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HA! GOOD! (FD: I made a submission recently that was very pro GCP... I promise I'm not a shill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41648371 https://news.ycom

by dijit 2y ago

HA! GOOD! (FD: I made a submission recently that was very pro GCP... I promise I'm not a shill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41648371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41648371). I used to run Windows Server for The Division and Division 2 gameservers and honestly we got completely fucked by this. I made a slide once that showcased the high cost of licensing on GCP compared to bare-metal, and BYOL (bring-your-own-license) was explicitly forbidden by Microsoft for cloud. Here's the slides: https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/devfest2019-msv.pdf https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/devfest2019-msv.pdf slide 35 is what you're after. Nobody sane runs Windows on the server, and Ubisoft has now completed the multi-year arduous task of porting Snowdrop to Linux (ironically, largely because of Stadia- another Google thing). As has Sharkmob (my former employer) and RENNSPORT (my current employer). Though it cost us 6 months of work, and is thus far my most controversial decision as CTO. To be completely clear here: our infrastructure spend was millions of dollars, 30% of that was direct to Microsoft, a fee that would not have existed had we used Azure.

jeffwask 2y ago
Similar experience but with RDS at a non-profit, we were running everything on AWS with SQL Server BYOL and when they yanked support for BYOL on AWS, we were left scrambling. This was in 2017-2018 and they kept getting away with it, from giving free non-prod licenses only on Azure to expanding the terrible licensing to other products. No one checked them on it and here we are...
YokoZar 2y ago
Out of complete curiosity, did you ever attempt to run the server software in Wine? If it happens to work well in the server use case it might be very interesting.
- dijit 2y ago
  Yes, I tried- I was (and, am) a bit of a FOSS zealot, though a slightly more pragmatic one. We made heavy use of performance features inside Windows such as IO Completion Ports, and we probed Windows itself for information about our processes to make something similar to a prometheus exporter. Because we leaned heavily into the ecosystem, with usage of named pipes for logging and crash collection; Wine simply couldn't do those things, and of course predictable performance was extremely important. (skipped frames cost avatar lives!) Wine was not working for the gameserver, it wasn't even working for the comparatively simple backend service executables- because we had the same philosophy, sadly.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CursedSilicon 2y ago
"AWS experts cost way more than old-school sysadmins" Where even is still hiring "old-school sysadmins" ? I've got bucketloads of experience in that. I grew up setting up servers and systems for friends in a "pre-AWS" world and now it seems everything is cloud and kubernetes etc and it all just feels overly complex for the sake of it
- dijit 2y ago
  I think you’re responding to my blog article. Not to derail the thread here, but largely it’s hard to know if people are using on-prem, colo, etc or not because theres no brand name term: it’s just “knowledge”. So doesn't sit as nicely on a JD.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Nobody. Everyone is now looking for xOps, where "x" is the latest acronym. Yesterday it was MLOps and AIOps, not sure about today.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    Those of us who moved on and accepted a degree of madness call ourselves SRE. It's supposed to be Site Reliability Engineering... but find it's just as well to replace the 's' with 'software'... or 'shit', if we're honest. We do sysadmin but Ops, too. Central point for all organizational baggage. Everyone outsources their operational garbage, had to make a catch-all role. Developers don't have release management skills? Security incident broke all your compiled software? Sold an impossible arrangement? Doesn't matter, SRE will do anything to keep the business running despite the business!
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  HPC and Mainframe basically, but they both have quirks and extra bits required for the role due to the unique nature of the environments that never really existed in traditional old school web based sysadmin work from the 90s and 2000s, and sometimes the title isn't Sysadmin. So basically you aren't walking into one of those roles cause you admin'd a bunch of Apache servers back in the day or anything like that. Point being, there is still a market for "pets above cattle" style infra work. It is just in increasingly specialized and technically challenging areas.

by dijit 2y ago

jeffwask 2y ago

Similar experience but with RDS at a non-profit, we were running everything on AWS with SQL Server BYOL and when they yanked support for BYOL on AWS, we were left scrambling. This was in 2017-2018 and they kept getting away with it, from giving free non-prod licenses only on Azure to expanding the terrible licensing to other products. No one checked them on it and here we are...

YokoZar 2y ago

Out of complete curiosity, did you ever attempt to run the server software in Wine? If it happens to work well in the server use case it might be very interesting.

dijit 2y ago
Yes, I tried- I was (and, am) a bit of a FOSS zealot, though a slightly more pragmatic one. We made heavy use of performance features inside Windows such as IO Completion Ports, and we probed Windows itself for information about our processes to make something similar to a prometheus exporter. Because we leaned heavily into the ecosystem, with usage of named pipes for logging and crash collection; Wine simply couldn't do those things, and of course predictable performance was extremely important. (skipped frames cost avatar lives!) Wine was not working for the gameserver, it wasn't even working for the comparatively simple backend service executables- because we had the same philosophy, sadly.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

CursedSilicon 2y ago

"AWS experts cost way more than old-school sysadmins" Where even is still hiring "old-school sysadmins" ? I've got bucketloads of experience in that. I grew up setting up servers and systems for friends in a "pre-AWS" world and now it seems everything is cloud and kubernetes etc and it all just feels overly complex for the sake of it

dijit 2y ago
I think you’re responding to my blog article. Not to derail the thread here, but largely it’s hard to know if people are using on-prem, colo, etc or not because theres no brand name term: it’s just “knowledge”. So doesn't sit as nicely on a JD.
surfingdino 2y ago
Nobody. Everyone is now looking for xOps, where "x" is the latest acronym. Yesterday it was MLOps and AIOps, not sure about today.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  Those of us who moved on and accepted a degree of madness call ourselves SRE. It's supposed to be Site Reliability Engineering... but find it's just as well to replace the 's' with 'software'... or 'shit', if we're honest. We do sysadmin but Ops, too. Central point for all organizational baggage. Everyone outsources their operational garbage, had to make a catch-all role. Developers don't have release management skills? Security incident broke all your compiled software? Sold an impossible arrangement? Doesn't matter, SRE will do anything to keep the business running despite the business!
zifpanachr23 2y ago
HPC and Mainframe basically, but they both have quirks and extra bits required for the role due to the unique nature of the environments that never really existed in traditional old school web based sysadmin work from the 90s and 2000s, and sometimes the title isn't Sysadmin. So basically you aren't walking into one of those roles cause you admin'd a bunch of Apache servers back in the day or anything like that. Point being, there is still a market for "pets above cattle" style infra work. It is just in increasingly specialized and technically challenging areas.