14 ms·

Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

321 points by klintcho 5y ago

de6u99er 5y ago
I've been doing this since many years. Just not serverless. Rollout to production, incl. build took max. 20 minutes for a fat-client relational-database application. The author is mixing here two things that don't depend on each other.
bob1029 5y ago
I love the test-in-production illustration. This is a fairly accurate map of my journey as well. I vividly remember scolding our customers about how they needed a staging environment that was a perfect copy of production so we could guarantee a push to prod would be perfect every time. We still have that customer but we have learned a very valuable & expensive lesson. Being able to test in production is one of the most wonderful things you can ever hope to achieve in the infra arena. No ambiguity about what will happen at 2am while everyone is asleep. Someone physically picked up a device and tested it for real and said "yep its working fine". This is much more confidence inspiring for us. I used to go into technical calls with customers hoping to assuage their fears with how meticulous we would be with a test=>staging=>production release cycle. Now, I go in and literally just drop the "We prefer to test in production" bomb on them within the first 3 sentences of that conversation. You would probably not be surprised to learn that some of our more "experienced" customers enthusiastically agree with this preference right away.
- edoceo 5y ago
  you still have unit tests and similar right? and maybe test in a staging env lightly first? or, right to Live?
  - bob1029 5y ago
    Yes we have a 2 stage process with the customer. There is still a test & production environment, but test talks to all production business systems too. Only a few people are allowed into this environment. We test with 1-5 users for a few days then decide to take it to the broader user base.
    - __jem 5y ago
      > but test talks to all production business systems too I'm not sure I understand this, would you mind explaining more? Do you mean you have multi-tenancy in databases and application (the "tenants" being stage/test and prod)?
      - pm90 5y ago
        I think what op’s referring to is a staging app version that talks to production services and databases. Eg you have a “clone” of your production UI, accessible only to devs. This clone is configured to talk to the same DB and call the same dependencies as the production service but since it’s access is limited it’s used by devs to test their new feature(s). This pattern is used where I work too. It’s been incredibly powerful. Some of our services allow for multiple staging replicas so that nobody is blocking one another; the replicas are ephemeral and nuked after testing.
        bob1029 5y ago
        Yes. This is essentially the idea.
        erhk 5y ago
        This is how to build a scaling DoS issue that bombs prod iirc
        __jem 5y ago
        Right but I'm wondering how you avoid polluting your production dataset with test data, hence the question about multi-tenancy in the database. Do you use a different schema? Discriminator column? How do you know the data came from the "clone"?
- erikerikson 5y ago
  IMO this still keeps production a previous thing. Next comes multi-version concurrent environments on the same replicated data streams. There is only production and delivery to customers is access version 3 instead of version 2. This can be proceeded by an automated comparison of v2's outputs to v3's and a review (or code description of the expected differences).
- nine_k 5y ago
  You can test in production by moving fast and breaking things (the clueless guy). You can test in production by having canaries, filters, etc, and allowing some production traffic to the version under test. This is the "wired" guy. For many backend things, you can test in production by shadowing the current services, and copying the traffic into your services under test. It has limitations, but can produce zero disruption.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - erhk 5y ago
    Until you discover that prod has an edgecase string that has the blood mother of cthulu's last name written in swahili-hebrew, (you know it as swabrew, or SHE for short) which due to a lack of goat blood on migration day is one of the ~3% of edge cases that aren't replicated and now youve got an entirly new underground civilization born that is expecting you to serve them traffic with 5 9's and you can only do 4 because of the flakiness.
skywhopper 5y ago
While it’s a good idea to lay out a vision for the future of infrastructure as a service, it’s annoying to read this sort of article that seems to believe it ought to be simple to provide true serverless magical on-demand resources for random code. Fact is it’s a lot more complicated than that unless you’re just a small fry without any really hard problems to solve. It’s silly to complain that AWS doesn’t have a service that allows any random programmer to deploy a globally scalable app with one click. For one thing, you aren’t AWS’s primary target audience. For two, the class of problems that can be solved with such simple architectures is actually pretty small. But for three, it’s not actually even possible to do what you’re asking for any random code unless you are willing to spend a really fantastic amount of money. And even then once you get into the realm of a serious number of users or a serious scale of problem solving, then you’ll be back into bespoke-zone, making annoying tradeoffs and having to learn about infra details you never wanted to care about. Because, sorry, but abstraction is not free and it’s definitely not perfect.
- nine_k 5y ago
  > It’s silly to complain that AWS doesn’t have a service that allows any random programmer to deploy a globally scalable app with one click. For one thing, you aren’t AWS’s primary target audience. I won't be surprised if AWS makes disproportionately more money off smaller operations which don't want to care about honing their infra, but want something be done quickly and with low effort. They quench the problem with money, while the absolute amounts are not very high. So targeting them even more, and eating a slice of Heroku's pie, looks pretty logical for AWS to do.
  - t_sawyer 5y ago
    They don't need to eat a slice of Heroku's pie. Heroku pays AWS for each of their customers already. Their infrastructure runs on top of AWS.
justicezyx 5y ago
Looks like someone who had not spend enough time to review modern computing history. Heck, who voted up this article... This article is like the NTF frenzy, it's fine, but it's going to be baseless because it's looking too far in the future.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Yeah, I just love his breathless dismissal of the incumbents (Guess I'm a neo-luddite!) In fact I think a lot of this optimism is in dire need of a couple of baseball-bat hits to the kneecaps. > But things are rarely built to optimize for developer productivity. Well, these a-holes abandoned Rails in favor of serverless-react-lambda-script. They made their bed, now they must lie in it.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Why? I don't see much unreasonable here. Make infrastructure changes faster? Why not. Make it easier to create ephemeral resources? Why not. Make scaling completely automatic? Would be nice. Though here I'd of course like to have some knobs to control the automatic scaling, else it could easily run out of reasonable budget. My only disagreement is client library vs declarative configuration. I'd prefer the latter, but using some better language than YAML; maybe, say, Dhall. And yes, it's now a common wisdom that the cloud is the new mainframe; e.g. [1]. Well, okay; if this is what is required to run services at scale without breaking the bank, so be it. If deploying to millions of ZX-81 Spectrums happened to give 3x reduction in opex, the industry would adapt to that, too. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26857859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26857859
anurag 5y ago
Testing in 'production' has been possible for a while: Heroku has Review Apps, and Render (where I work) has Preview Environments [1] that spin up a high-fidelity isolated copy of your production stack on every PR and tear it down when you're done. [1] https://render.com/docs/preview-environments https://render.com/docs/preview-environments
- nrmitchi 5y ago
  There are a variety of other, similar Preview Environment offerings out there, and most PaaS offer their own options built in. If you're using a PaaS with a built-in solution, you'll almost always be better off using theirs. A lot of the difficulty comes when you've "outgrown" a PaaS for one-reason-or-anyother, and need to try to back-fill this functionality in a production-like fashion. If you're intereseted, I wrote a thing attempting to cover some of the options ~6 months ago, but recognize that there has been a fair amount of change in the space since then (I really should update the post). [thing: https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product-review-tools/ https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product...]
  - anurag 5y ago
    Great article and certainly worth an update! Specifically for Render, you can now: 1. Specify a TTL on inactive PRs 2. Pick less expensive plans for preview services.
- sebmellen 5y ago
  Hey, a question about Render — do you run your own base infra/colocate or do you use a VPS/bare metal setup or do you sit on top of a cloud? I love the service but I’m wondering if you’ll expand outside of the two available regions anytime soon. I understand this might be hard based on your infra setup.
  - anurag 5y ago
    > I love the service Thanks! We will absolutely expand beyond Oregon and Frankfurt later this year. Our infrastructure was built to be cloud agnostic: we run on AWS, GCP, and Equinix Metal.
henning 5y ago
The desire to go "truly serverless" and pretend the computer does not actually exist is absolutely delusional. The refusal to acknowledge that software will never be anything beyond executable data on some kind of computer, somewhere, is why most web-based software is so slow and shitty. Having someone build the server and assign your code to run on it does not change that one (pun intended) bit.
- valenterry 5y ago
  It is not. The JVM is something that comes quite close actually, but it lacks a few environment features and configuration/specification options to fully cover the space that most people need, hence why everyone is using docker now. But if you think about it: most people don't really want to use docker. It's just the best option currently. Many don't care what OS they run on, because they don't rely on any specific OS functionality. This is exactly what should be improved for running code that can operate on a higher abstraction.
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    BEAM, the erlang vm comes even closer to that. Everything is a process and has the same semantics. Erlang and Elixir take this to their full advantage.
    - valenterry 5y ago
      I have little experience with BEAM, but I'm curious about it. Is there a good description of the scope of the VM and what it defines and what not?
      - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
        These resources are commonly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pwlvy3zz9M&t=833s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pwlvy3zz9M&t=833s, https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/ https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/, http://beam-wisdoms.clau.se/en/latest/ http://beam-wisdoms.clau.se/en/latest/
pbiggar 5y ago
So I'm creating something that's exactly like the author is describing: https://darklang.com https://darklang.com He's right that there's no reason that things shouldn't be fully Serverless, and have instant deployment [1]. These are key parts of the design of Dark that I think no one else has managed to solve in any meaningful way. (I'll concede that we haven't solved a lot of other problems had still need to be solved to be usable and delightful though). [1] https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  That's super cool. There is a lot to be said about simple things, and I think the language approach makes a ton of sense. I'm building a serverless document store with mini-databases using a programming language I designed for board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/ http://www.adama-lang.org/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nonameiguess 5y ago
