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Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

Really good post - "making it hard to do the wrong thing" is more or less my entire design ethos when it comes to software, particularly developer tools.

Somewhat on-topic, instead of re-inventing the wheel on this one, I've recently been using Flagger (https://flagger.app/) and have been exceptionally happy with it. Automated rollback on error rates, metrics or integration tests. It's so nice to finally be able to stop writing this code at every company I work for!

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> making it hard to do the wrong thing" is more or less my entire design ethos when it comes to software, particularly developer tools.

See also poka-yoke: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

That's lovely, thank you!

I found it strange that that page doesn’t mention the example I immediately thought of after reading the first sentence: large dangerous machinery such as presses or lasers that require two hands to operate to prevent the case where the operator, in a hurry, still has one hand in the danger area when he presses the “do it” button with the other.

I'm going to add "poka-yoke" to the list of things that I make students commit to memory in my law school contract-drafting course; it'll be a synonym for "R.O.O.F" — Root Out Opportunities for [Foul]-ups.

(This is another example of how legal-contract drafters can learn from the software world, including concepts such as, for example, orthogonality; modularity; R.O.O.F.; D.R.Y. [Don't Repeat Yourself]; graceful failure; and the benefit of sometimes explaining why things are done the way they are, to help future readers understand.)

How does Flagger compare to Spinnaker in your experience?

I haven't used Spinnaker outside of a few tutorials and experiments, but Flagger is far simpler. It's just a "Canary" CRD you install that controls nginx-ingress (in our case). Watches prometheus, nginx and does things to a deployment.

Spinnaker invents a lot of new terms and complexities. Flagger just does one thing, and it does it pretty darn well :)

We're Armory (YC W17) and we bring Spinnaker into complex enterprise environments. Happy to answer any ?s about it. Or you can learn more at https://www.armory.io/learn/what-is-spinnaker/ and docs at http://docs.armory.io/

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