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willthames

91 karma · joined April 7, 2011

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willthames··on IBM acquires Kubecost
RDS is an example of something that is more expensive but can be better value - because a lot of the managed service stuff saves the time of those looking after it.

15 years ago I worked an infrastructure department with 50+ employees - these days a lot of that work that we used to do back then is taken care of by AWS.

Scaling the infra to meet peak capacity (which might be two days in a year) because you can only run on hardware you have, having data centres and data centre engineers, are all costs that go away with cloud, even though you are paying more for the compute you do use.

willthames··on Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
Perhaps more accurate is that there is no one root cause, but a bunch of contributing factors.

I had a quick search to find my favourite article on this one, it might be https://willgallego.com/2018/04/02/no-seriously-root-cause-i... as it demolishes Five Whys but https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/02/10/each-necessary-but-on... is a classic

willthames··on Google Kubernetes Engine incident spanning 9 days
Does ECS support mounting configuration files (without needing the configuration file to be on the host)?

Being able to mount secrets and configmaps into the container file system (without having to modify the container image to provide an entrypoint) definitely seemed to be one major advantage of kubernetes over ECS a few years back.

willthames··on Show HN: Kr8s – a Python client library for Kubernetes
Haha, I meant to add one to my comment but struggled to do so on mobile

https://github.com/openshift/openshift-restclient-python

willthames··on Show HN: Kr8s – a Python client library for Kubernetes
The comparison doesn’t include the (perhaps confusingly named) openshift library. All the ansible kubernetes modules rely heavily on it because its support for dynamic client (where you just want to apply a manifest and don’t know in advance that it’s a Deployment and a Service and a ConfigMap) is first rate.
willthames··on A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call
Same, where do I sign up for these kickbacks?

The difference between datadog and doing it yourself is that datadog is a well thought through product rather than a cobbled together set of various tools

Having a single interface for everything makes life so much easier across a number of different teams

Search is fast and easy to use for logs and traces

Being able to see what a user actually clicked on in their session is absolutely game changing for support teams

I’m not a huge fan of the bill but it’s so much better than anything we could do ourselves without a team of engineers dedicated to observability (which would cost far more than datadog)

willthames··on AWS Purity Test
Cross AZ traffic became free in April last year

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/aws-data-...

willthames··on Ask HN: Who is firing?
Sent to Coventry appears to be Constructive Dismissal under UK law

https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismiss...

Of course it might not be worth the lawsuit.

willthames··on Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
Ansible - I first discovered it from a comment here, thought 'who needs a new config management tool' then realised Michael Dehaan had also written cobbler so thought it was worth a crack. Since then my python skills have improved through reading and improving the ansible code base, I've written ansible-lint, ansible-inventory-grapher and ansible-review, and I've been on two long distance conference trips as a result.
willthames··on Upgrade your SSH keys
128 bits isn't twice as strong as 64 bits. 65 bits is twice as strong as 64 bits. 2^64 ~= 10^19 - or 10 million million million times stronger.
willthames··on Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
Revert your playbooks and roles to the version of your last good deployment, and redeploy. With good version control, role version management and idempotent library modules, this should be functionally equivalent to a rollback.

There are plenty of caveats to the above (like the fact that the yum module won't downgrade [1], and you'll need reversible DB migrations) but that's basically the procedure.

[1] https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/1419

willthames··on Dell’s Skylake XPS 13, Precision workstations now come with Ubuntu preinstalled
I don't think you're using it wrong, but the default for the trackpad is a hard click, as you say.

But you can set the trackpad (Preferences > Trackpad > Point & Click > Tap to click) to accept a soft finger tap. And two finger tap is equivalent to a right click.

I think the MBP trackpad is the primary reason for me not moving to another laptop, even as I become less and less enamoured with OS X itself.

willthames··on Atlassian Sets Its I.P.O. at $21
I'm not sure why Atlassian would acquire Gitlab when they already have Stash (which might be called Bitbucket Server now - but either way is a fully fledged Git{la,hu}b competitor)
willthames··on SpaceX Falcon 9 debris from failed CRS-7 launch found in sea off Scilly
It doesn't help that Scilly isn't usually used in isolation. Usually the group is referred to as the Isles of Scilly or the Scilly Isles. None of the islands is actually called Scilly.
willthames··on List of Y Combinator companies I have worked with (hacked)
I found a bug in your page! The link to the Gitlab acknowledgements page isn't right (not sure what the correct link should be). Let me know what my bounty will be ;)
willthames··on The Art of Command Line
Or seq -f %04g 1 10
willthames··on Improving the GitHub Workflow for the Microsoft Community
Another example is the regulatory requirement for data sovereignty to ensure data remains under the data protection laws of the organisation's country.

