrasensory perception specialist who allegedly helped Google increase their marketshare in the messaging app market, and was also involved in developing the Material Design framework. Almost lost my coffee.
- rob74 3y agoMust be at least better than the guy that helped them succeed in the social network market...
- ithkuil 3y agoVic Gundotra?
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoDenpok? I swear it reads like a skit from the Silicon Valley satire TV show. I thought Mike Judge was exaggerating but now I see he's just imitating the SV reality. I think execs and managers at Google are just high on their own farts at this point.
- fileeditview 3y agoI was also thinking of the show.. it was a great one.. need to rewatch in a few months. Also I always remember the Hotdog classification app when some CEO says AI these days :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- freetonik 3y agoDenpok was exactly my inspiration and a kind of an easter egg, kudos for noticing it!
- impish9208 3y ago“Very perceptive, Chala!”
- artimis 3y ago> When the process was seemingly complete, nobody at the company could remember the purpose of their product anymore. This is nonsense! Such migration could not be even "seemingly" completed in 11 weeks, rather 11 years. /s
- lozenge 3y agoThey still have one "legacy" resource through which all data flows.
- rob74 3y ago(2020)
- lelag 3y agoIn real life, an 11-week migration to K8s would have been recognized as a great success...
- raverbashing 3y agoWould be 11-months where they would be now "cloud native" or something Of course running their DB was a bit challenging as they forgot to set proper K8S storage configs and saw their data disappear after their pod was suddenly migrated
- stn_za 3y agoPretty lame. If you already use docker, it shouldn't take nearly that long. If you don't, then kube isn't the problem for any migration similar
- blowski 3y ago"Should" is perhaps disguising the fact that these projects normally do take a lot longer than 11 weeks. I know of multiple tech companies that are years into an unfinished k8s migration. Everyone on the project will have a ton of good reasons why that project was uniquely challenged and therefore took so long.
- stn_za 3y agoYeah, when you have inept people. Hackernews however is a frounder, frontend scene first site. So I'd imagine that is what normal feels like to most of you.
- masterinept 3y agoEither the entire IT sector is inept in general or your bar is way too high. I've not seen a single K8s migration project in an actual, business running company going in under 11 weeks
- snapcaster 3y ago
- geraldwhen 3y agoBy the time my team finishes the Kubernetes migration, it will be time to migrate to the next tool. This industry sucks.
- aryehof 3y agoApril Fools joke accidentally released a month early?
- gostsamo 3y agoMeaning restored: selling yak jumpers from finely shaved and gathered yak wool.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoOne thing I like about AI is that at least we don't hear about Kubernetes and blockchain that much anymore. AI has now its NFT moment so hopefully will be over soon.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoI hear paperclips are new great thing to follow. Have you considered creating paperclips? Just order some metal wire then Cut an 8-10″ piece. Use pliers to bend in desired shape.
- techwiz137 3y agoSo the article is satire and the company non-existant, but what is it alluring to exactly. What is it trying to say?
- hennell 3y agoPeople are too obsessed with tech stacks and chasing the best framework they forget the thing they're actually trying to build.
- Moto7451 3y agoFor my experience, this article is one of the scenes in my personal version of This is Spinal Tap. Three times I’ve been involved in a Kubernetes (or competitor) migration where the plot gets lost along the way. At my current company we have canceled the product roadmap to focus on year three of the migration and we likely have at least another year to go. No one can tell me why our current ECS based deployments are a problem. No one bothered to train people on appropriate uses of Kafka before double abstracting it into a framework. But hey, the board was promised a cost savings and globally available product from this effort so at least the executive that promised it all has two more years to figure out how to make good on it. Best of all is we have a new CTO and he has openly questioned why we don’t just use Kubernetes itself instead of the couple of Hashicorp products we’ve settled on. Maybe I’ll get to do this a fourth time once we finish the current migration.
- beAbU 3y ago> we have canceled the product roadmap to focus on year three of the migration This is the most surreal thing I've read on here. You went from a company that delivers some product, to a company that delivers a migration. You sure your company is not the one in the OP? ;)
- secondcoming 3y ago> No one can tell me why our current ECS based deployments are a problem. The problem is it's not Kubernetes. I am in the exact same situation. New manager arrives and wants to move to Kubernetes, just because.