This is a lot harder than the author wants to realize. Elastic infrastructure deployment in sub second latency is not likely to ever happen. The problem is simply a lot harder than serving http requests. It's not receive some bytes of text, send back some bytes of text. VMs are just files and can be resized, but optimal resource allocation on multitenant systems is effectively solving the knapsack problem. It's NP hard, and at least some of the time, it involves actually powering devices on and off and moving physical equipment around. There is still metal and silicon back there. In order to just be able to grow on demand, the infrastructure provider needs to overprovision for worst case, as the year of Covid should have taught us the entire idea of just in time logistics for electronics is a house of cards. Ships still need to cross oceans. My wife was the QA lead for a data center provisioner for a US government agency a few years back and the prime contractor refused to eat into their own capital and overprovision, instead waiting for a contract to be approved before they would purchase anything. They somehow made it basically work through what may as well have been magic, but damn the horror stories she could tell. This is where Amazon is eating everyone else's lunch by taking the risk and being right on every bet so far so if they build it, the customers will come. But even so, after all of that to complain that deploying infrastructure changes takes more than a second, my god man! Do you have any idea how far we've come? Try setting up a basic homelab some time or go work in a legacy shop where every server is manually configured at enterprise scale, which is probably every company that wasn't founded in the past 20 years. Contrast that with the current tooling for automated machine image builds, automated replicated server deployment, automated network provisioning, infrastructure as code. Try doing any of this by hand to see how hard it really is. Modern data centers and networking infrastructure may as well be a 9th wonder of the world. It is unbelievable to see how underappreciated they are sometimes. Also, hardware is not software. Software is governed solely by math. It doesn't exactly what it says it will do, every single time. Failures of software are entirely the fault of bad program logic. Hardware isn't like that at all. It is governed by physics and it is guaranteed to fail. Changes in temperature and air pressure can change results or cause a system to shut down completely. Hiding that from application developers is absolutely the goal, but you're never going to make a complex problem simple. It's always going to be complex. Remember my wife? Let me tell you one of her better stories. I can't even name the responsible parties because of NDAs, but one day a while back an entire network segment just stopped working. Connectivity was lost for several applications considered "critical" the US defense industrial base, after they had done nothing but pre-provision reserved equipment for a program that hadn't even gone into ops yet and wasn't using the equipment. It turned there was some obscure bug in a particular model of switch that caused it to report a packet exchange as successful even though it wasn't so that failover never happened, even though alternative routes were up and available. Nobody on site could tell why this was happening because the cause ended up being locked away in chip level debug logs that only the vendor could access. The vendor claimed this could only happen one a million times, so they didn't consider it a bug. Guess how often one in a million times happens when you're routing a hundred million packets a second? Maybe your little startup isn't doing that, but the entire US military industrial complex or Amazon is absolutely doing that, and those are the problems they are concerned with addressing, not making the experience better for some one man shop paying a few bucks a month who think yaml dsls make software-defined infrastructure too complicated for his app that can plausibly run on a single laptop.
ngngngng 5y ago
> but it takes 45 steps in the console and 12 of them are highly confusing if you never did it before. I am constantly amazed that software engineering is as difficult as it is in ways like this. Half the time I just figure I'm an idiot because no one else is struggling with the same things but I probably just don't notice when they are.
- edoceo 5y ago
  many things are confusing if you've never done it before. my first HAproxy setup wasn't great, my 10th is rock solid, just needed a bit of context-specific learning. same with PG replication (locical and archive) but 3rd go was awesome. its a flawed expectation to get it right the first time.
  - mLuby 5y ago
    > its a flawed expectation to get it right the first time. If your toilet overflows when you push the lever down and flushes when you pull the lever up, you'll learn pretty quickly how to use it. And other users will too, after they screw up or after you carefully explain so they're sure to understand. But it's just a shitty design! The fact that you've learned to deal with it doesn't excuse it or mean it shouldn't be fixed for all future users. I want to get it right the first time; I don't expect to only because I've been hurt too many times by shoddy UIs. A good UI, whether a GUI, API, CLI, or other TLA, guides users through their workflow as effortlessly as possible by means of sensible defaults, law of least surprise, and progressive reveal of power features. Relevant http://xkcd.com/1168 http://xkcd.com/1168
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      There's still no way around having to learn complex features. For most software, building a really simple first try is very easy, but almost certainly useless. Once you need to actually do something useful, uunavoidable complexity sets in and all of a sudden defaults and such don't really help anymore. Some people try to push defaults further with templates and wizards, but that often still doesn't really work for your particular use case, and also makes you first search through many options before realizing you actually need to go for the scary blank one.
Ericson2314 5y ago
I'm sympathetic to the motivation, but the author is a bit naive in some of the specific requirements --- we absolutely must spin things up locally to retain our autonomy. Sure, allow testing in the cloud too, but don't make that the only option. The cloud should be a tiny margin business, that it isn't shows just how untrustworthy it is. The win-win efficiency isn't there because there's so much rentier overhead. Oh, and use Nix :).
throwaway823882 5y ago
There will not be a massive productivity boost in the next 10 years. We haven't had a productivity boost in the past 20 years. In fact, we're much less productive now. But I digress. We're still largely making and running software the same way we did 20 years ago. The only major differences are the principles that underpin the most modern best practices. "What the fuck does that mean," you say? It means that I can take a shitty tool and a shitty piece of infrastructure, and make it objectively more reliable, faster, and easier, by using modern practices. Conversely, I can take the latest tools, infrastructure, etc, and make them run like absolute dogshit, by using the practices of a decade ago. Let's take K8s for example. It's like somebody decided to take the worst trends in software development and design-by-committee and churned out something that is simultaneously complicated and hard to use [correctly]. Setting it up correctly, and using it correctly (no, Mr. I'm A Javascript Developer, however you think you're supposed to use it, you are wrong), for a medium-scale business, requires banging your head against a hodge-podge of poorly designed interfaces and bolting on add-on software for at least a month. This is ridiculous, because what you actually needed was something whose principles match those of K8s. You want immutable infrastructure as code. You want scalable architecture. You want (in theory) loosely joined components. Do you need K8s to do that? No! K8s is literally the most complicated way that exists to do that. Next let's take Terraform. A clunky DSL that is slowly becoming sentient. Core functionality that defeats itself (running terraform apply is unpredictable, due to the nature of the design of the program, even though it was created with the opposite intention). Kludgy interfaces that are a chore to cobble together. Dependency hell. Actual runtime in the 10s of minutes (for the infra of a single product/region/AWS account). And no meaningful idea if the state of the infrastructure matches its state file matches the code that generated it all. To say nothing of continuous integration. Do you need all of that to do infrastructure as code? Of course not. A shell script and Make could do the same thing. So, you have a kludgy Configuration Management tool (terraform), and a kludgy Cluster Management tool (k8s), and all just to run your fucking Node.js webserver, make sure it restarts, and make sure a load-balancer is updated when you rotate in new webservers. Did you need all of this, really? No. The end result is functionally equivalent to a couple of shell scripts on some random VMs. To get the best out of "Software Infrastructure" you don't need to use anything fancy. You just need to use something right. --- But there's a different problem with infra, and it's big. See, Cloud Infrastructure works like a server. Like a physical server, with a regular old OS. To manage it, first you "spin up" the physical server. Then you "configure" the server with some "configuration management" software. Then you "copy some files to it". Then you "run something on it". And while it's running, you change it, live. This is how all Cloud Infra is managed. This is known as Mutable Infrastructure. Modern best practices have shown that this is really bad, because it leads to lots of problems and accidental-yet-necessary complexity. So what is the solution? The solution is for cloud vendors to supply interfaces to manage their gear immutably. And that is a really big fucking problem. Say I have an S3 bucket. Let's say I have a bucket policy, lifecycle policy, ACLs, replication, object-level settings, versioning, etc. The whole 9 yards. Now let's say I make one change to the bucket (a policy change, say). Production breaks. Can I "back out" that change in one swift command, without even thinking about it, and know that it will work? No. Assuming an AWS API call even has versioning functionality (most don't) I can use some API calls to query the previous version, apply the previous version as the current version, change some other things, and hope that fixes it. But there's no semblance of `rm S3-BUCKET ; cp -f S3-BUCKET-OLD S3-BUCKET`. You have to just manually fix it "live". Usually with some fucked up tool with a state file and a DSL that will randomly break on you. There is literally no way to manage cloud infrastructure immutably. Cloud vendors will have to re-design literally all of their interfaces for a completely new paradigm. And that's just interfaces. If trying to do the S3 bucket copy fails for "mysterious reasons" (AWS API calls fail all the time, kids), then your immutable change didn't work, and you still have a broken system. So they actually have to change how they run their infrastructure, too, to use operations that are extremely unlikely to "misbehave". Do you know how much shit that covers? It took them like 20 years to make what we have now. It may take another 10 to 20 years to change it all. Therefore, for a very, very long time to come, we will be stuck with shitty tools, trying to shittily manage our infrastructure, the way we used to manage web servers in the 90s. Even though we know for a fact that there is a better way. But we literally don't have the time or resources to do that any time soon, because it's all too big.
XorNot 5y ago
