alrs

51 ms·

511.
by alrs 12y ago
Always be proving that your infrastructure is resilient. Pain should be felt by stakeholders, not engineering. When 24/7 means millions of dollars, hire a four-shift redundant geo-distributed team.
512.
by alrs 12y ago
You're right, totally doable. I should have said 24/7 for the price of 8/5 is going away.
513.
by alrs 12y ago
To do scheduled off-hours work on top of scheduled on-hours work and not get paid for it indicates that the worker has a damaged sense of self-worth.
514.
by alrs 12y ago
The plan is to never have an outage. Instead be scheduling maintenance that should, at worst, result in some backed up queues or non-functional admin functions. Building a system for graceful degradation costs time and money.
515.
by alrs 12y ago
We don't have "loads" of top-skill talent to begin with. The pool of top-skill-talent-with-a-self-esteem-problem is rapidly diminishing.
516.
by alrs 12y ago
No one with half a backbone should be willing to do scheduled work all day and then during any portion of the night. You need to build a resilient system, and that's gonna cost you. It's a lot less fun than adding features, which
517.
by alrs 12y ago
I'm sure that's the plan. But if you really really really need faultless 24/7 you're looking for something akin to "NASA as a service", and I assume that such a service wouldn't be able to invoice u
518.
by alrs 12y ago
8AM EDT is 5AM PDT, which is where web tech can be found in the United States. I'm sure you can find engineers willing to work garbage-man hours, but it's gonna cost you.
519.
by alrs 12y ago
Deployment and maintenance should not happen in the middle of the night. We've known this for years. You design your systems to degrade gracefully, hopefully transparently. Screwing up your engineers' sleep schedules is a terrib
520.
by alrs 12y ago
If you want NASA reliability, build a NASA-grade 24/7 operation across three timezones. If your plan is just to have the nerds skip sleep periodically, you're an asshole.
521.
by alrs 12y ago
Do you want to start working night shifts? The people who know how do this stuff command six-figure salaries and are highly in demand. Every startup is looking for the design/dev/ops unicorn. You want to start trying to find noc
522.
by alrs 12y ago
I disagree, strongly. If you've architected for IAAS you have sufficient redundancy and a plan for graceful degradation. I'd rather be dealing with an outage after lunch than at 4am.
523.
Al Gore finds spot defending Snowden(politico.com)
2 points by alrs 12y ago|0 comments
524.
Questioning corporate involvement in Gnome development(lwn.net)
1 points by alrs 12y ago|0 comments
525.
by alrs 12y ago
XFS-on-Linux worked fine until you had a kernel panic or power outage, and would always shit the bed on reboot. I've always preferred XFS over ext4 on ephemeral cloud instances, because you don't expect it to come back if it crash
526.
by alrs 12y ago
I guess that would be great, if developers had any kind of UNIX background. These days kids grow up on an Xbox until they get their first Mac. Seldom do I meet a developer who has run a headless Linux box, understands syslog, understands t
527.
by alrs 12y ago
I am not opposed to Docker. Also, I'm with you, someone with a systems background should be involved from the beginning. I went and saw someone from Docker in December speak at the local meetup in LA, and his slides explained that D
528.
by alrs 12y ago
Go to a meetup, listen to what the Docker guys are saying. It isn't this. They are explicit that their vision is for developers to bake up a container, and for ops to mindlessly deploy it. They use the shipping container metaphor: ops
529.
by alrs 12y ago
I've been at events where Docker people were pushing this "separation of concerns" nonsense. Really? The devs build it, hand the black box to ops, and ops has no say in how things are built or even knowledge of how to fix i
530.
by alrs 12y ago
It's awesome, now the devs have to be on 24hr call with the ops people, because they're the ones who built the environment. Welcome to my world!
531.
by alrs 12y ago
As opposed to not pinning versions and expecting your average Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP/nodejs library author not to introduce some crazy API breakage in a minor point release?
532.
by alrs 12y ago
I don't see anything in that repo that says that the work has been licensed as a work in the public domain. Works licensed under Creative Commons, GPL, MIT, BSD, etc. are not in the public domain. Public domain is something else, enti
533.
by alrs 12y ago
I can't figure out how your comment that "understanding mistakes will happen" is compatible with 99.999% uptime. I'm of the opinion that 99.999% for an individual instance isn't particularly achievable in a commodit
534.
by alrs 12y ago
I tend to agree with you, with the caveat that you can't have this philosophy and sell your customers 99.999% uptime[0]. [0] http://www.joyent.com/products/compute-service/features/linu...
535.
by alrs 12y ago
Systems engineers, software engineers, architects, whatever. We're all in the same gang. My point is that the problem in this case is likely the system's design, not one engineer's typing abilities.
536.
by alrs 12y ago
Joyent's messaging about "we're cloud, but with perfect uptime" was always broken. It's mildly gross that the current messaging sounds like they're throwing a sysadmin under the bus. If fat fingers can down a
537.
by alrs 12y ago
I see your Obama and raise you Disraeli. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disraeli
538.
by alrs 12y ago
Not particularly new news. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsakey
539.
by alrs 12y ago
Apparently I'm not?
540.
by alrs 12y ago
I'm embarrassed for people that post about spectator sports on social media.

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