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Comment by yourduskquibble | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of technical jargon but wondering how all of this relates and fits in with (if at all) the redesign?

Agreed, it was hard to read from all the jargon. Also seems overly complex.

The original architecture seemed overly complex IMO. Maintaining a fleet of HAProxys and their configs seems daunting... it seems like they're gaining both flexibility (maintaining configs easily) and observability (request/response metrics for thirft requests)

Per-service proxy deployments are a bit complex for the infrastructure but provide a nice abstraction for the service and service developers themselves. The configuration scheme is indeed daunting, which is what we're hoping Envoy and its xDS APIs + centralized configs can help us solve for developer teams.

Like the redesign.

if you arent familiar with the "jargon" in this post then you're probably not in a position to reasonably judge whether its "overly complex". Most everything in here would be familiar to anyone with experience working on modern high volume web properties.

Regardless of whether Service Mesh is overly complex, the industry seems to have entered an era of "Complexity Worship". I was speaking to some engineers at a small startup the other day with only a handful of customers. They have invested significant resource building there own K8S cluster, ensuring it runs on multi-cloud etc, sounds a lot like premature optimisation.

That's insane. I feel like at a small scale you get a product out the door and refine it until you start growing. It's really not hard to use ansible to deploy your stuff onto EC2 and add more nodes as you grow.

But, K8s is the new hotness and people are going to use it.

I have a theory that Complexity Worship is a product of boredom by CS degrees who would rather not spend their time implementing WYSIWYG editors or whatever anymore.

Envoy is a networking tool. Wouldn't have much to do with a frontend redesign. They're very far apart in a tech stack.

> They're very far apart in a tech stack.

Which I think is kind of OP's point, i.e. that maybe reddit is focusing its resources on the wrong issues. Afaik the website was and still is generally responsive from a networking point of view, there are some 503s here and there from time to time but nothing that could throw me away as a regular user, on the other hand the redesign (if it manages to overwrite all the present ways of getting past it, such as using old.reddit or i.reddit) will definitely turn me away as a regular user, and I say that as a really long-time user of that website.

The more general issue is that there are a lot of technical people around SV that do, well, technical stuff, because they are really, really good at what they're doing (so I'm in no way downplaying this post). The issue is that focusing only on technical stuff and ignoring how users actually use your website/product might turn those users away and you're left with a technical behemoth which has no users (see Google+ for a relatively recent example).

I would be very surprised if the people working on UI/UX and the people working on network visibility and routing were the same group. I suspect you are mentally constructing a zero sum situation where there is not one. I don't use reddit much, or know that much about it, so I maybe be wrong, but unless they are a very small shop those are generally pretty separate disciplines.

> I suspect you are mentally constructing a zero sum situation where there is not one.

Generally speaking companies do have limited economic resources and also generally speaking yes, there is "a zero sum situation" when it comes to allocating resources inside a specific company. The management doesn't generally have infinite time and resources at its disposal and a focus on the technical side of things (or on any other specific side of a particular business) has many times resulted in neglecting the rest of the business not related to that particular topic.

A very good such example is the same Google+ case, with the now famous motto "all arrows pointed in the same direction" or some such which imho made them lose focus on a ton of other important stuff going on at the same time (Amazon and aws, most of the google products have become a chore to use since then etc)

I'm struggling to see your point. A company at a size that I assume reddit is is going to have dedicated infrastructure engineers and dedicated UI/UX/design people. They are almost definitely separate groups, regardless of the fact that they're paid from the same overall company budget, and will have separate projects. Infrastructure engineers working on infrastructure has no impact on UI engineers working on UI, unless perhaps they have Infrastructure engineers work on UI in their down time. Perhaps that is the case though and that's why everyone is so unhappy with the UI?

Google is a lot larger than Reddit is but it nevertheless blew it by focusing on mainly one thing, Google+. I’m saying that instead of focusing on this tech reorg which seems kind of overkill (at least from an user’s perspective) they could have given more time to focusing on the redesign, because at this point the redesign looks like it has received no significant input from management at all, it’s a total disaster.

If a company has significant users, ops/site reliability is one area where I’d be hesitant to say they’re overfunding, especially from the outside. Especially at reddit’s growth trajectory, if you’re sitting still, you’re probably falling behind.

I'm genuinely curious about their growth trajectory lately, meaning the last 6 months to one year, i.e. if they continued on their almost exponential upward trajectory that has been manifest in the last 4-5 years. Either way, I really do think that them blowing up the redesign is an existential threat for them, and I say that as a reddit user active on that site since before the digg blowout and following exodus.

There are some interesting stats/details listed at https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9x577m/were_reddi... and https://redditblog.com/2018/12/04/reddit-year-in-review-2018...

Pretty interesting, thanks! Comparing it to the data from 2017 [1] it looks like a ~30% increase in the number of comments (from 900 million to 1.2 billion), while unfortunately the number of votes/upvotes provided for the two periods is not consistent: they mentioned 12 billion upvotes for 2017 and 27 billion votes (which presumably included downvotes) for 2018. All in all not bad, let's see what 2019 will bring to them.

[1] https://redditblog.com/2017/12/19/the-best-of-reddit-in-2017...

Definitely, I hate the redesign and use old.reddit.com when I do visit, but what their ops team does on the backend to scale the site seems tangential to that.

We're actually looking to put Envoy in front of the redesign stack at some point in the near future! The major services backing the redesign can be isolated into a few smaller pieces, and we'd like to have Envoy be a routing layer that can abstract this for the central browser client as we evolve the backend.

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