Some of this I agree with, even if the overall is to me asking for "magic" (I wouldn't mind trying to get there though). For me the one I really want is "serverless" SQL databases. On every cloud platform at the moment, whatever cloud SQL thing they're offering is really obviously MySQL or Postgres on some VMs under the hood. The provisioning time is the same, the way it works is the same, the outage windows are the same. But why is any of that still the case? We've had the concept of shared hosting of SQL DBs for years, which is definitely more efficient resource wise, why have we failed to sufficiently hide the abstraction behind appropriate resource scheduling? Basically, why isn't there just a Postgres-protocol socket I connect to as a user that will make tables on demand for me? No upfront sizing or provisioning, just bill me for what I'm using at some rate which covers your costs and colocate/shared host/whatever it onto the type of server hardware which can respond to that demand. This feels like a problem Google in particular should be able to address somehow.
- stadium 5y ago
  There is AWS aurora serverless https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/
  - klintcho 5y ago
    I know this perspective is not relevant for most companies: But for side-projects and a-like the cold-start time for Aurora is like 15 - 30 seconds, and the first query always times out. Having it always on (if just 1 "compute") will cost you 30 USD a month. I'm hoping for Aurora to eventually be closer to DynamoDB pricing and startup (I'm fine with 5 - 10 second cold start as long as it doesn't time out the first request everytime.)
    - stadium 5y ago
      Interesting, thanks for sharing. How does data get loaded? Can it use s3 as an external source similar to foreign data wrappers?
    - cowsandmilk 5y ago
slver 5y ago
My impressions TLDR: 1. "Built for delight" Author wants everyone to suddenly start making nicer things. 2. "Truly serverless" Author wants to throw code at cloud, without thinking about performance or resource usage. 3. "Fast" Author wants every AWS command to take less than a second. 4. "Ephemeral resources" Author wants to test in the cloud with less effort. 5. "Code not configuration" Author doesn't like static config, everything should be an API. 6. "Built for productivity" Author wants everyone to be more productive. All in all, reads a bit like the random musings of a frustrated cloud server user.
- thundergolfer 5y ago
  > Author wants to throw code at cloud, without thinking about performance or resource usage. Not really what Erik is saying. Taking AWS S3 as an example, you absolutely need to think about performance and resource usage when dealing with S3, but you never have to think about the servers. You never think about some cluster that is making your S3 usage possible. S3 is such a great success that there's very few (if any) examples of companies starting with S3 and then getting too big for it and needing to build their own system (thus wrangling servers and clusters etc). Dropbox migrated off of S3 to 'Magic Pocket' but I'm pretty sure this was for $$ reasons not because AWS simply couldn't handle Dropbox's massive read+write requirements. AWS S3 is a marvel of serverless computing, and we should try and get more like it.
  - slver 5y ago
    Maybe I'm confused by all those doubleplusgood buzzwords that almost deliberately say the opposite of what's happening (like serverless servers).
mikewarot 5y ago
Virtualization eventually will be seen as the unnecessary layer added to make up for operating systems that lack capability based security. It's going to take a decade to refactor things to remove that layer. Once done, you'll be able to safely run a process against a list of resources.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Agreed 100%, but you still are going to get the old-timers who insist that virtualization and containers just make things more difficult and that their old school approach is the best.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Good, that's a very universal interview question that will get me a practically direct answer to the actual question. It's not easy today... I'm asking about JS/HTML/CSS if the candidate isn't web-oriented, but what do I ask the JS guys? Perhaps a view layer bait?
- chii 5y ago
  going by how the web is doing today, the refactor you refer to will never be done.
- philipswood 5y ago
  Agreed. Operating systems abstract resources, the fact that we needed containers and VMs point to the fact that the first set of implementations weren't optimal and needs to be refactored. For VMs, security is the one concern, the others would be more direct access to lower levels and greater access to the hardware and internals than just a driver model. For containers I'd say that the abstraction/interface presented to an application was too narrow: clearly network and filesystem abstractions needed to be included as well (not just memory, OS APIs and hardware abstractions). I imagine that an OS from the far future could perform the functions of a hypervisor and a container engine and would allow richer abilities to add code to what we consider kernel space, one could write a program in Unikernel style, as well as have normal programs look more container-like.
zmmmmm 5y ago
This post mingles different interpretations of "serverless" - the current fad of "lambda" style functions etc and premium / full stack managed application offerings like Heroku. Although they are both "fully managed" they have a lot of differences. Both though assume the "hard" problem of infrastructure is the one-time setup cost, and that your architecture design should be centered around minimising that cost - even though it's mostly a one-time cost. I really feel like this is a false economy - we should optimise for long term cost, not short term. It may be very seductive that you can deploy your code within 10 minutes without knowing anything, but that doesn't make it the right long term decision. In particular when it goes all the way to architechting large parts of your app out of lambda functions and the like we are making a huge archtitectural sacrifice which is something that should absolutely not be done purely on the base of making some short term pain go away.
- deepzn 5y ago
  what would you say is the architectural sacrifice of pushing things out to the edge, or using lambda functions per say in your opinion? There are issues about resolving state at the edge, though Cloudflare has solved some of that with durable objects, and Fastly is working on something too. Think there are memory constraints as of now however. Security too is better in these platforms at the edge - true zero trust models.
  - zmmmmm 5y ago
    It's similar to the issues with microservices. You've broken something that could be "simple" single monolithic application into many pieces and now there is huge complexity in how they are all joined together, fragemented state, latency, transactional integrity, data models, error handling, etc etc. Then your developers can't debug or test them properly, what used to be a simple breakpoint in the debugger and stepping into a function call and directly observing state requires a huge complexity to trace what is happening. All these things got much harder than they used to be, and you're living with that forever - to pay for a one-time saving on setting up some self-updating, auto-scaling infrastructure.
    - 5y ago
asim 5y ago
Been there. Dreamed that. Built my ideal experience -> https://m3o.com https://m3o.com Honestly I've spent the better part of a decade talking about these things and if only someone would solve it or I had the resources to do it myself. I'm sure it'll happen. It's just going to look different than we thought. GitHub worked because it was collaborative and I think the next cloud won't look like an AWS, it'll look more like a social graph that just happens to be about building and running software. This graph only exists inside your company right now. In the future it'll exist as a product.
jiggawatts 5y ago
Years and years ago I saw an advertisement by a SAN array vendor where their gimmick was that they supported very cheap read/write snapshots of very large datasets, in combination with a set of transforms such as data masking or anonymisation. Their target market was same as the OP: developers that need rapid like-for-like clones of production. The SAN could create a full VM server pool with a logical clone of hundreds of terabytes of data in seconds, spin it up, and blow it away. The idea was that instead of the typical "DEV/TST/PRD" environments, you'd have potentially dozens of numbered test environments. It was cheap enough to deploy a full cluster of something as complex as SAP or a multi-tier Oracle application for a CI/CD integration test! Meanwhile, in the Azure cloud: Practically nothing has a "copy" option. Deploying basic resources such as SQL Virtual Machines or App Service environments can take hours. Snapshotting a VM takes a full copy. Etc... It's like the public cloud is in a weird way ahead of the curve, yet living with 1990s limitations. Speaking of limitations: One reason cheap cloning is "hard" is because of IPv4 addressing. There are few enough addresses (even in the 10.0.0.0/8 private range) that subnets have to be manually preallocated to avoid conflicts, addresses have to be "managed" and carefully "doled out". This makes it completely impossible to deploy many copies of complex multi-tier applications. The public cloud vendors had their opportunity to use a flat IPv6 address space for everything. It would have made hundreds points of complexity simply vanish. The programming analogy is like going from 16-bit addressing with the complexity of near & far pointers to a flat 64-bit virtual address space. It's not just about more memory! The programming paradigms are different. Same thing with networking. IPv6 simply eliminates entire categories of networking configuration and complexity. PS: Azure's network team decided to unnecessarily use NAT for IPv6, making it exactly (100%!) as complex as IPv4...
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  gcp doesn’t even give you ipv6 at all. Talk about limitations...
- pgwhalen 5y ago
  Your comment makes me realize how lucky I am at my job: we do this production environment replication via “SAN magic” and it is so insanely useful.
qaq 5y ago
Given how much capitalization AWS and Azure account for it's surprising how little progress has being made in many areas. A true serverless RDBMS database priced sanely that basically charged for qry execution time and storage without need to provision some "black box" capacity units and would be suitable for a large scale app. Most of all workflows that require contacting support and arbitrary account limits that force you to split solutions across multiple accounts wtf.
- erikerikson 5y ago
  Both Dynamo DB and Cosmos DB offer effectively what you're asking for. Limits are a risk that must be mitigated but they aren't arbitrary, they exist to avoid interference of one customer on to others. They protect the service which, to providers and reasonably so, is more important than any one customer.
  - qaq 5y ago
    DynamoDB is really crappy key value store with poor feature set and really bad limits.I am talking about real SQL RDBMS like Aurora Serverless but not built on top of legacy codebase and shoehorned into the use case. As far as account limits if I consume X+X things across 2 accounts vs 1 account what did it protect exactly? An org can have any number of accounts and add them at any time.
  - aliswe 5y ago
    CostmostDB is not sanely priced IMO!
marcus_holmes 5y ago
why does this rant start by talking about optimising things for the user, and then end up talking about optimising things for the developer? I get that they're talking about productivity tools for developers. But missing the point that optimising these tools for developers will mean they're not optimised for the actual user. We're not the customer. The stuff we write should be fast when run in production. Having it be nice to develop on is a bonus. Having generated configuration that the developer doesn't have to think about means that the system can't be tweaked for the particular use case to make it faster in production. Yes, it's easier. No, that's not better. Our job is to handle the complexity. To take "simple" business requirements and deal with all the complexity that is needed to make those work. That's the gig.
jcelerier 5y ago
I'm so happy to just develop desktop apps in C++ / Qt. I commit, I tag a release, this generates mac / windows / linux binaries, users download them, the end.
- m_st 5y ago
  I'm very happy in the same camp using C# and SQL (though Windows only). Thank you for making desktop apps.
- drinchev 5y ago
