[swozey]

You're basically coming for my job as an SRE/Platarch but great documentation you've covered a lot of scenarios and in a pretty thorough manner.

You should figure out a way to import current infra state and control it from your dashboard and build off of that. That'd be really interesting. Like, take over a tfstate file or whatever pulumi/cdk uses. And definitely just build off of aws/gcp/azure/oracle without IAC like terraformer does.

[regiswilson]

Release engineer here. I believe you have hit on some of the ideas we've certainly discussed way down the road (or sooner than you'd think?). For example, can we inform the AI about your existing infrastructure patterns, tooling, configs, etc. and then ask it to "suggest best practices", "compare to security and compliance policies", "improve" it, "analyse optimisations", "identify unused/overprovisioned pieces", etc. etc.!

[swozey]

I'll throw you a big bone, I just cut our nearly $million/month aws infra costs down 45% by switching from x86 to arm64. So factor that in for sure. I was hoping for 15-25%.

[regiswilson]

Fantastic, we've already begun switching RDS instances to Arm64 (simple, easy, and effective), but still haven't cracked (yet) building for Arm64 compute containers in a safe and effective way. I love it!

[Ocha]

What about arm64 makes building containers in a safe and effective way harder compared to x86?

[neduma]

The long history and dominant ecosystem on x86 makes containerization more seamless today. ARM64 support is evolving quickly but still has maturity gaps that can make safe and efficient container deployment more challenging. Careful testing and validation is required.

[regiswilson]

Exactly right but also in our case, we support single and multi-tenant first/second, and even third party support. That is, we need to support any workload from any customer or customer's customer at any moment now or in the future. We can easily say "if you have an x86 cluster, we guarantee 100% compatibility." But if we switch to ARM, we'd have to make exceptions and do double the testing on any existing workloads, as well as all the complications with building twice and doing releases and notes for each arch... It really does spin out of control quickly.

[victorbjorklund]

Wow. Is that a general web app or some highly specialized computing?

[atmosx]

I would like to know that as well because last time I've read about this scenario, the x86 version of the app (IIRC golang app) was running almost twice as fast, so pound for pound wasn't worth the switch.

[regiswilson]

Speaking personally, the feeling is that for general compute like web servers and apis it is acceptable and will show a decrease in costs for the same performance. That is my understanding, and I am eager to try it.

[atmosx]

I will check it out. Thanks for sharing.

[voz_]

What is a Platarch?

[swozey]

As mentioned platform architect. I work on the research, design and construction of PaaS systems (which usually include SaaS as well, the backend of what lambdas or "functions" etc run on).

PaaS being Platform as a Service (think GKE/EKS/A...KS?)

[Melatonic]

How did you get into that originally ?

[hhh]

Not the person you asked, but I needed a place to run my shitty python scripts and the minimal requirement in my org was 'stand up an ec2 and get the OS managed by (insert other team)'

I complained about it and designed and built an MVP for a k8s SaaS in a week or so and pitched it to leadership and got some buy-in.

[4ggr0]

Platform Architect :)