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by trollied 2467 days ago
All that’s really happened is that developers have learned or taken on the responsibility to build and deploy to production, and also be knowledgeable and responsible for the development stack, hence “full stack developer”.

Unfortunately, it’s incredibly dangerous if everyone involved doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Then kubernites and docker turn up. To make things easy?

No. They’re making the infrastructure more difficult to manage so that the developers can deploy things easier.

Developers should not be deploying. Large businesses should not be doing very regular deploys to live - it’s simply too risky without a shitload of testing.

Everyone praises startups with a few million customers that are open about their fuckups/downtime, but they are almost always because of their shitty modern deployments and lack of testing.

Crikey, look at Monzo. “We use a shit database and fucked up scaling it, but sorry your transactions failed and you looked like a twat buying your coffee”.

Try and revolutionise industries, fine. But ....

1 comments

If you want a database that is arbitrarily horizontally scalable, there aren't really good open source options.

As a former employee it isn't clear to me that Monzo couldn't have used boring stuff for a while and switched to C* or some equivalent later when it was genuinely needed, but it's worked well enough for them that I'm not inclined to critique the decision post hoc.

Their last outage worries me greatly.
I think there's a clear critique of Cassandra in there, in that it shouldn't even be possible to configure nodes to serve data they don't have.

Monzo... It's very hard to say. I think based on the contents of the blog post they acted reasonably and competently (yeah, the test rollout was a badly designed test, but that's easy to say post hoc). The only fair basis for critiquing Monzo would be if they had notably more averages than is 'typical', and we don't have the data or conceptual framework required to do that. As a customer, I can't think of risks that Monzo exposes you to that aren't also present with other banks. I bank with them ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