  There is hardly an app that I use these days that doesn't require internet connection. I guess once your app needs it, you will have the same problems.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    > There is hardly an app that I use these days that doesn't require internet connection. well, most of the ones I use (my note taking app, my text editor, my music player, my file manager) don't so YMMV
- abraxas 5y ago
  I want to live in that world again. It ended for me about 19 years ago when I left my last "desktop software" job. How do you manage to avoid "web stacks" in this day and age?
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    Most people still use desktop software for large projects ? Adobe stuff, music software, basically any advanced authoring software - the performance of the web platform is just not there for projects measured in dozens of gigabytes of media, hundreds of AVX2-optimized plug-ins, etc (and it's a field with a large tradition of benchmarking software between each other to find the most efficient, see e.g. dawbench)
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    I write backend code, and it's basically Java + Spring. No web technologies beyond HTTP in sight.
zby 5y ago
I have been observing it at my work - the production systems were getting more and more complicated and it was harder and harder to set up dev and test environments. It also started to break the underlying system when you had to install old libs for the project - and then maybe you needed two versions of the libs for different branches of the project. So I started to develop in virtual machines. Then people started using containers for that. That felt like a step back, because it was a different abstraction - and you had to do things differently on the dev machine that on production. Then I learned that people use terraform or ansible to setup the production and I hoped that I could run the same scripts on my dev machine in a vm and have environment just like production. But no - when I encountered a project with terraform and ansible - the scripts contain lots of AWS related stuff, it is impossible to untangle it and run on dev machines. I have never learned kubernets, I don't do much programming any more, with containers both in production and dev that would make sense - but I still don't see scripts that would just spin off a dev environment. Maybe dev environments on a dev machine is really a dead end now - and what we need is a way to spin of dev envs in the cloud.
erhk 5y ago
Google app engine was released in 2008...
InsomniacL 5y ago
A trainer said to me YAML is like JSON but easier to read, he then said count the whitespace on every line... Sure, An IDE makes it easier to see, but the same can be said about JSON.
ramoz 5y ago
I think we assume too much about where infrastructure is headed. Serverless, containers... they're fueling this notion of increased productivity but I don't think they themselves are keeping up with where Software is headed. E.g. "AI: --- in a lot of cases you're going to be breaking through every level of abstraction with any *aaS above the physical cores and attached devices. Traditional CRUD simplified? -- sure, but I feel like these "infrastructure" dev opportunities will be eaten by digital platforms and cloud solutions in the coming years.
evoxmusic 5y ago
Well written article. This exactly with this spirit - of making AWS, GCP, Azure accessible to any developer that Qovery has been built. The idea of Qovery is to build the future of the Cloud - making developers to deploy their apps on AWS in just a few seconds. No joke. 2200+ developers from 110+ countries are deploying hundreds of apps per day. And this is only the beginning. Thanks again for sharing this article. You can give a try to Qovery here: https://www.qovery.com https://www.qovery.com
max_ 5y ago
>Truly serverless >The beauty of this is that a lot of the configuration stuff goes away magically. The competitive advantage of most startups is to deliver business value through business logic, not capacity planning and capacity management! Is this exactly what cloudflare's workers is doing? [0] I love the fact that I only need to think of the business logic. Development without the need for VMs and obscure configuration scripts feels — and is in fact very productive. I don't think I will want to use anything else for hosting my back ends. [0]:https://workers.cloudflare.com/ https://workers.cloudflare.com/
- simonpantzare 5y ago
  I'm really excited by Cloudflare Workers. I hope to get a chance to build something tangible with it soon. The developer experience with Wrangler is superb and paired with Durable Objects and KV you got disk and in-memory storage covered. I'm a fan of and have used AWS for 10+ years but wiring everything together still feels like a chore, and Serverless framework and similar tools just hide these details which will inevitable haunt you at some point. Cloudflare recently announced database partners. Higher-level options for storage and especially streaming would be welcome improvements to me. Macrometa covers a lot of ground but sadly it seems like you need to be on their enterprise tier to use the interesting parts that don't overlap with KV/DO, such as streams. [0] I played with recently launched support for ES modules and custom builds in Wrangler/Cloudflare Workers the other day together with ClojureScript and found the experience quite delightful. [1] [0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/partnership-announcement-db/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/partnership-announcement-db/ [1]: https://dev.to/pilt/clojurescript-on-cloudflare-workers-2d9g https://dev.to/pilt/clojurescript-on-cloudflare-workers-2d9g
kkapelon 5y ago
Code not configuration We have this already -> https://www.pulumi.com/ https://www.pulumi.com/
EdwardDiego 5y ago
> The word cluster is an anachronism to an end-user in the cloud! I'm already running things in the cloud where there's elastic resources available at any time. Why do I have to think about the underlying pool of resources? Just maintain it for me. Because very often, software that runs on clusters, requires thought when resizing. In fact, I'm trying to think of a distributed software product where resizing a cluster, doesn't require a human in the loop making calculated decisions. Even with things like Spark where you can easily add a bunch of worker nodes to a cluster in the cloud, there's still core nodes maintaining a shared filesystem for when you need to spill to disk.
cryptica 5y ago
>> Software infrastructure (by which I include everything ending with *aaS, or anything remotely similar to it) is an exciting field, in particular because (despite what the neo-luddites may say) it keeps getting better every year The fact that many people think that software infrastructure is getting worse is a very bad sign in itself (it cannot be ignored). There has always been religious wars over software development practices, but never to the extent we have today.
tammerk 5y ago
Literally author is asking for something in the cloud which is abstracted away, fast, easy to use and easy to debug. This is not possible imho. There are always trade-offs. You can't get all of them for "free". e.g serverless services will be slower than your own setup, like always. Debugging, I'm not sure but I don't think it will be as easier as your own setup ever.
- pwinnski 5y ago
  I don't know. What he's describing sounds very close to what I've been working on, all AWS Serverless with lambdas and SQS and DynamoDB, with config (CloudFormation) via code in BitBucket. I can launch a new lambda in less than a minute with a couple of aws-sam-cli commands, and get responses from curl in less than 2ms. I mean, nothing's perfect, but AWS Serverless seems to be the closest thing I've ever seen to truly abstracting away everything but the actual code.
sullyj3 5y ago
The point about the AWS console being thoroughly un-delightful is well made, it's a nightmare.
Throaway838921 5y ago
My biggest problem with modern infrastructure is how much resources they use for simple things. They scale upwards, but they don't scale down. I tried OpenFAAS in Kubernetes, to see if I could run simple lambda like loads. Default setup took north of 8 Gb of memory! I just want efficient and simple microservices infrastructure, that doesn't hog 8 Gb of memory to run a simple functions or small microservices.
- kazen44 5y ago
  might i recommend running simple (go) binaries on a couple of hosts running freebsd? (running them in a jail if you want). Proper isolation that is battle tested, rock solid operating system that doesn't try to reinvent the wheel every 3 years and as an added bonus you get ZFS which makes development, upgrades and maintenance a breeze thanks to proper snapshotting. We did this a simple side project, originally written in PHP, then python and now go and it has been rock solid and easily scalable for atleast a decade or more. Heck, you can even run linux compatible binaries in linux compatible jails nowadays[0]. 0: https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails
lnsp 5y ago
I am currently working on a project attempting to achieve something like this called Valar (https://valar.dev https://valar.dev). It's still quite experimental and in private beta, but feel free to take a look and put yourself on the waiting list. I'm targeting small, private projects so it's not really suited for full-on production workloads yet. The core of it is a serverless system that shrinks workload quotas while running them (similar to the Google Autopilot system). This way you don't have to rewrite your entire codebase into lambdas and the end user can save a lot of costs by only specifying a resource cap (but probably using a lot less, therefore paying less).
anonfunction 5y ago
> I'm not asking for milliseconds! Just please at least get it to less than a second. Is there a word for an oxymoron but instead of contradictory words it's sentences?
thiht 5y ago
> The word cluster is an anachronism to an end-user in the cloud! I'm already running things in the cloud where there's elastic resources available at any time. Why do I have to think about the underlying pool of resources? Just maintain it for me. You still need to know the geographic location of your physical cluster for multiple reasons though: legal (Cloud Act is a thing!), performance (you need closeness to your end users) and sometimes redundancy when talking about multi clusters architecture.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
> "but there was nothing on the checklist to make sure the experience is delightful." This is the key point. AWS is alright once you wrap your head around it. But it seems it was "designed" / gobbled together without any form of empathy for their poor users whatsoever. The best you can say about it that it works as documented. But you'll be reading a lot that to figure out what and how or even why. Absolutely nothing is straightforward, ever. I've indeed had the pleasure of figuring out hosting a static website on AWS via https. Took me several attempts top get right. Calling that process complicated does not do it justice. It's basically a series of hacks to integrate components that were clearly not intended to be used like this. Think doing s3 redirects just to ensure www goes to the main domain. And then another set of redirects at the CDN level to ensure http goes to https. Make sure you name your resources just right or you will have a hard time pointing to them from route 53. (DNS). And of course you want auto renewing certificates to go with that. All possible. But it's indeed a long process with many pitfalls, possible mistakes, gotchas, etc. This lack of empathy is a common failing with engineers that typically lack the end to end perspective on what users/customers actually need (they don't care, or if they do lack key information) and are actually discouraged from thinking for themselves by managers that are not a whole lot better that report to boards populated by sociopaths who just want their minions to do whatever the hell it is they do. Exaggerating of course. But decision making in large companies is problematic at best. Sane results are almost accidental once you reach a certain size. SAAS software in general has this problem. Usability stops being a concern once you've locked enough customers into paying you in perpetuity.
hendry 5y ago
I encourage to follow developers like https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/ https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/ who are making the cloud / infra far better from a Developer Experience perspective.