- taspeotis 3y agoI know it’s a joke but if you did a post-mortem the reason for failure would probably be: > Many at the company thought it's a good chance to upgrade software dependencies and libraries as well. A large part of a PostgreSQL database running on a single machine could as well be transformed into a distributed KV storage, leveraging the tremendous power of flexibility of AWS. Stick to the scope.
- nailer 3y agoStick to the company’s scope too. If your business isn’t selling cloud infrastructure, use an off the shelf cloud provider. Especially don’t use k8s if you’re already paying for a cloud provider.
- weinzierl 3y agoThis sounds so trivial and common sense but is more often violated than not.
- threeseed 3y agoThis is bad advice. 1) Be clear about your requirements, understand your target platform and take the time to estimate costs. Blindly picking an off the shelf cloud provider can ruin you if you suddenly get hit with unexpected costs e.g. ingress/egress. 2) Kubernetes is often the sensible way to go so long as you're using a managed platform e.g EKS. As it allows you to build out your platform in a scalable, highly-available and geo-distributed way without needlessly tying yourself to any one cloud.
- fragmede 3y ago> needlessly tying yourself to any one cloud. Because aaaany day now, AWS is going to turn around and jack up prices on EC2 instances because they can. Humans are terrible at risk analysis. There are good reasons to arbitrage between clouds, but business continuity isn't one of them.
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- flanked-evergl 3y agoI have been fighting day and night for four months to move 500000 blobs to managed blob storage from self-hosted MinIO, and of that actual productive work that was not about politics or bureaucracy is less than 1 week, so an 11-week migration to K8S sounds like a great success.
- nottorp 3y agoThere's more funny on that blog. I particularly liked: https://www.theolognion.com/p/dev-builds-perfect-note-taking-system-which-only-stores-info-about-building-note-taking-systems https://www.theolognion.com/p/dev-builds-perfect-note-taking... Edit: oh, and how about this one: https://www.theolognion.com/p/ai-solves-all-political-economic-and-medical-problems-after-parsing-hacker-news-comments https://www.theolognion.com/p/ai-solves-all-political-econom...
- brodo 3y agoSome of these hit very close to home...
- phh 3y agoThanks, that motivated me to add their rss ( https://www.theolognion.com/feed https://www.theolognion.com/feed so people can have 2 clicks less to do)
- 1oooqooq 3y agoWow. since when browsers quit rendering RSS?!?! also, their homepage does not work well. i can read all the articles but i can't dismiss their "gimme your email" homepage popup. So i guess i'm not adding this site to my list of blogs i read often.
- mycatislenin 3y agoProud and happy user of Vivaldi, with an integrated RSS reader
- kunley 3y agoThis one is even better: "Company accidentally increased dev productivity 3x by laying off 20% of middle management" https://www.theolognion.com/p/company-accidentally-increased-dev-productivity-3x-by-laying-off-20-of-middle-management https://www.theolognion.com/p/company-accidentally-increased...
- larschdk 3y agoThat's not even satire!
- Perepiska 3y agoIt looks like you haven't read the text on the link: "The Board of Directors plans to hire several Agile Analyticistis, Working Culture Ambassador Researchers, Import-Export-Integrator-Optimizer Masters and Kanban Disruptors in order to help them investigate the unexpected outcome."
- darkwater 3y agoAt $dayjob we are in the middle of such a migration, started 2 years ago and still less than 30% complete. Now, the guys that were most vocals about "we must go Kubernetes, kill the Monolith" etc are already playing with LLMs, and forgot about Kubernetes. Some people just love proves of concept and the shiny next thing. I guess that role is useful, in its own way.
- gtirloni 3y agoScope creep will kill any project, Kubernetes or not.
- darkwater 3y agoNo. This (and many others) are just cases of "if you can't walk, don't try to run".
- gtirloni 3y agoYou could say most people can run if they master walking first. The problem is that companies take a Java 5 monolith without any CI/CD and want to take rewriting AND re-platforming AND business changes all at once in a giant project. Then they pick the technology that is anyone might be blaming and run with that excuse so it's nobody's fault.
- kunley 3y agoUseful for burning company's money, perhaps? PS. What you describe seems to be not even about PoC (the rule about PoC is that it should work at all), but about following the herd and inventing a setup to appear busy. But that'd be also not very good environment to stay at, as an employee..