With hosted Github you have no choice - data will presumably live on mainland US. With Azure/AWS/whatever, you can host your data in the most suitable location (always worth checking the contracts though)

willthames··on Maybe we’ve not improved things as much as we think we have with Devops?
You can use ansible as a library from python: http://docs.ansible.com/developing_api.html
willthames··on The Fuck – Correct your previous console command
And the reason for the other approach - global substitution (otherwise the caret approach is simpler)

    $ ls
    hello_world hi_there_world
    $ mv hello_world hello_everyone
    $ !!:gs/hello/hi_there
    mv hi_there_world hi_there_everyone
    $ ls
    hi_there_world hi_there_everyone
willthames··on Vim is moving to GitHub
Stash is far, far cheaper than Github Enterprise, and Stash features have come a long way in the last 18 months.

* 250 user Stash license: $12000 first year, $6000 after [1]

* 250 user GH Enterprise license: $61750 per year [2]

If you need on premise git hosting, I'd look at Stash or Gitlab, long before I thought about looking at Github Enterprise!

[1] https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/stash#serverlicenses-1

[2] https://enterprise.github.com/features

willthames··on Ask HN: I got let go this morning. What should I do next?
A couple and a couple of hundred are quite different though!

The original post suggests ~$2000, not ~200k

willthames··on Show HN: Hacker News' “most unique support email of 2014”
What a pathetic [1] argument!

[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pathetic

willthames··on Ask HN: How to keep marginal employees
You also need to factor in loss of productivity while bringing a new hire into an organisation.

They won't be 100% productive (50% might be aspirational for some roles for the first few months) and they will also reduce the productivity of their colleagues while they are brought up to speed.

$10k seems like a low figure for that.

willthames··on Ask HN: Where can I get Dev Ops training?
Do you have an Operations function in your organisation? As really DevOps is development and operations working together to meet business goals.

If you do have an Operations person, you should be working together on things like how you can improve the deployment process to make it easy for new software to get into production.

If you don't have an Operations person, then you will have to bridge that gap. And that means learning what things make software operable - logging, monitorability, availability, resilience etc.

Web Operations, Continuous Delivery, Release It are three good starting points.

I gave a talk at Devops Days Brisbane on How to Design and Develop Software for Operations. I don't claim it to be complete but it comes from years of experience supporting critical applications

http://willthames.github.io/2014/08/10/devops-days-brisbane-...

willthames··on Nobody Knows What Running Looks Like
"tick tocking" was what we called it in our sea cadets corp. It is surprisingly hard to get it right without practice (and then I guess less conscious thought)
willthames··on Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM
1941 was not the start of WWII. It started in 1939.
willthames··on Scotland's Decision
You can look at the tags to see the bias of biasedbbc. I'm sure there are plenty of people that would argue that if not pro-conservative, the BBC neglects many of the issues that would be detrimental to current government - the BBC completely ignored phone hacking, the privatisation of the NHS, among others. It's still probably significantly more neutral than almost any corporate controlled broadcaster though.
willthames··on Digital Ocean: Ubuntu, Nginx, Unicorn, Rails
Ansible is mostly configuration based - Ansible itself is written in python but all you'll typically need to write for most usages is configuration in YAML. So no ruby at all.

There are likely existing roles for most things at http://galaxy.ansible.com/

The Ansible docs at http://docs.ansible.com/ are pretty good, and there are lots of getting started guides most weeks on the Ansible weekly mailing list (https://devopsu.com/newsletters/ansible-weekly-newsletter.ht...)

And there are a few pages on my github blog on a few fundamental principles of modelling configuration e.g. http://willthames.github.io/2014/03/17/ansible-layered-confi... http://willthames.github.io/2014/04/02/modelling-credentials... to give a bit of flavour of how to manage more complicated setups. Installing things is easy, getting the configuration right for your needs is the tricky bit!

willthames··on How the 'Kung Fu Fighting' Melody Came to Represent Asia
On an international site (it's currently 18:30 on Friday evening where I am, for example), populated by people who might not necessarily do 9-5 Mon-Fri, I don't think there's any such thing as non-work-hours

If you mean 'please don't link to TV Tropes', say so.

willthames··on The new land of opportunity for immigrants is Germany
The above translation should probably just be "belongs in" rather than "belongs to" then. Your clarification helped, thanks.
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