321 points by klintcho 5y ago

I've been doing this since many years. Just not serverless. Rollout to production, incl. build took max. 20 minutes for a fat-client relational-database application. The author is mixing here two things that don't depend on each other.

bob1029 5y ago

I love the test-in-production illustration. This is a fairly accurate map of my journey as well. I vividly remember scolding our customers about how they needed a staging environment that was a perfect copy of production so we could guarantee a push to prod would be perfect every time. We still have that customer but we have learned a very valuable & expensive lesson. Being able to test in production is one of the most wonderful things you can ever hope to achieve in the infra arena. No ambiguity about what will happen at 2am while everyone is asleep. Someone physically picked up a device and tested it for real and said "yep its working fine". This is much more confidence inspiring for us. I used to go into technical calls with customers hoping to assuage their fears with how meticulous we would be with a test=>staging=>production release cycle. Now, I go in and literally just drop the "We prefer to test in production" bomb on them within the first 3 sentences of that conversation. You would probably not be surprised to learn that some of our more "experienced" customers enthusiastically agree with this preference right away.

edoceo 5y ago
you still have unit tests and similar right? and maybe test in a staging env lightly first? or, right to Live?
- bob1029 5y ago
  Yes we have a 2 stage process with the customer. There is still a test & production environment, but test talks to all production business systems too. Only a few people are allowed into this environment. We test with 1-5 users for a few days then decide to take it to the broader user base.
  - __jem 5y ago
    > but test talks to all production business systems too I'm not sure I understand this, would you mind explaining more? Do you mean you have multi-tenancy in databases and application (the "tenants" being stage/test and prod)?
    - pm90 5y ago
      I think what op’s referring to is a staging app version that talks to production services and databases. Eg you have a “clone” of your production UI, accessible only to devs. This clone is configured to talk to the same DB and call the same dependencies as the production service but since it’s access is limited it’s used by devs to test their new feature(s). This pattern is used where I work too. It’s been incredibly powerful. Some of our services allow for multiple staging replicas so that nobody is blocking one another; the replicas are ephemeral and nuked after testing.
      - bob1029 5y ago
        Yes. This is essentially the idea.
      - erhk 5y ago
        This is how to build a scaling DoS issue that bombs prod iirc
      - __jem 5y ago
        Right but I'm wondering how you avoid polluting your production dataset with test data, hence the question about multi-tenancy in the database. Do you use a different schema? Discriminator column? How do you know the data came from the "clone"?
erikerikson 5y ago
IMO this still keeps production a previous thing. Next comes multi-version concurrent environments on the same replicated data streams. There is only production and delivery to customers is access version 3 instead of version 2. This can be proceeded by an automated comparison of v2's outputs to v3's and a review (or code description of the expected differences).
nine_k 5y ago
You can test in production by moving fast and breaking things (the clueless guy). You can test in production by having canaries, filters, etc, and allowing some production traffic to the version under test. This is the "wired" guy. For many backend things, you can test in production by shadowing the current services, and copying the traffic into your services under test. It has limitations, but can produce zero disruption.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- erhk 5y ago
  Until you discover that prod has an edgecase string that has the blood mother of cthulu's last name written in swahili-hebrew, (you know it as swabrew, or SHE for short) which due to a lack of goat blood on migration day is one of the ~3% of edge cases that aren't replicated and now youve got an entirly new underground civilization born that is expecting you to serve them traffic with 5 9's and you can only do 4 because of the flakiness.

skywhopper 5y ago

While it’s a good idea to lay out a vision for the future of infrastructure as a service, it’s annoying to read this sort of article that seems to believe it ought to be simple to provide true serverless magical on-demand resources for random code. Fact is it’s a lot more complicated than that unless you’re just a small fry without any really hard problems to solve. It’s silly to complain that AWS doesn’t have a service that allows any random programmer to deploy a globally scalable app with one click. For one thing, you aren’t AWS’s primary target audience. For two, the class of problems that can be solved with such simple architectures is actually pretty small. But for three, it’s not actually even possible to do what you’re asking for any random code unless you are willing to spend a really fantastic amount of money. And even then once you get into the realm of a serious number of users or a serious scale of problem solving, then you’ll be back into bespoke-zone, making annoying tradeoffs and having to learn about infra details you never wanted to care about. Because, sorry, but abstraction is not free and it’s definitely not perfect.

nine_k 5y ago
> It’s silly to complain that AWS doesn’t have a service that allows any random programmer to deploy a globally scalable app with one click. For one thing, you aren’t AWS’s primary target audience. I won't be surprised if AWS makes disproportionately more money off smaller operations which don't want to care about honing their infra, but want something be done quickly and with low effort. They quench the problem with money, while the absolute amounts are not very high. So targeting them even more, and eating a slice of Heroku's pie, looks pretty logical for AWS to do.
- t_sawyer 5y ago
  They don't need to eat a slice of Heroku's pie. Heroku pays AWS for each of their customers already. Their infrastructure runs on top of AWS.

justicezyx 5y ago

Looks like someone who had not spend enough time to review modern computing history. Heck, who voted up this article... This article is like the NTF frenzy, it's fine, but it's going to be baseless because it's looking too far in the future.

tomc1985 5y ago
Yeah, I just love his breathless dismissal of the incumbents (Guess I'm a neo-luddite!) In fact I think a lot of this optimism is in dire need of a couple of baseball-bat hits to the kneecaps. > But things are rarely built to optimize for developer productivity. Well, these a-holes abandoned Rails in favor of serverless-react-lambda-script. They made their bed, now they must lie in it.
nine_k 5y ago
Why? I don't see much unreasonable here. Make infrastructure changes faster? Why not. Make it easier to create ephemeral resources? Why not. Make scaling completely automatic? Would be nice. Though here I'd of course like to have some knobs to control the automatic scaling, else it could easily run out of reasonable budget. My only disagreement is client library vs declarative configuration. I'd prefer the latter, but using some better language than YAML; maybe, say, Dhall. And yes, it's now a common wisdom that the cloud is the new mainframe; e.g. [1]. Well, okay; if this is what is required to run services at scale without breaking the bank, so be it. If deploying to millions of ZX-81 Spectrums happened to give 3x reduction in opex, the industry would adapt to that, too. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26857859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26857859

anurag 5y ago

Testing in 'production' has been possible for a while: Heroku has Review Apps, and Render (where I work) has Preview Environments [1] that spin up a high-fidelity isolated copy of your production stack on every PR and tear it down when you're done. [1] https://render.com/docs/preview-environments https://render.com/docs/preview-environments

nrmitchi 5y ago
There are a variety of other, similar Preview Environment offerings out there, and most PaaS offer their own options built in. If you're using a PaaS with a built-in solution, you'll almost always be better off using theirs. A lot of the difficulty comes when you've "outgrown" a PaaS for one-reason-or-anyother, and need to try to back-fill this functionality in a production-like fashion. If you're intereseted, I wrote a thing attempting to cover some of the options ~6 months ago, but recognize that there has been a fair amount of change in the space since then (I really should update the post). [thing: https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product-review-tools/ https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product...]
- anurag 5y ago
  Great article and certainly worth an update! Specifically for Render, you can now: 1. Specify a TTL on inactive PRs 2. Pick less expensive plans for preview services.
sebmellen 5y ago
Hey, a question about Render — do you run your own base infra/colocate or do you use a VPS/bare metal setup or do you sit on top of a cloud? I love the service but I’m wondering if you’ll expand outside of the two available regions anytime soon. I understand this might be hard based on your infra setup.
- anurag 5y ago
  > I love the service Thanks! We will absolutely expand beyond Oregon and Frankfurt later this year. Our infrastructure was built to be cloud agnostic: we run on AWS, GCP, and Equinix Metal.

henning 5y ago

The desire to go "truly serverless" and pretend the computer does not actually exist is absolutely delusional. The refusal to acknowledge that software will never be anything beyond executable data on some kind of computer, somewhere, is why most web-based software is so slow and shitty. Having someone build the server and assign your code to run on it does not change that one (pun intended) bit.

valenterry 5y ago
It is not. The JVM is something that comes quite close actually, but it lacks a few environment features and configuration/specification options to fully cover the space that most people need, hence why everyone is using docker now. But if you think about it: most people don't really want to use docker. It's just the best option currently. Many don't care what OS they run on, because they don't rely on any specific OS functionality. This is exactly what should be improved for running code that can operate on a higher abstraction.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  BEAM, the erlang vm comes even closer to that. Everything is a process and has the same semantics. Erlang and Elixir take this to their full advantage.
  - valenterry 5y ago
    I have little experience with BEAM, but I'm curious about it. Is there a good description of the scope of the VM and what it defines and what not?
    - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
      These resources are commonly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pwlvy3zz9M&t=833s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pwlvy3zz9M&t=833s, https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/ https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/, http://beam-wisdoms.clau.se/en/latest/ http://beam-wisdoms.clau.se/en/latest/

pbiggar 5y ago

So I'm creating something that's exactly like the author is describing: https://darklang.com https://darklang.com He's right that there's no reason that things shouldn't be fully Serverless, and have instant deployment [1]. These are key parts of the design of Dark that I think no one else has managed to solve in any meaningful way. (I'll concede that we haven't solved a lot of other problems had still need to be solved to be usable and delightful though). [1] https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/

mathgladiator 5y ago
That's super cool. There is a lot to be said about simple things, and I think the language approach makes a ton of sense. I'm building a serverless document store with mini-databases using a programming language I designed for board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/ http://www.adama-lang.org/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nonameiguess 5y ago

