8 ms·

I love Heroku, but am I the only one that thinks their choice of words describing their architecture is a bit pretentious? "...streaming data API which connect

I love Heroku, but am I the only one that thinks their choice of words describing their architecture is a bit pretentious? "...streaming data API which connects the dyno manifold to the routing mesh." Give me a break!

neilmiddleton 14y ago
How else would you describe them?
- dllthomas 14y ago
  "connects the tachyon emitter to the warp nacelles"?
- moe 14y ago
  How about words like "ec2 instances", "erlang processes", "haproxy", "nginx" and similar stuff that was likely involved in the incident? If they're too embarrassed to tell what happened then they should just keep quiet. Don't insult your customers with handwavy bullshit bingo, that just leaves a sour taste in everyones mouth. Just imagine the hilarity when the PHB asks his inhouse engineer to translate this "post-mortem" into layman's terms for him. Most bosses have a bit of humor, but not when it comes to hosting infrastructure.
  - ajasmin 14y ago
    Amazon also has its own fancy vocabulary but instead of cool sounding words like manifold they prefer short acronyms. Things like EC2 RDS AWS S3 EBS EMR IAM AMI SQS SNS SES HPC VPC But Amazon is the reference in cloud hosting and these terms are well understood in the field. Heroku also had to coin some words to describe their architecture. But frankly this outage report is worthy of an Hollywood hacker movie: "A manual garbage collection process which created an unusual record in the data stream" Wow!
    - FireBeyond 14y ago
      Heroku had to coin some words of their own to "mask" the fact that their services are but engineering on top of the AWS stack (which isn't to belittle the effort involved).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
chadmaughan 14y ago
This is classical geek owning up. My first thought was, this is written with two purposes: 1) to prevent the average, non-technical person from understanding it ("Phew, I'm glad these guys are figuring out this stuff and not me - that's why I host with them. I don't even know what a 'dyno manifold' is!") 2) to show management how smart we are and that you still need us ("because who else is going to figure this 'routing mesh' stuff out if you fire those responsible for the outage") A simple "we're sorry and we've given 10 lashes to the engineer performing the manual garbage collection" may have been a better approach. Having said that, I still think Heroku is awesome.
- aiscott 14y ago
  Read up on the heroku architecture. These are the terms used. The manual garbage collection wasn't the problem. An unexpected data structure created by garbage collection wasn't handled in a fault tolerant manner.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    I can guarantee you that the Heroku architecture uses an internal slang for common sysadmin concepts.
  - dsl 14y ago
    All the reading in the world will not change the fact they pick retarded names. Routing mesh? We call that a cluster of load balancers in the real world.
    - aiscott 14y ago
      Well, shucks, wuts a load balancer? Sounds like some kinda doofus trying to keep a pile of shit on their head from tipping over. Jargon is jargon, and in my part of the world, you're what we call a dumb-ass. Or is that too retarded for you? Nah, I expect there ain't a name too retarded for you.
pnathan 14y ago
It might be pretentious. But it serves as (1) sales-speak and (2) provides a frame of metaphor that may well assist the engineers internally.
tptacek 14y ago
Well, there's the problem right there. They're using a dyno manifold to connect to the routing mesh. If they'd just use a flux capacitor, they could use a static manifold instead.
- Cushman 14y ago
  Love it. Times like this I wish there were more of a sketch comedy scene in our community... Not sure whether to go with "The AWS Enterprise" or "Bob the Cloud Mechanic".
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    Reminds me of the good ol' Turbo Encabulator...
gojomo 14y ago
If a future update mentions 'phase modulation' we'll know they're just cribbing excuses from old Star Trek episodes.
- moe 14y ago
  Nothing a directed tachyon beam can't fix.
moe 14y ago
Pretentious is an understatement. This seems to be an unfortunate attempt to apply Corporate Speak to a technical announcement; "Let's see how many paragraphs we can fill with technical-sounding gibberish without actually telling anything..."
erikpukinskis 14y ago
OK, I'll bite. Instead of "dyno", they could possibly use a word like "VM". Except that they're not really virtual machines, nor are they EC2 instances. Read Only Chroot Jails plus Precompiled Application, Libraries, and Environment (ROCJPALEs?) They also have a pretty complex set of support structures that provide connectivity to databases and other resources. Perhaps someone can suggest an existing name for that, but I know of none. Instead of "manifold", perhaps they could use the word "cluster". Except it's not really a cluster, it's a set of distributed clusters. And nodes in a cluster are typically machines. The nodes in the dyno manifold aren't machines, virtual machines, they're ROCJPALEs. You could use the word "array", but again, it's not really an array. It's a multi-layered, geographically distributed structure of co-hosted application jails. "Manifold" seems as good a term as any. "Streaming" seems like a good word. It's specifically relevant to this incident... they describe how the API is not atomic; that each message is built on top of the previous entries, and the data structures are implicit in the stream. That sounds like the definition of "streaming" to me. "API" seems like a widely accepted term. They could've described it as a "protocol", perhaps. But neither seems more jargony than the other. "Data"... well I suppose "streaming API" without the data would work. But it serves to differentiate it from a streaming video protocol. "Mesh" has a very specific meaning. It means that you have a set of nodes that are connected peer-to-peer and that messages travel through the network by hopping from node to node. I'm assuming that their routing layer is organized in this way. "Routing" is also pretty well defined. Requests come in and need to be sent to the machine that can serve responses to it. What would you call that instead of routing? I feel like people who object to this kind of language are the same folks who object to the word "cloud". People don't take the time to understand different strategies to provisioning and application hosting APIs, and then think these words don't mean anything. Yeah, salespeople use the word to hustle the Same Old Shit, but it also actually means something to people like us who are actually building stuff.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  It's "dyno manifold" that's the issue here. However, a quick Google search took me here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos It explains all :-)
- 14y ago

neilmiddleton 14y ago

How else would you describe them?

