sandorscribbles

i may have not emphasized enough how important quotas are for customers. quotas are very important guardrails for orgs that ensure that newly hired engineer who wants to "test drive the cloud" by running a BigQuery tutorial they found on github, gets stopped before they burn $10k in an afternoon. however, quotas on gcp are there for the benefits of google and not geared towards the customers. first there is an ever expanding tree of potential quotas complicating production rollouts of infra and second they are all set insanely low so even the smallest POC gets blocked. requesting a small increase routes the quota through software and auto-approval, requesting a quota that allows for a production workload? 3 weeks + help from your account rep, if google has blessed you the privilege of being allowed to talk with a human googler. no account rep you say, well your production workload can just wait around for google support to potentially acknowledge your existence.

manage the infrastructure with infrastructure tools - manage the application with application tools. they are not the same thing. you do not need to change the oil on your cars seats...drivetrains and interiors are different worlds joining together to achieve the goal of moving humans around.

googlers in their infinite wisdom have built a startup ecosystem for gcp that assigns "startups" to entry level new hires who are scrambling to figure out how to be managers of accounts while learning how to talk to humans, because googlers are generally not used to interacting with humans, just code, and that is the result of the programmatic hiring/screening process. each newly hired 20-something is also assigned 3,000 gcp accounts to manage.

what is the engineering used to determine a weak startup from a growing company you ask? well....googlers again use random numbers not logic (human interaction avoidance firewall) to determine that and set the floor at $30M "publicly declared investment capital". so what happens when you the gcp architect consultant hired to help this successful startup productionalize their gcp infra but their last round was private? google tells the soon to be $100M success company they are not real yet.....so they go get their virtual cpu,ram,disk from aws who knows how to treat customers right by being able to talk to humans by hiring account managers who pick up the phone and invite you to lunch to talk about your successful startup growing on aws. googlers are the biggest risk factor to the far superior gcp infrastructure for any business, startup or fortune 10.

if you need to bump a quota above the predetermined range of what googlers think is "normal" usage (which is far too low to run anything at scale)you have to talk to a human to negotiate the quota bump. why? because googlers in their infinite engineering wisdom use "gcp quotas" not as a cost optimization guardrail for customers benefit, but to inform google on when and how much metal they need to buy for their datacenter region you are running in.

the medical professions you cite are the very people that are profiting off the propaganda you are spoon feeding yourself. and your very link does precisely zero to address the question being asked, why is high cholesterol bad? maybe journey away from the profit center and widen your view to answer the question instead of parroting propaganda from bigpharma...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21160131/

you say "fixed" but have you asked "why" you think your cholesterol is broken and needs "fixed"?? why is your cholesterol broken? why is higher cholesterol numbers strictly associated with longer life? why is lower cholesterol numbers strictly associated with premature death? why do we think higher cholesterol numbers are bad when the worldwide data clearly shows higher numbers are healthier?

when will someone find the $300M bill to update the FAAs NOTAMs website which consists of a giant database with some simple web pages on top?

google pso + cgi federal overloaded the migration with 300+ people and 4 layers of subcontractors to deliver a sub-par infra stack in order to make some media splash before DOGE (rip) could derail it - yes that is why they shifted the db choice last minute to ship quicker versus ship best practices.

NOTAMs is the most important tool used daily by airlines, pilots, airports, the military, and every other industrialized nation in the world. and its now a rube goldberg hodgepodge to avoid an audit from a team that just got canned....

disclosure - i am a pilot who also worked on the migration before being canned for vocally pushing back against the infra architecture decisions that will result in hackable, or offline NOTAMs, halting air traffic worldwide.

excellent point. at tmobile (circa 2014) it required 87 APIs be hit to turn on a new subscriber. if the 34th API failed, the subscriber had to wait and start over clogging up the stores. at the core only 3 or 4 of those APIs were crucial to start the service and the rest could have been fine with eventual consistency. who is ticketed for what flight is the core, the rest dealing with plane can be handled manually just like the small airplanes do it, manual weight & balance, flight planning, etc. but Alaska chooses not to do that and is ok losing millions of dollars per day disrupted while losing customers because they do not care. and not hiring a safety officer for years proves they do not care.

that was my point in the purposeful use of the word "fiefdom" to describe the Alaska IT culture. it wasn't focused on optimal infra state with what it had, it was focused on following the cult of the winders wizards that refused to acknowledge anything different like Linux.

i prefer to arrive to work fresh and not have smoked meth or fentanyl the entire train ride not to mention dodging random stabbings, homeless feces, and insane people that belong in a mental care facility.

yep! at least it was entertaining watching the ground crews standing around doing nothing while the updates broadcasting into the lounge were making it sound like the apocalypse, with Delta, United, SWA, well basically everyone else taking off....btw the Alaska lounge is like paying $500 a year to eat at a Holiday Inn buffet, no the HI buffet is better.

to make their infra culture even more dire, they require in-office 5 days a week, and moved their office to SeaTac airport. KSEA is a solid 90 min commute each way from the tech hubs of Kirkland and Seattle. not to mention SeaTac the city is a crime ridden dystopia where 3-4 cars are stolen per day from SeaTac airport and the local officials response is "ya but its a lower stolen car average than the city of Seattle".

i have applied and interviewed at AlaskaAir in order to help my "hometown" airline + get free travel. its not shocking to state they are a very ancient infrastructure that is being run and protected by fiefdoms that refuse to even acknowledge best practices of any infrastructure tech released in the past decade. as a former business traveler of AlaskaAir, i stopped flying on them after the 6th flight in a row that was either delayed hours, or never showed up, with no humans at the gate to even provide updates. one of those flights was because Alaska Air had not trained their ground crews how to de-ice the plane and refused to use the deice-as-a-service, stubbornly keeping it in-house, which had their entire Alaska flight grounded at KSEA for an entire day for a light dusting of snow. the AlaskaAir app would consistently route me to the wrong gate, for a flight that was still two hours away, shouting notifications that boarding was closing. i used FlightAware and ignored the AlaskaAir app as it is completely worthless. now with their merger with Hawaiian Air the plan (from an insider) is to ignore all of Hawaiians modern-ish infra and just slam everything into Alaskas ancient tech stack. and if you are still not convinced, research how long Alaska Air was running without a Chief Safety Officer, before and after, Flight 261, and thought it was fine. a true disaster of an airline from the infrastructure culture to the safety culture. i now keep applying just to get on a call with anyone infra related to shout at them for ruining that hometown airline.

Costco earns almost all of their profit from the membership fees and tries to keep all the product sales at break even pricing. Which makes their future precarious as the average member age is 50+, explaining the missing technology focus compared to say WalMart Labs or Amazon. They send Costco employees out to the farms to inspect every stage of the meat process, from raising the animals to the slaughter and packaging to ensure the quality. Disclosure: former IT employee at Costco HQ.