This is a lot harder than the author wants to realize. Elastic infrastructure deployment in sub second latency is not likely to ever happen. The problem is simply a lot harder than serving http requests. It's not receive some bytes of text, send back some bytes of text. VMs are just files and can be resized, but optimal resource allocation on multitenant systems is effectively solving the knapsack problem. It's NP hard, and at least some of the time, it involves actually powering devices on and off and moving physical equipment around. There is still metal and silicon back there. In order to just be able to grow on demand, the infrastructure provider needs to overprovision for worst case, as the year of Covid should have taught us the entire idea of just in time logistics for electronics is a house of cards. Ships still need to cross oceans. My wife was the QA lead for a data center provisioner for a US government agency a few years back and the prime contractor refused to eat into their own capital and overprovision, instead waiting for a contract to be approved before they would purchase anything. They somehow made it basically work through what may as well have been magic, but damn the horror stories she could tell. This is where Amazon is eating everyone else's lunch by taking the risk and being right on every bet so far so if they build it, the customers will come. But even so, after all of that to complain that deploying infrastructure changes takes more than a second, my god man! Do you have any idea how far we've come? Try setting up a basic homelab some time or go work in a legacy shop where every server is manually configured at enterprise scale, which is probably every company that wasn't founded in the past 20 years. Contrast that with the current tooling for automated machine image builds, automated replicated server deployment, automated network provisioning, infrastructure as code. Try doing any of this by hand to see how hard it really is. Modern data centers and networking infrastructure may as well be a 9th wonder of the world. It is unbelievable to see how underappreciated they are sometimes. Also, hardware is not software. Software is governed solely by math. It doesn't exactly what it says it will do, every single time. Failures of software are entirely the fault of bad program logic. Hardware isn't like that at all. It is governed by physics and it is guaranteed to fail. Changes in temperature and air pressure can change results or cause a system to shut down completely. Hiding that from application developers is absolutely the goal, but you're never going to make a complex problem simple. It's always going to be complex. Remember my wife? Let me tell you one of her better stories. I can't even name the responsible parties because of NDAs, but one day a while back an entire network segment just stopped working. Connectivity was lost for several applications considered "critical" the US defense industrial base, after they had done nothing but pre-provision reserved equipment for a program that hadn't even gone into ops yet and wasn't using the equipment. It turned there was some obscure bug in a particular model of switch that caused it to report a packet exchange as successful even though it wasn't so that failover never happened, even though alternative routes were up and available. Nobody on site could tell why this was happening because the cause ended up being locked away in chip level debug logs that only the vendor could access. The vendor claimed this could only happen one a million times, so they didn't consider it a bug. Guess how often one in a million times happens when you're routing a hundred million packets a second? Maybe your little startup isn't doing that, but the entire US military industrial complex or Amazon is absolutely doing that, and those are the problems they are concerned with addressing, not making the experience better for some one man shop paying a few bucks a month who think yaml dsls make software-defined infrastructure too complicated for his app that can plausibly run on a single laptop.

ngngngng 5y ago

> but it takes 45 steps in the console and 12 of them are highly confusing if you never did it before. I am constantly amazed that software engineering is as difficult as it is in ways like this. Half the time I just figure I'm an idiot because no one else is struggling with the same things but I probably just don't notice when they are.

edoceo 5y ago
many things are confusing if you've never done it before. my first HAproxy setup wasn't great, my 10th is rock solid, just needed a bit of context-specific learning. same with PG replication (locical and archive) but 3rd go was awesome. its a flawed expectation to get it right the first time.
- mLuby 5y ago
  > its a flawed expectation to get it right the first time. If your toilet overflows when you push the lever down and flushes when you pull the lever up, you'll learn pretty quickly how to use it. And other users will too, after they screw up or after you carefully explain so they're sure to understand. But it's just a shitty design! The fact that you've learned to deal with it doesn't excuse it or mean it shouldn't be fixed for all future users. I want to get it right the first time; I don't expect to only because I've been hurt too many times by shoddy UIs. A good UI, whether a GUI, API, CLI, or other TLA, guides users through their workflow as effortlessly as possible by means of sensible defaults, law of least surprise, and progressive reveal of power features. Relevant http://xkcd.com/1168 http://xkcd.com/1168
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    There's still no way around having to learn complex features. For most software, building a really simple first try is very easy, but almost certainly useless. Once you need to actually do something useful, uunavoidable complexity sets in and all of a sudden defaults and such don't really help anymore. Some people try to push defaults further with templates and wizards, but that often still doesn't really work for your particular use case, and also makes you first search through many options before realizing you actually need to go for the scary blank one.

Ericson2314 5y ago

I'm sympathetic to the motivation, but the author is a bit naive in some of the specific requirements --- we absolutely must spin things up locally to retain our autonomy. Sure, allow testing in the cloud too, but don't make that the only option. The cloud should be a tiny margin business, that it isn't shows just how untrustworthy it is. The win-win efficiency isn't there because there's so much rentier overhead. Oh, and use Nix :).

throwaway823882 5y ago

There will not be a massive productivity boost in the next 10 years. We haven't had a productivity boost in the past 20 years. In fact, we're much less productive now. But I digress. We're still largely making and running software the same way we did 20 years ago. The only major differences are the principles that underpin the most modern best practices. "What the fuck does that mean," you say? It means that I can take a shitty tool and a shitty piece of infrastructure, and make it objectively more reliable, faster, and easier, by using modern practices. Conversely, I can take the latest tools, infrastructure, etc, and make them run like absolute dogshit, by using the practices of a decade ago. Let's take K8s for example. It's like somebody decided to take the worst trends in software development and design-by-committee and churned out something that is simultaneously complicated and hard to use [correctly]. Setting it up correctly, and using it correctly (no, Mr. I'm A Javascript Developer, however you think you're supposed to use it, you are wrong), for a medium-scale business, requires banging your head against a hodge-podge of poorly designed interfaces and bolting on add-on software for at least a month. This is ridiculous, because what you actually needed was something whose principles match those of K8s. You want immutable infrastructure as code. You want scalable architecture. You want (in theory) loosely joined components. Do you need K8s to do that? No! K8s is literally the most complicated way that exists to do that. Next let's take Terraform. A clunky DSL that is slowly becoming sentient. Core functionality that defeats itself (running terraform apply is unpredictable, due to the nature of the design of the program, even though it was created with the opposite intention). Kludgy interfaces that are a chore to cobble together. Dependency hell. Actual runtime in the 10s of minutes (for the infra of a single product/region/AWS account). And no meaningful idea if the state of the infrastructure matches its state file matches the code that generated it all. To say nothing of continuous integration. Do you need all of that to do infrastructure as code? Of course not. A shell script and Make could do the same thing. So, you have a kludgy Configuration Management tool (terraform), and a kludgy Cluster Management tool (k8s), and all just to run your fucking Node.js webserver, make sure it restarts, and make sure a load-balancer is updated when you rotate in new webservers. Did you need all of this, really? No. The end result is functionally equivalent to a couple of shell scripts on some random VMs. To get the best out of "Software Infrastructure" you don't need to use anything fancy. You just need to use something right. --- But there's a different problem with infra, and it's big. See, Cloud Infrastructure works like a server. Like a physical server, with a regular old OS. To manage it, first you "spin up" the physical server. Then you "configure" the server with some "configuration management" software. Then you "copy some files to it". Then you "run something on it". And while it's running, you change it, live. This is how all Cloud Infra is managed. This is known as Mutable Infrastructure. Modern best practices have shown that this is really bad, because it leads to lots of problems and accidental-yet-necessary complexity. So what is the solution? The solution is for cloud vendors to supply interfaces to manage their gear immutably. And that is a really big fucking problem. Say I have an S3 bucket. Let's say I have a bucket policy, lifecycle policy, ACLs, replication, object-level settings, versioning, etc. The whole 9 yards. Now let's say I make one change to the bucket (a policy change, say). Production breaks. Can I "back out" that change in one swift command, without even thinking about it, and know that it will work? No. Assuming an AWS API call even has versioning functionality (most don't) I can use some API calls to query the previous version, apply the previous version as the current version, change some other things, and hope that fixes it. But there's no semblance of `rm S3-BUCKET ; cp -f S3-BUCKET-OLD S3-BUCKET`. You have to just manually fix it "live". Usually with some fucked up tool with a state file and a DSL that will randomly break on you. There is literally no way to manage cloud infrastructure immutably. Cloud vendors will have to re-design literally all of their interfaces for a completely new paradigm. And that's just interfaces. If trying to do the S3 bucket copy fails for "mysterious reasons" (AWS API calls fail all the time, kids), then your immutable change didn't work, and you still have a broken system. So they actually have to change how they run their infrastructure, too, to use operations that are extremely unlikely to "misbehave". Do you know how much shit that covers? It took them like 20 years to make what we have now. It may take another 10 to 20 years to change it all. Therefore, for a very, very long time to come, we will be stuck with shitty tools, trying to shittily manage our infrastructure, the way we used to manage web servers in the 90s. Even though we know for a fact that there is a better way. But we literally don't have the time or resources to do that any time soon, because it's all too big.

