Hacker News Reader

Comment by elwebmaster | Hacker News Reader

Article is totally spot on! However, people have been so brainwashed by cloud marketing that they don’t even know what dedicated hardware means anymore. Even the comments here are talking about VPS. Almost everybody has accepted underperforming and unpredictable infra for double the cost of dedicated. OP is spot on, I do exactly the same.

View on HN

How do you handle downtime due to project/package/os upgrades?

Don't upgrade unnecessarily. Then you won't get backdoored by xz releases.

Same security industry convinces you to upgrade every 15 seconds and then sells you solutions for when those upgrades fuck you over.

Or don't upgrade unecessarily and still have backdoors :P

kexec

Still using docker so you can upgrade most of it on every deployment. As far as the host, modern Linux distros handle security updates automatically and unattended. I do recommend having a backup replica server in standby. If you need to upgrade the kernel on the host you just change the DNS to point to your backup, wait for some time for connections to finish on your primary then restart the primary, ensure it is stable, change DNS back. It’s standard A/B deployment. Nothing special about it.

If you can't simply upgrade while your program is running, you would fire up a redundant server containing the latest version and take the one you are upgrading offline.

Technically no different than what you’d do in the cloud - have multiple of each resource so you can update them one by one while the others keep serving traffic.

Additionally, not every update needs to be applied, you need to understand your threat model and only apply updates when they actually patch something that would affect you - this cuts down on the actual number of updates that you need.

Cloud is the a better proposition than EJBs and look how long it took that to die off.

The bright shiny object / resume building in software decisions is in some ways fascinating

If anything, cloud is shinier resume building than handrolling.

Handrolling: "wrote a few systemd services"

Cloud: put the EC2 in the VPC with an ENI and attached the EBS to connect to the RDS

Reply on news.ycombinator.com