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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I've told this story before on HN, but a recent client of mine was on Kubernetes. He had hired an engineer like 5 years ago to build out his backend, and the guy set up about 60 different services to run a 2-3 page note taking web app. Absolute madness.

I couldn't help but rewrite the entire thing, and now it's a single 8K SLOC server in App Engine, down from about 70K SLOC.

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My most recent job, and the job before that and the job before that all have one thing in common:

Someone convinced the right person to “put stuff on kubernetes” and then booked it for another job/greener pastures with barely any production services, or networking configured.

Thus an opening for a new SRE and once again I find myself looking at a five headed monster of confusing ingress rules, unnamed/unlabeled pods, unclaimed volume specs…

Sigh.

That is a real life story of "drink too much kool-aid"

absolutely nuts to think what that would look like. Is he building services to abstract out english grammar? Have one service called VerbManager that returns a boolean if a given word is a verb, have another one called AdjectiveManager that does similar and so on.

What's your plan when (not if) Google deprecates GAE?

Not OP, but App Engine have actually been around for a long time.

Also, there's no inherent lock-in, you can basically just deploy it somewhere else.

Data is where the lock-in lies. Moving can be hard if you use proprietary databases. Can still be worth it.

Yeah the one good decision by that former dev was to use Mongo Atlas, so the data layer is completely decoupled from GCP.

>App Engine have actually been around for a long time

That means very little, I hope you realize. Reader, Voice, Chat, etc.[0] were all around a long time.

>Also, there's no inherent lock-in

GAE has plenty of proprietary APIs you can depend on. Whether or not you do is up to the programmer.

0 - A comment below notes that voice and chat aren't deprecated yet. Voice was announced deprecated, and google has had so many chat apps I'm not sure which ones are gone. Anyway, here is a more complete list of things Google has abandoned: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Gae is nearly twice as old as reader was when deprecated. Voice and chat still exist and aren't deprecated.

Eh, it's just a simple node server, no real attachments to GAE. I could move it over to Digital Ocean or something within a day or two.

It is very likely that GAE will last a lot more than the Kubernetes cowboy you hired to set up the undocumented and untested version of it in house.

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