> This guy used to run infra at uber and was incredibly salty about every single new technology. There were a lot of bad ones, but every conversation was about as constructive, free of evidence, and bitter as this blog post.
I'm going to assume you're a developer?
Infra people are usually much more apprehensive to take on new technology. Crucially I would describe classically trained sysadmins as 'pessimists to the core'. This is why there's memes of operations saying 'no'.
This is what devops was all about, the shared responsibility of it all. I'm going to assume that uber was perfect and got devops exactly right- but adding technology should in my mind always be met with the absolute most critical eye imaginable; and if he's a classically trained sysadmin then it probably comes from that place of being once bitten twice shy.
The apprehensiveness of sysadmins May have been justified in the world 5 years ago but today it sounds somewhat out of place. Note that critically evaluating new technologies is still an important skill and many infrastructure people I work with are extremely cautious about adopting new tech without spiking/getting to know it. But the sysadmins with the penchant for saying no is probably one of the reasons the devops movement actually kicked off: developers and infrastructure folks could see the immense productivity gains from being able to ship code quickly to production and got onboard the technologies that enabled this after being frustrated with the amount of time that traditional software deployment processes took.
So in today’s world, that kind of attitude is hardly productive. Skeptical? Absolutely. But open minded.
And this is why every single project out there is now a house of cards (or should I say house of YAML files) using insanely complicated technologies (like Kubernetes) with very "interesting" failure modes to say the least.
This attitude works today because of engineering-driven-development; the whole purpose of engineering is engineering and business priorities took a backseat in favor of buzzwords on the careers page and an obligatory "engineering blog" (describing how they solve self-inflicted problems), however when it comes to reliability and solving problems a large majority of projects can get away with much simpler, old-school technologies.
Almost everything in your comment is wrong. Kubernetes has enabled a whole host of observability tooling (eg opentracing), promoted a culture where app logs are easily and always accessible, enabled 0 downtime deployments for teams without dedicate infra specialists and so much more. It has made deploying reliable applications a lot more easier than ever before.
Services today scale to handle a lot more users and traffic than they did not so long ago; and these reliability guarantees are the norm rather than an exception.
Kubernetes does indeed have advantages but also brings a whole layer of complexity, overhead and moving parts. From my experience, in many cases the theoretical advantages don't end up being worth the tradeoff and/or don't even end up being implemented. Furthermore the particular things you mention (tracing, centralized logging & no-downtime deploys) can be done just as easily without Kubernetes.
I disagree about not needing dedicated infrastructure specialists. Kubernetes' complexity, learning curve and failure modes would make me uncomfortable operating without having a dedicated "devops" person (or sysadmin as we used to call them) while I am perfectly comfortable managing a few virtual machines (or even bare metal hosts) with a load-balancer in front of it. I recommend building systems in a way that can easily fit in your mind, and there's only so many abstraction layers and moving parts you can fit in there before you overload.
When it comes to scaling, not every application needs to scale and even when it needs to, it's trivial to scale stateless app servers without Kubernetes. You can scale quite far without Kubernetes, and when you're past that point you'll realize your main bottleneck is your data store and Kubernetes (or similar) can't magically solve that.
Your answer to everything I said is “actually, it’s not that hard without kubernetes”. Maybe it’s not for you. For most developers, it absolutely is. And that’s why kubernetes is popular.
Fads don’t form out of thin air. There’s always some value that they provide. To someone experienced with setting up infrastructure, the tasks may seem trivial, and the value add is low. For others who don’t, having a dead simple way of easily adding tooling around their applications is a godsend. Why is this so fucking hard for you to understand?
It is and it isn't. I remember the first time I thought "this software is just X that everybody forgot about, reinvented again". That was 2005. Not coincidentally that was a decade after I started working as a sysadmin.
Venkatesh Rao says that there comes a point in your life when you realize things you thought were permanent are temporary, and things you thought were temporary are permanent; he uses "40" as a good rubric for that developmental stage. IT goes through many pendula, whether it be containerization vs. amalgamation, or thin clients vs. thick. What, over time, you learn to hold on to is the tools that have lasted decades and will probably continue to. Right now the pendulum is starting to swing back towards amalgamation, and it will probably swing back towards containerization again in another decade. Whatever the tech is at the time, it can be good to reconsider whether your views will have changed not on the technology, but on the larger pendulum it's riding.
I find it hard to parse anything meaningful from your comment, sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, perhaps blunt.
Please name what infrastructure technology has lasted decades, I am curious to know. If you try hard enough yes you can see it’s all cyclical, you can say, MULTICS was the OG cloud. OK, fine, but what use is that to be as a practical software developer building things? Perhaps with age you start seeing everything as being like something you’ve already seen so it’s not that exciting anymore?
> A decade is a long time in software engineering.
Is it?
Code I wrote literally 20 years ago is still running in production, and I get paid to work on an app with plenty of code around that was first committed in 2009.
If you build a system in k8s today, and it's a success, there's good reason to believe you'll be on k8s in 2030.
That’s pretty cool, really. I can’t really find studies on average software life time, so all I really have is anecdotes. I can’t imagine software running for that long on eg public clouds without any kind of major refactor considering how quickly technology changes today, and how aggressively cloud costs push companies to change. Specifically, I can see something like “Serverless” coming to maturity and completely changing the paradigm (again!) on how software is architected. But it’s possible I’m wrong and like you say, k8s will be around for much longer than I anticipate.
I'm explaining that the majority of the people who were sysadmins in 2005 are more likely to be pessimists than optimists and are change/risk averse, I don't think that's controversial and definitely is a meme.[0]
> [thanks for] helping me empathize with toxic people.
If you dislike the article, go ahead and say why. Leaving negative personal comments about the person who wrote it approximates your own comments: unconstructive, free of evidence and bitter
I haven't even read the article and hence don't really have an opinion either way, but "[not] constructive" and "free of evidence" seem like pretty specific criticisms to me.
Given that Uber is infamous for its extreme NIH syndrome, unnecessarily reinventing the wheel and spending enormous amounts of dev effort to create internal versions of products that already exist, I think it's relevant to the article to point out that the author almost probably had a key role in that culture, and what his philosophy leads to if taken unchecked.
Its safe to say the unix crowd recreated the Windows Registry. I guess it turns out the Microsoft guys weren't idiots its just a messy problem that requires a messy solution.
etcd is not a windows registry- it's more similar to active directory, but with consensus protocols to implement the multi-machine requirements for consistency.
I'm going to assume you're a developer?
Infra people are usually much more apprehensive to take on new technology. Crucially I would describe classically trained sysadmins as 'pessimists to the core'. This is why there's memes of operations saying 'no'.
This is what devops was all about, the shared responsibility of it all. I'm going to assume that uber was perfect and got devops exactly right- but adding technology should in my mind always be met with the absolute most critical eye imaginable; and if he's a classically trained sysadmin then it probably comes from that place of being once bitten twice shy.