zoltrain

100% this, all smoke and mirrors. But you can’t argue with it’s effectiveness.

I mean Mogg is someone who comes across as having his finger on the pulse of society… the best description I’ve ever heard for him is “A haunted victorian drainpipe”. Ultimately the guys stake in Irish hedge-funds are served well by destabilising the pound. I can’t think of one member of the tories who isn’t in politics to make themselves even richer. Everything is grandstanding at the moment.

Was going to say the exact same thing... https://capnproto.org/otherlang.html seems like there's pretty broad support.

So I've been trying out Pulumi at the new company I've just started working at and I can say the experience so far has been pretty awesome. This coming from a pre-version 1 user of terraform (when pretty much the only support was the AWS provider). For me HCL was never the killer feature of Terraform, I personally think it was the resource abstraction and providers that made it the best choice at the time. Chef/Ansible runs were always dangerous because as most of us will know from hard learnt lessons, "what you see isn't necessarily what you get". Having a DAG, tracking dependencies between resources, and getting a "this is what you have, this is what you'll get" when you apply a change is the core of what makes terraform great... but this isn't the language, I'd actually argue HCL is where most of it's problems were. The hacks one had to make before HCL 2.0 to get any type of reuse were to be frank, awful. They were also non-obvious, so you had to either pass the knowledge on in your team like a "sage" which isn't scalable for smaller/midsize teams, or let people hit those walls and waste more collective time. Writing languages is hard, and it took Hashicorp years to get it "mostly" right. Though the ergonomics of HCL I would still say aren't very nice or very developer friendly.

Now to Pulumi's merits, if you dive into it's architecture you'll find it's actually users from terraform providers under the hood (very well tested code bases). So it will do things like build a DAG, track dependencies, and give you a diff before you apply anything. From what I can tell it's just changed how you interact with the terraform internals (I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but this is my simple understanding of it). Sure you can get code ordering problems, like any imperative language but it doesn't make it any more unsafe to run as you're protected by the same plan/apply type setup as Terraform. You can also rely on the same language specific quality controls you already rely on. Things like unit tests, integration tests, code coverage, IDE integration etc. Personally I think a better use of time is teaching team members about the infrastructure fundamentals who have an interest in learning them, over getting them to also split focus on a language they will only use in one situation.

I'm not even entirely sure the microservice part is the bit that's ridiculous. I remember interviewing with them a few years back and when I was told the architecture I was like "so you have all these services but you run them off the same database cluster, isn't that like super risky?"

Low and behold pretty much every major outage they've had has been because of their Cassandra cluster. To be fair they have addressed this now, but for it to take N outages and 5 years kind of tells me they could focus a little more attention on properties people value in their banks, like I don't know... uptime.

This is why they have to work pretty hard to make me switch over to it being my primary bank, and 1600 microservices communicating over the most brittle part of your stack doesn't win them any points in this space.

To put it in context I really can't remember the last time HSBC had a major outage... Sure it's boring but it works pretty much all the time.

Monzo seems more of a "60% of the time it works everytime" situation, great to send your mates money but I wouldn’t trust it to pay my rent on time. Having 1600 microservices kind of explains this.

If there’s anyone at Monzo listening, please focus on not going down as everything else you do is great.

It's seems brutal, but what introduced species have done to NZ's ecosystem is far far worse. Would anyone knowingly sit back and watch one species that shouldn't even be in an ecosystem wipe out many native species that exist no where else on the planet. The Takahē is holding on by a thread, at one point in a the 1980's it's population was down to 118, in a remote part of New Zealand (Fiordland). It was thought to be extinct, now conservationist have gone full send on the effort to protect them and set up sanctuaries on small remote islands that are pest free (you can never visit this island because they're rightly super paranoid). They were in a position of, if the hedgehogs weren't eating their Takahē's eggs, the Stoats were eating their chicks, or the Rabbits, Deer, and Goats were eating their food supply. This is just one case, since the introduction of man the vertebrate species native to NZ has halved, as in half the species are extinct, if anything they're still not doing enough. The Moa is just one of many species we'll never get to see, the Haast Eagle is another, they were starved to death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_eagle they also hunted Moa's which is pretty epic, largest bird of prey to have existed on earth.

Gulp runs in node, which runs single core so compilation speed will be effected by single core speed. I'm not really that familiar with how "Parallel" msbuild/roselyn is these days in regards to core usage. I'm pretty sure Roselyn/Visual Studio does some very clever stuff when compiling your code. I think it keeps a shadow copy of your on disk files and only recompiles the AST sections it needs too. I remember watching a talk on how Anders reimagined the .net compiler to approach compilation this way. You should probably look at other multi-core workloads you might be doing on the dev machine that would benefit from the increased core count.

It also doesn't take into account the startups that can't use said serverless architectures, like Fintech or Heathtech. You inherently need to understand how data moves through your platform when you have tight compliance restrictions. It's why both Firebase functions and Lambda aren't HIPAA compliant. unsurprisingly the old school tech like RDS, EC2, EBS, VPC are. Having a sweeping statement that if you're an early stage startup you need to be No-Ops is a bit silly in this context. It shows you not considering what you're trading for that platform. I'm more for having better tooling for orchestrators like Kubernetes. You still get low level control, but most boring ops can be automated away pretty easily. You also don't trade portability across cloud vendors. If your dev team is already using docker/docker-compose then its not much of a step up to deploying a service in Kubernetes.

Civil Defence are doing their job, getting people away from the coastline. There maybe Tsunami's there may not be, better not to take any risks. Must be protocol when any of the Tsunami alarms are triggered.

That would make a lot of sense. Civil defence must be being pessimistic in there predictions, as you should be. It's better to be away from a coastline if there might be a tsunami and there isn't, then the other way way around.

I'm pretty sure Civil Defence announced it's been contaminated. I would get bottled water, and get away from the coast if you're anywhere near there, or get to high ground. If you have no other option, go to a building with reinforced concrete that's high such as a parking lot. The Tsunami warning is issued to as far as wellington, and all of the cook straight.

I'm from Christchurch, contacted family there. There's been mass evacuations from the coastline. Tsunami's have started but they can last for hours. Kaikoura has already had a a surge measured 2.5m, if this is the case the waves will get worse before they get better. But NZ is pretty prepared for these things, so hopefully everyone scampers to the safe distance from the coastline. I worry about the Chatham Islands, they're directly east of the epicentre, and Tsunami's travel very fast. I hope they've all gotten to high ground.