Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

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Here, let me pre-emptively render the standard replies, to save everyone time:

* "Nuh-uh! We love Kubernetes and run EVERYTHING in it, so there. And we DID NOT do that just so we could be cool by copying Google or just so I could pad my resume, I triple-double-swear".

* "But, StatefulSets! It doesn't matter that it's taken over two years of engineering effort to get to a place where fundamental functionality that you've gotten automatically for the last 3 decades exists, like individually-addressable servers or stable disk space. It doesn't matter that they're still beta. Run your database in it TODAY, or you are in serious danger of exhausting your GCool Points!"

* "Please take back your mean comments about modern-day software development culture. Node.js was my first language and I for one find left-pad a miraculous innovation, which never would've been possible without a culture of everyone scrambling to copy some crappy module up to npm and their github profile so that they can brag about how many stars they have. I am thoroughly enjoying this same ethos being carried over into sysadmin/devops."

Every time you write about the ongoing silliness that is chasing the car that is infrastructure/platform trends, I want to buy you a drink. The overwhelming proportion of teams neither need nor benefit from all of this stuff. We're all not running Google here--at some point, the mindset of an engineer should go from "this looks fun" to "this isn't going to blow up and screw us at the worst possible time", but unfortunately, it looks like the devops/infrastructure world is currently traipsing down the road tread by other trendy ecosystems and fields.

So many developers insist that elegance is having nothing to take away--and then they pile all of this stuff that they don't fully understand on top of other stuff they don't understand at all just because "it's devops". It's maddening and strange.

(While we're at it: most of you don't need your million microservices, either, and you're probably not fault-tolerant across them anyway.)

Indeed. The scary part is that eventually the consequences of this will propagate up to someone important and powerful enough to do something about it, and then I worry that there will be legal limitations put on the industry.

I believe there are already substantial rumblings in this direction given the current state of cybersecurity, so this new age of recklessness only stands to hasten it.

I am really hoping that we can avoid such strenuous regulations, lest highly functional autodidacts and anti-authoritarians find themselves shut out of yet another high-paying, at-least-semi-merit-based career. The evisceration of the legal profession should stand as a warning to us. We do not want the actually good and useful people, who generally have low tolerance for the systemic brutality of rote learning, edged out by status seekers who have no real value to offer but can occupy space in a room for the requisite time to earn their certifications.

And on the note about microservices, you couldn't be more right. These architectures are such nightmares to debug that special transaction tracing tooling had to be invented to ease the process, and you have to either go through and update all 90 of your services to use these or go through a centralized service broker (now called a "microservice mesh" so that people don't catch on) to append tracing tags to each request.

Please get real here, people. There are times when this kind of stuff may be useful (if you're running Google or Twitter, for example). That does NOT apply to your small company of 100 employees. You are only making things harder on yourselves.

Thank goodness there a people that get this. I ran screaming from a devops role I'd been in for two years around 6 months ago. This thought process of "complexity == good", "old == bad" - watching the company starting to pull apart an already unstable product and break it down into microservices when they could't even document their existing codebase, how to bootstrap a new instance.

Most puppet installations I've seen run by these small teams just degenerate into snowflake factories. Going to all that effort to run a huge packer pipeline so your templates are the same accross all your clouds providers - and then pulling whatever-the-current-random-version-of-a-bunch-of gems from rubygems.org onto hundreds of different machines. Arggggh!

The argument I keep hearing is that "if we don't use all the latest tools then how are we going to attract the best talent".

Every few years I dip my toes back into the devops space, just to see if it's improving. Nope. It's just getting worse.

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