dllthomas 14y ago
"connects the tachyon emitter to the warp nacelles"?
moe 14y ago
How about words like "ec2 instances", "erlang processes", "haproxy", "nginx" and similar stuff that was likely involved in the incident? If they're too embarrassed to tell what happened then they should just keep quiet. Don't insult your customers with handwavy bullshit bingo, that just leaves a sour taste in everyones mouth. Just imagine the hilarity when the PHB asks his inhouse engineer to translate this "post-mortem" into layman's terms for him. Most bosses have a bit of humor, but not when it comes to hosting infrastructure.
- ajasmin 14y ago
  Amazon also has its own fancy vocabulary but instead of cool sounding words like manifold they prefer short acronyms. Things like EC2 RDS AWS S3 EBS EMR IAM AMI SQS SNS SES HPC VPC But Amazon is the reference in cloud hosting and these terms are well understood in the field. Heroku also had to coin some words to describe their architecture. But frankly this outage report is worthy of an Hollywood hacker movie: "A manual garbage collection process which created an unusual record in the data stream" Wow!
  - FireBeyond 14y ago
    Heroku had to coin some words of their own to "mask" the fact that their services are but engineering on top of the AWS stack (which isn't to belittle the effort involved).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

chadmaughan 14y ago

This is classical geek owning up. My first thought was, this is written with two purposes: 1) to prevent the average, non-technical person from understanding it ("Phew, I'm glad these guys are figuring out this stuff and not me - that's why I host with them. I don't even know what a 'dyno manifold' is!") 2) to show management how smart we are and that you still need us ("because who else is going to figure this 'routing mesh' stuff out if you fire those responsible for the outage") A simple "we're sorry and we've given 10 lashes to the engineer performing the manual garbage collection" may have been a better approach. Having said that, I still think Heroku is awesome.

aiscott 14y ago
Read up on the heroku architecture. These are the terms used. The manual garbage collection wasn't the problem. An unexpected data structure created by garbage collection wasn't handled in a fault tolerant manner.
- rhizome 14y ago
  I can guarantee you that the Heroku architecture uses an internal slang for common sysadmin concepts.
- dsl 14y ago
  All the reading in the world will not change the fact they pick retarded names. Routing mesh? We call that a cluster of load balancers in the real world.
  - aiscott 14y ago
    Well, shucks, wuts a load balancer? Sounds like some kinda doofus trying to keep a pile of shit on their head from tipping over. Jargon is jargon, and in my part of the world, you're what we call a dumb-ass. Or is that too retarded for you? Nah, I expect there ain't a name too retarded for you.

pnathan 14y ago

It might be pretentious. But it serves as (1) sales-speak and (2) provides a frame of metaphor that may well assist the engineers internally.

tptacek 14y ago

Well, there's the problem right there. They're using a dyno manifold to connect to the routing mesh. If they'd just use a flux capacitor, they could use a static manifold instead.

Cushman 14y ago
Love it. Times like this I wish there were more of a sketch comedy scene in our community... Not sure whether to go with "The AWS Enterprise" or "Bob the Cloud Mechanic".
- dllthomas 14y ago
  Reminds me of the good ol' Turbo Encabulator...

gojomo 14y ago

If a future update mentions 'phase modulation' we'll know they're just cribbing excuses from old Star Trek episodes.

moe 14y ago
Nothing a directed tachyon beam can't fix.

moe 14y ago

Pretentious is an understatement. This seems to be an unfortunate attempt to apply Corporate Speak to a technical announcement; "Let's see how many paragraphs we can fill with technical-sounding gibberish without actually telling anything..."

erikpukinskis 14y ago

OK, I'll bite. Instead of "dyno", they could possibly use a word like "VM". Except that they're not really virtual machines, nor are they EC2 instances. Read Only Chroot Jails plus Precompiled Application, Libraries, and Environment (ROCJPALEs?) They also have a pretty complex set of support structures that provide connectivity to databases and other resources. Perhaps someone can suggest an existing name for that, but I know of none. Instead of "manifold", perhaps they could use the word "cluster". Except it's not really a cluster, it's a set of distributed clusters. And nodes in a cluster are typically machines. The nodes in the dyno manifold aren't machines, virtual machines, they're ROCJPALEs. You could use the word "array", but again, it's not really an array. It's a multi-layered, geographically distributed structure of co-hosted application jails. "Manifold" seems as good a term as any. "Streaming" seems like a good word. It's specifically relevant to this incident... they describe how the API is not atomic; that each message is built on top of the previous entries, and the data structures are implicit in the stream. That sounds like the definition of "streaming" to me. "API" seems like a widely accepted term. They could've described it as a "protocol", perhaps. But neither seems more jargony than the other. "Data"... well I suppose "streaming API" without the data would work. But it serves to differentiate it from a streaming video protocol. "Mesh" has a very specific meaning. It means that you have a set of nodes that are connected peer-to-peer and that messages travel through the network by hopping from node to node. I'm assuming that their routing layer is organized in this way. "Routing" is also pretty well defined. Requests come in and need to be sent to the machine that can serve responses to it. What would you call that instead of routing? I feel like people who object to this kind of language are the same folks who object to the word "cloud". People don't take the time to understand different strategies to provisioning and application hosting APIs, and then think these words don't mean anything. Yeah, salespeople use the word to hustle the Same Old Shit, but it also actually means something to people like us who are actually building stuff.

chris_wot 14y ago
It's "dyno manifold" that's the issue here. However, a quick Google search took me here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos It explains all :-)
14y ago