XorNot 5y ago

Some of this I agree with, even if the overall is to me asking for "magic" (I wouldn't mind trying to get there though). For me the one I really want is "serverless" SQL databases. On every cloud platform at the moment, whatever cloud SQL thing they're offering is really obviously MySQL or Postgres on some VMs under the hood. The provisioning time is the same, the way it works is the same, the outage windows are the same. But why is any of that still the case? We've had the concept of shared hosting of SQL DBs for years, which is definitely more efficient resource wise, why have we failed to sufficiently hide the abstraction behind appropriate resource scheduling? Basically, why isn't there just a Postgres-protocol socket I connect to as a user that will make tables on demand for me? No upfront sizing or provisioning, just bill me for what I'm using at some rate which covers your costs and colocate/shared host/whatever it onto the type of server hardware which can respond to that demand. This feels like a problem Google in particular should be able to address somehow.

stadium 5y ago
There is AWS aurora serverless https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/
- klintcho 5y ago
  I know this perspective is not relevant for most companies: But for side-projects and a-like the cold-start time for Aurora is like 15 - 30 seconds, and the first query always times out. Having it always on (if just 1 "compute") will cost you 30 USD a month. I'm hoping for Aurora to eventually be closer to DynamoDB pricing and startup (I'm fine with 5 - 10 second cold start as long as it doesn't time out the first request everytime.)
  - stadium 5y ago
    Interesting, thanks for sharing. How does data get loaded? Can it use s3 as an external source similar to foreign data wrappers?
  - cowsandmilk 5y ago

slver 5y ago

My impressions TLDR: 1. "Built for delight" Author wants everyone to suddenly start making nicer things. 2. "Truly serverless" Author wants to throw code at cloud, without thinking about performance or resource usage. 3. "Fast" Author wants every AWS command to take less than a second. 4. "Ephemeral resources" Author wants to test in the cloud with less effort. 5. "Code not configuration" Author doesn't like static config, everything should be an API. 6. "Built for productivity" Author wants everyone to be more productive. All in all, reads a bit like the random musings of a frustrated cloud server user.

thundergolfer 5y ago
> Author wants to throw code at cloud, without thinking about performance or resource usage. Not really what Erik is saying. Taking AWS S3 as an example, you absolutely need to think about performance and resource usage when dealing with S3, but you never have to think about the servers. You never think about some cluster that is making your S3 usage possible. S3 is such a great success that there's very few (if any) examples of companies starting with S3 and then getting too big for it and needing to build their own system (thus wrangling servers and clusters etc). Dropbox migrated off of S3 to 'Magic Pocket' but I'm pretty sure this was for $$ reasons not because AWS simply couldn't handle Dropbox's massive read+write requirements. AWS S3 is a marvel of serverless computing, and we should try and get more like it.
- slver 5y ago
  Maybe I'm confused by all those doubleplusgood buzzwords that almost deliberately say the opposite of what's happening (like serverless servers).

mikewarot 5y ago

Virtualization eventually will be seen as the unnecessary layer added to make up for operating systems that lack capability based security. It's going to take a decade to refactor things to remove that layer. Once done, you'll be able to safely run a process against a list of resources.

encryptluks2 5y ago
Agreed 100%, but you still are going to get the old-timers who insist that virtualization and containers just make things more difficult and that their old school approach is the best.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Good, that's a very universal interview question that will get me a practically direct answer to the actual question. It's not easy today... I'm asking about JS/HTML/CSS if the candidate isn't web-oriented, but what do I ask the JS guys? Perhaps a view layer bait?
chii 5y ago
going by how the web is doing today, the refactor you refer to will never be done.
philipswood 5y ago
Agreed. Operating systems abstract resources, the fact that we needed containers and VMs point to the fact that the first set of implementations weren't optimal and needs to be refactored. For VMs, security is the one concern, the others would be more direct access to lower levels and greater access to the hardware and internals than just a driver model. For containers I'd say that the abstraction/interface presented to an application was too narrow: clearly network and filesystem abstractions needed to be included as well (not just memory, OS APIs and hardware abstractions). I imagine that an OS from the far future could perform the functions of a hypervisor and a container engine and would allow richer abilities to add code to what we consider kernel space, one could write a program in Unikernel style, as well as have normal programs look more container-like.

zmmmmm 5y ago

This post mingles different interpretations of "serverless" - the current fad of "lambda" style functions etc and premium / full stack managed application offerings like Heroku. Although they are both "fully managed" they have a lot of differences. Both though assume the "hard" problem of infrastructure is the one-time setup cost, and that your architecture design should be centered around minimising that cost - even though it's mostly a one-time cost. I really feel like this is a false economy - we should optimise for long term cost, not short term. It may be very seductive that you can deploy your code within 10 minutes without knowing anything, but that doesn't make it the right long term decision. In particular when it goes all the way to architechting large parts of your app out of lambda functions and the like we are making a huge archtitectural sacrifice which is something that should absolutely not be done purely on the base of making some short term pain go away.

deepzn 5y ago
what would you say is the architectural sacrifice of pushing things out to the edge, or using lambda functions per say in your opinion? There are issues about resolving state at the edge, though Cloudflare has solved some of that with durable objects, and Fastly is working on something too. Think there are memory constraints as of now however. Security too is better in these platforms at the edge - true zero trust models.
- zmmmmm 5y ago
  It's similar to the issues with microservices. You've broken something that could be "simple" single monolithic application into many pieces and now there is huge complexity in how they are all joined together, fragemented state, latency, transactional integrity, data models, error handling, etc etc. Then your developers can't debug or test them properly, what used to be a simple breakpoint in the debugger and stepping into a function call and directly observing state requires a huge complexity to trace what is happening. All these things got much harder than they used to be, and you're living with that forever - to pay for a one-time saving on setting up some self-updating, auto-scaling infrastructure.
  - 5y ago

asim 5y ago

Been there. Dreamed that. Built my ideal experience -> https://m3o.com https://m3o.com Honestly I've spent the better part of a decade talking about these things and if only someone would solve it or I had the resources to do it myself. I'm sure it'll happen. It's just going to look different than we thought. GitHub worked because it was collaborative and I think the next cloud won't look like an AWS, it'll look more like a social graph that just happens to be about building and running software. This graph only exists inside your company right now. In the future it'll exist as a product.

jiggawatts 5y ago

Years and years ago I saw an advertisement by a SAN array vendor where their gimmick was that they supported very cheap read/write snapshots of very large datasets, in combination with a set of transforms such as data masking or anonymisation. Their target market was same as the OP: developers that need rapid like-for-like clones of production. The SAN could create a full VM server pool with a logical clone of hundreds of terabytes of data in seconds, spin it up, and blow it away. The idea was that instead of the typical "DEV/TST/PRD" environments, you'd have potentially dozens of numbered test environments. It was cheap enough to deploy a full cluster of something as complex as SAP or a multi-tier Oracle application for a CI/CD integration test! Meanwhile, in the Azure cloud: Practically nothing has a "copy" option. Deploying basic resources such as SQL Virtual Machines or App Service environments can take hours. Snapshotting a VM takes a full copy. Etc... It's like the public cloud is in a weird way ahead of the curve, yet living with 1990s limitations. Speaking of limitations: One reason cheap cloning is "hard" is because of IPv4 addressing. There are few enough addresses (even in the 10.0.0.0/8 private range) that subnets have to be manually preallocated to avoid conflicts, addresses have to be "managed" and carefully "doled out". This makes it completely impossible to deploy many copies of complex multi-tier applications. The public cloud vendors had their opportunity to use a flat IPv6 address space for everything. It would have made hundreds points of complexity simply vanish. The programming analogy is like going from 16-bit addressing with the complexity of near & far pointers to a flat 64-bit virtual address space. It's not just about more memory! The programming paradigms are different. Same thing with networking. IPv6 simply eliminates entire categories of networking configuration and complexity. PS: Azure's network team decided to unnecessarily use NAT for IPv6, making it exactly (100%!) as complex as IPv4...

dilyevsky 5y ago
gcp doesn’t even give you ipv6 at all. Talk about limitations...
pgwhalen 5y ago
Your comment makes me realize how lucky I am at my job: we do this production environment replication via “SAN magic” and it is so insanely useful.

qaq 5y ago

Given how much capitalization AWS and Azure account for it's surprising how little progress has being made in many areas. A true serverless RDBMS database priced sanely that basically charged for qry execution time and storage without need to provision some "black box" capacity units and would be suitable for a large scale app. Most of all workflows that require contacting support and arbitrary account limits that force you to split solutions across multiple accounts wtf.

erikerikson 5y ago
Both Dynamo DB and Cosmos DB offer effectively what you're asking for. Limits are a risk that must be mitigated but they aren't arbitrary, they exist to avoid interference of one customer on to others. They protect the service which, to providers and reasonably so, is more important than any one customer.
- qaq 5y ago
  DynamoDB is really crappy key value store with poor feature set and really bad limits.I am talking about real SQL RDBMS like Aurora Serverless but not built on top of legacy codebase and shoehorned into the use case. As far as account limits if I consume X+X things across 2 accounts vs 1 account what did it protect exactly? An org can have any number of accounts and add them at any time.
- aliswe 5y ago
  CostmostDB is not sanely priced IMO!

marcus_holmes 5y ago

why does this rant start by talking about optimising things for the user, and then end up talking about optimising things for the developer? I get that they're talking about productivity tools for developers. But missing the point that optimising these tools for developers will mean they're not optimised for the actual user. We're not the customer. The stuff we write should be fast when run in production. Having it be nice to develop on is a bonus. Having generated configuration that the developer doesn't have to think about means that the system can't be tweaked for the particular use case to make it faster in production. Yes, it's easier. No, that's not better. Our job is to handle the complexity. To take "simple" business requirements and deal with all the complexity that is needed to make those work. That's the gig.

jcelerier 5y ago

I'm so happy to just develop desktop apps in C++ / Qt. I commit, I tag a release, this generates mac / windows / linux binaries, users download them, the end.