- thinkingemote 3y agoJob satisfaction through new shiny tech things. It's why many brilliant minds appear to be quite content working for unethical tech giants, advertising or surveillance companies. The reason why the company exists doesn't matter to them. What the company actually does outside of their computer doesn't matter to them. The technology and their freedom to pursue the New does. Companies love the production and enthusiasm they provide and pay well for it. (Usually these types of developers do have a conscience and it's often taken up, used and displayed in worthwhile and benevolent corporate friendly style social activism)
- underscoring 3y agoYou guys are making progress with Kubes?
- vbezhenar 3y ago0. Learn technologies first, if they are complex. Try on small not significant services first. 1. Do one thing at a time. 2. Start simple. I migrated our services to Kubernetes without any issues. But it took two years of learning and trying, migrating small services. I tried several approaches before coming to the most suitable and that’s not something you would find in the Internet. I’m using gitops without automation, I just kubectl apply -k what I need, because I decided back at a time, that flux was unnecessarily complex to start with. Now I have few dozens of services and good understanding of things, I’m thinking about introducing flux.
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- Draiken 3y agoI could replace "Kubernetes" with GraphQL/React/Next in my world. All, of course, to migrate a perfectly functioning app (mostly CRUD) and doesn't need any of the tradeoffs given by GraphQL or an interactive frontend. The longer I am in this industry the more I see people in charge have no idea of what they're doing.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoPeople are never rewarded for keeping things running. They are rewarded for change, as long as they can at least pretend it is (or will be) paying off.
- Draiken 3y agoDefinitely agree. But it's not only about keeping things running though. People want to fix issues by rewriting everything because it's gonna look good on their resumé and it's "easier". You don't have to deal with the old stuff. It saddens me because improving code (especially one that changes often) is absolutely crucial, but we seem to never bite the bullet and improve the existing code, instead opting to rewrite the entire world in never-ending projects. After a company gets burned by one of these rewrites, they often become averse to any refactoring and the few legitimate rewrites that need to happen. We spend all our influence capital on useless projects and then wonder why our industry is so often viewed as unprofessional and amateurish.
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago> It saddens me because improving code (especially one that changes often) is absolutely crucial It has burned me and it has burned others. Just doing cosmetic refactorings alone me and others I have observed caused new bugs. Let alone doing architectural or other "deeper" refactorings. At this point I pretty much refuse touching anything not related to my ticket, everything else is a risk to my reputation. When I see junior developers take on unrelated refactorings, I let them fly too close to the sun, they will learn through the pain. Last thing I did a few years ago was changing a weird boolean field that could be null. I thought it would be smarter to default it to false, client team told me it was fine. We then found out in production that very old clients actually had different logic based on true, false AND null. I got pinged in my free time, it ruined the date I was on and thus at least the whole day. In a perfect world you have CDC and all the testing in the world, but in reality you just don‘t.
- itronitron 3y agoI honestly can't tell whether the photographs on that blog are stock photos or produced specifically for their corresponding article. https://www.theolognion.com/p/dev-realizes-he-is-still-in-the-interview-stage-after-2-years-of-work https://www.theolognion.com/p/dev-realizes-he-is-still-in-th...
- freetonik 3y agoThey are all from Unsplash.com :) Source: I'm the author of The Olognion
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- Traubenfuchs 3y agoOur devops/prod team is constantly migrating, upgrading and changing stuff. At this point I am convinced devops is a job security scam, all the way up to the director in charge, with many of the engineers in between actually believing they are doing something useful and happy to be learning $in_demand_skill. Just like "cloud" and "cloud native" altogether. Costs more, requires more engineers to be kept running and is just as incomprehensible, customized and brittle as good old sh scripts on bare metal.
- neurostimulant 3y agoEh, programming is also following the same cycle with cool new programming languages and frameworks introduced every 5-10 years.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoYou can airdrop a spring developer from 15 years ago into any modern Java shop using spring boot with instant startup thanks to aoc and all he has to do is to learn the basics of docker, some nosql crap and aws services like SNS/SQS, which should be easily possible within a week and some help from ChatGPT.
- neurostimulant 3y agoBackend stuff (especially java/enterprisy stuff) moves slower. Frontend stuff however... Drop a jquery dev from 15 years ago into modern react/typescript shop and watch their blood pressure steadily rise every day.