m_st 5y ago
I'm very happy in the same camp using C# and SQL (though Windows only). Thank you for making desktop apps.
drinchev 5y ago
There is hardly an app that I use these days that doesn't require internet connection. I guess once your app needs it, you will have the same problems.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > There is hardly an app that I use these days that doesn't require internet connection. well, most of the ones I use (my note taking app, my text editor, my music player, my file manager) don't so YMMV
abraxas 5y ago
I want to live in that world again. It ended for me about 19 years ago when I left my last "desktop software" job. How do you manage to avoid "web stacks" in this day and age?
- jcelerier 5y ago
  Most people still use desktop software for large projects ? Adobe stuff, music software, basically any advanced authoring software - the performance of the web platform is just not there for projects measured in dozens of gigabytes of media, hundreds of AVX2-optimized plug-ins, etc (and it's a field with a large tradition of benchmarking software between each other to find the most efficient, see e.g. dawbench)
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  I write backend code, and it's basically Java + Spring. No web technologies beyond HTTP in sight.

zby 5y ago

I have been observing it at my work - the production systems were getting more and more complicated and it was harder and harder to set up dev and test environments. It also started to break the underlying system when you had to install old libs for the project - and then maybe you needed two versions of the libs for different branches of the project. So I started to develop in virtual machines. Then people started using containers for that. That felt like a step back, because it was a different abstraction - and you had to do things differently on the dev machine that on production. Then I learned that people use terraform or ansible to setup the production and I hoped that I could run the same scripts on my dev machine in a vm and have environment just like production. But no - when I encountered a project with terraform and ansible - the scripts contain lots of AWS related stuff, it is impossible to untangle it and run on dev machines. I have never learned kubernets, I don't do much programming any more, with containers both in production and dev that would make sense - but I still don't see scripts that would just spin off a dev environment. Maybe dev environments on a dev machine is really a dead end now - and what we need is a way to spin of dev envs in the cloud.

erhk 5y ago

Google app engine was released in 2008...

InsomniacL 5y ago

A trainer said to me YAML is like JSON but easier to read, he then said count the whitespace on every line... Sure, An IDE makes it easier to see, but the same can be said about JSON.

ramoz 5y ago

I think we assume too much about where infrastructure is headed. Serverless, containers... they're fueling this notion of increased productivity but I don't think they themselves are keeping up with where Software is headed. E.g. "AI: --- in a lot of cases you're going to be breaking through every level of abstraction with any *aaS above the physical cores and attached devices. Traditional CRUD simplified? -- sure, but I feel like these "infrastructure" dev opportunities will be eaten by digital platforms and cloud solutions in the coming years.

evoxmusic 5y ago

Well written article. This exactly with this spirit - of making AWS, GCP, Azure accessible to any developer that Qovery has been built. The idea of Qovery is to build the future of the Cloud - making developers to deploy their apps on AWS in just a few seconds. No joke. 2200+ developers from 110+ countries are deploying hundreds of apps per day. And this is only the beginning. Thanks again for sharing this article. You can give a try to Qovery here: https://www.qovery.com https://www.qovery.com

max_ 5y ago

>Truly serverless >The beauty of this is that a lot of the configuration stuff goes away magically. The competitive advantage of most startups is to deliver business value through business logic, not capacity planning and capacity management! Is this exactly what cloudflare's workers is doing? [0] I love the fact that I only need to think of the business logic. Development without the need for VMs and obscure configuration scripts feels — and is in fact very productive. I don't think I will want to use anything else for hosting my back ends. [0]:https://workers.cloudflare.com/ https://workers.cloudflare.com/

simonpantzare 5y ago
I'm really excited by Cloudflare Workers. I hope to get a chance to build something tangible with it soon. The developer experience with Wrangler is superb and paired with Durable Objects and KV you got disk and in-memory storage covered. I'm a fan of and have used AWS for 10+ years but wiring everything together still feels like a chore, and Serverless framework and similar tools just hide these details which will inevitable haunt you at some point. Cloudflare recently announced database partners. Higher-level options for storage and especially streaming would be welcome improvements to me. Macrometa covers a lot of ground but sadly it seems like you need to be on their enterprise tier to use the interesting parts that don't overlap with KV/DO, such as streams. [0] I played with recently launched support for ES modules and custom builds in Wrangler/Cloudflare Workers the other day together with ClojureScript and found the experience quite delightful. [1] [0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/partnership-announcement-db/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/partnership-announcement-db/ [1]: https://dev.to/pilt/clojurescript-on-cloudflare-workers-2d9g https://dev.to/pilt/clojurescript-on-cloudflare-workers-2d9g

kkapelon 5y ago

Code not configuration We have this already -> https://www.pulumi.com/ https://www.pulumi.com/

EdwardDiego 5y ago

> The word cluster is an anachronism to an end-user in the cloud! I'm already running things in the cloud where there's elastic resources available at any time. Why do I have to think about the underlying pool of resources? Just maintain it for me. Because very often, software that runs on clusters, requires thought when resizing. In fact, I'm trying to think of a distributed software product where resizing a cluster, doesn't require a human in the loop making calculated decisions. Even with things like Spark where you can easily add a bunch of worker nodes to a cluster in the cloud, there's still core nodes maintaining a shared filesystem for when you need to spill to disk.

cryptica 5y ago

>> Software infrastructure (by which I include everything ending with *aaS, or anything remotely similar to it) is an exciting field, in particular because (despite what the neo-luddites may say) it keeps getting better every year The fact that many people think that software infrastructure is getting worse is a very bad sign in itself (it cannot be ignored). There has always been religious wars over software development practices, but never to the extent we have today.

tammerk 5y ago

Literally author is asking for something in the cloud which is abstracted away, fast, easy to use and easy to debug. This is not possible imho. There are always trade-offs. You can't get all of them for "free". e.g serverless services will be slower than your own setup, like always. Debugging, I'm not sure but I don't think it will be as easier as your own setup ever.

pwinnski 5y ago
I don't know. What he's describing sounds very close to what I've been working on, all AWS Serverless with lambdas and SQS and DynamoDB, with config (CloudFormation) via code in BitBucket. I can launch a new lambda in less than a minute with a couple of aws-sam-cli commands, and get responses from curl in less than 2ms. I mean, nothing's perfect, but AWS Serverless seems to be the closest thing I've ever seen to truly abstracting away everything but the actual code.

sullyj3 5y ago

The point about the AWS console being thoroughly un-delightful is well made, it's a nightmare.

Throaway838921 5y ago

My biggest problem with modern infrastructure is how much resources they use for simple things. They scale upwards, but they don't scale down. I tried OpenFAAS in Kubernetes, to see if I could run simple lambda like loads. Default setup took north of 8 Gb of memory! I just want efficient and simple microservices infrastructure, that doesn't hog 8 Gb of memory to run a simple functions or small microservices.

kazen44 5y ago
might i recommend running simple (go) binaries on a couple of hosts running freebsd? (running them in a jail if you want). Proper isolation that is battle tested, rock solid operating system that doesn't try to reinvent the wheel every 3 years and as an added bonus you get ZFS which makes development, upgrades and maintenance a breeze thanks to proper snapshotting. We did this a simple side project, originally written in PHP, then python and now go and it has been rock solid and easily scalable for atleast a decade or more. Heck, you can even run linux compatible binaries in linux compatible jails nowadays[0]. 0: https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails

lnsp 5y ago

I am currently working on a project attempting to achieve something like this called Valar (https://valar.dev https://valar.dev). It's still quite experimental and in private beta, but feel free to take a look and put yourself on the waiting list. I'm targeting small, private projects so it's not really suited for full-on production workloads yet. The core of it is a serverless system that shrinks workload quotas while running them (similar to the Google Autopilot system). This way you don't have to rewrite your entire codebase into lambdas and the end user can save a lot of costs by only specifying a resource cap (but probably using a lot less, therefore paying less).

anonfunction 5y ago

> I'm not asking for milliseconds! Just please at least get it to less than a second. Is there a word for an oxymoron but instead of contradictory words it's sentences?

thiht 5y ago

> The word cluster is an anachronism to an end-user in the cloud! I'm already running things in the cloud where there's elastic resources available at any time. Why do I have to think about the underlying pool of resources? Just maintain it for me. You still need to know the geographic location of your physical cluster for multiple reasons though: legal (Cloud Act is a thing!), performance (you need closeness to your end users) and sometimes redundancy when talking about multi clusters architecture.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

> "but there was nothing on the checklist to make sure the experience is delightful." This is the key point. AWS is alright once you wrap your head around it. But it seems it was "designed" / gobbled together without any form of empathy for their poor users whatsoever. The best you can say about it that it works as documented. But you'll be reading a lot that to figure out what and how or even why. Absolutely nothing is straightforward, ever. I've indeed had the pleasure of figuring out hosting a static website on AWS via https. Took me several attempts top get right. Calling that process complicated does not do it justice. It's basically a series of hacks to integrate components that were clearly not intended to be used like this. Think doing s3 redirects just to ensure www goes to the main domain. And then another set of redirects at the CDN level to ensure http goes to https. Make sure you name your resources just right or you will have a hard time pointing to them from route 53. (DNS). And of course you want auto renewing certificates to go with that. All possible. But it's indeed a long process with many pitfalls, possible mistakes, gotchas, etc. This lack of empathy is a common failing with engineers that typically lack the end to end perspective on what users/customers actually need (they don't care, or if they do lack key information) and are actually discouraged from thinking for themselves by managers that are not a whole lot better that report to boards populated by sociopaths who just want their minions to do whatever the hell it is they do. Exaggerating of course. But decision making in large companies is problematic at best. Sane results are almost accidental once you reach a certain size. SAAS software in general has this problem. Usability stops being a concern once you've locked enough customers into paying you in perpetuity.

hendry 5y ago

I encourage to follow developers like https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/ https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/ who are making the cloud / infra far better from a Developer Experience perspective.