- arun-mani-j 3y agoThanks, it took me sometime to get that it is a parody/joke :D I liked this one - Dev realizes he is still in the interview stage after 2 years of work [https://www.theolognion.com/p/dev-realizes-he-is-still-in-the-interview-stage-after-2-years-of-work https://www.theolognion.com/p/dev-realizes-he-is-still-in-th...] Especially the conclusion: > Pawri's hope is that the offer will come before his retirement date.
- belter 3y agoThis reminds me of real job post, I saw once for a Startup. No details on the actual product or company purpose. They were looking for a Kubernetes administrator. The main requirement, besides experience with Linux, was to write a long technical report on why Kubernetes was the right solution.
- mattjaynes 3y agoIt's never been easier or cheaper to run systems. And yet, engineers would rather deliver a pizza by organizing an expedition team, climbing Mount Everest, taking a picture of the pizza at the summit, then fly the pizza back home, rent a Lamborghini and drive the Mongolian rally race, then 18 months later deliver said pizza. While they do that, just get on a cheap scooter and drive it down the street. Win.
- flanked-evergl 3y agoI have never worked anywhere where engineers injected complexity comparable to that injected by management.
- inductive_magic 3y agoI have. There are multiple types of engineer which insist on migrating "legacy" (stable) systems to "state of the art" (cooler, modern, en vogue) tech. You'd be surprised how many companies that maintained <20 vms migrated to k8s. The motivations include ordering a chaotic status quo, premature optimisation, young blood wanting to prove themselves, boredom, "its new so it must be better", "i want to try this" [...], you get the idea.
- lurking15 3y agoI hear loud-mouthed people at work talking about introducing "durable execution" when there's so many other fish to fry and the company can't achieve those well already.
- lobocinza 3y agoI have.
- dsign 3y agoOnly 11 weeks? Are these guys available for an acqui-hire? At my $dayjob, we have been working 22 months in a similar project.
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- keernan 3y agoI was a young trial lawyer back in 1977 working for a firm that billed by the hour. We kept track of what work we did on cases on sheets of paper with pull-off strips that clerks would take from completed sheets and paste onto a board inside each paper folder for a case. In 1979 I bought a radio-shack Tandy I. Soon I was deep into playing at home with Foxbase, a DOS based database program (later known as FoxPro and bought by MSft in the early 1990s). In 1981 I opened my own firm. Back then the newest advance in office production was the fax machine and electric typewriters that had one line screens; memory; and tiny disks that could hold forms. Businesses still did not use personal computers. My law firm soon had ~10 attorneys and another 12 support staff. I bought Compaq computers fir every secretary. I spent much of my time writing a time and billing program to replace the manual paste-strips. Then I learned how - and installed - a network. No other firm I knew of had a computer. We had 10+ for the support staff plus 4-5 "portable" Compaqs for attorneys to review the bills before they were sent to clients. Meanwhile I was running the business into the ground. We had world-class tech before anyone else had even one computer, but I wasn't focused on lawyering or smoozing the business clients. Instead I was locked up behind closed doors programming. I finally closed the firm in 1994. But they sure were exciting times - soon every from had computers for word processing but commercial billing programs didn't exist. For a period of maybe 24 months, every lawyer from other firms I worked with wanted my billing program. But I was too focused on having fun programming while drowning trying to keep up with my case load. My law practice was the perfect lab from my programs. Too bad my programming ruined my business. Edit: corrected horrible number of typos.
- ashildr 3y agoThat pull-off system sounds extremely interesting, was it a common way of time tracking back then? Do you have any pictures by accident?
- keernan 3y agoSadly, I do not have pictures. I only worked for that one firm before the age of computers, and therefore I can't say for sure what other firms did for timekeeping. But the fact the pull-off adhesive strips were sold commercially by office supply companies back then tells me they were widely used. If I get a chance (and remember), I'll see if I can find pictures online.
- readthenotes1 3y agoOne of Brook's essays (the guy who gave us '9 women can't make a baby in one month') has the moral of 'given the choice, software developers would rather build the tool to build the tool to solve the problem rather than just solving the problem'
- wlonkly 3y agoYou can tell this one is satire because the Kubernetes migration only took 11 weeks.