[eropple]

I wonder why, then, the enterprise-by-any-reasonable-standard place I'm currently consulting is moving away from .NET and Windows to a polyglot microservice architecture on Linux. Surely it isn't the severe drag of dealing with C# and the incredible mess of .NET deployment in a rapidly iterating environment (and, to be fair, this is also in part Windows's fault, there's no good disposable-server model for Windows in a cloud environment because the provisioning stuff is not great, so you make bad decisions like persistent servers and Octopus).

As it happens, I like C#, as a mostly-portable language for writing video games because the runtime has been ported almost anywhere I care about. I have a lot of open-source C# stuff in my Github and have been doing open-source C# since about 2007. But as an ecosystem for high-velocity, agile work, it's got problems. Maybe CoreCLR on Linux, once the bugs are well and truly killed, will be an answer, but it's not there yet.

[tacos]

"polyglot microservice architectures" eh?

Hey Bill! We've got 20 years of legacy code that handles everything from Arrivals Boards to seat assignments in 1627 different aircraft configurations. We got a room full of .NET devs downstairs.

How about we re-write everything in multiple languages! Remember that time we went down for two days because we muffed up our NET 2.0 to 4.0 migration? Imagine how much fun we'll have when we're doing it with Python, Ruby, Rust, Swift, Javascript and Go!

We'll break out the seat assignments in Go. Do the signboards in Python. Web app for refunds in Ruby. I don't know what Rust is but one of the guys downstairs has a book on it with a woodcut of a beaver on the front. Think of all the time we'll save!

Plus our consultant says it's so much easier to spin up Linux VMs!

"Bill, it's the same damn button to spin up a Linux server anywhere. Even on Azure. You just check the Penguin instead of the four squares first. And our deploy scripts work just fine. Even our stupidest apps from the 1990s are one binary file and one text file now. And nobody but Tim is allowed to change the text file."

[eropple]

Here's the thing: literally none of that is right. You had to assume a lot of facts not in evidence to be that much of a jerk. It was a big task. But you did it!

- Almost every developer was converted to .NET to work there, because Microsoft's credibility among startup-focused developers is not great outside of a few specific tools like SQL Server. It's a lot easier to get enough hands to get the job done when you let them use Node (which, I'll be honest, I don't even really like, I'd personally rather write C# but I don't write application code here so it doesn't matter) instead of making them write C#.

- The legacy stuff isn't being rewritten. It's going to be ported to Linux, using Microsoft's own CoreCLR. Parts will be broken out into their own services in order to directly scale them and make it easier to provide separation of concerns; whether it gets rewritten or just parted out is an engineering decision, but so far they seem content to part out legacy code instead of rewrite.

- I'm a DevOps guy. I automate. And you can automate a lot more, to go a lot faster, in a Linux environment. Chef's made strides in Windows, and that's honestly and truly cool, but it's only a first step. There's a reason that most devops folks I know have settled on disposable architectures, where a config change means that the machine should be canned: it reduces ambiguity by removing convergence in favor of guaranteed state. This is extremely difficult in Windows because of the amount of drag induced by the tooling. It takes literally-literally twice as long to bake a Windows Vagrant box as it does a Linux one--I've timed it. It takes longer to build a Windows AMI. It takes longer to deploy one, making your auto-scaling groups less responsive.

-This company's load patterns are unpredictable enough and spiky enough that there is an actual, no-bullshit need for scaling on the order of seconds, not 5-10 minutes, and you literally can't do that in AWS with Windows (and I don't think you can with Azure, either); containerization technology (ECS, Mesos, whatever) is making it very practical to meet these sorts of response requirements.

- Languages must be approved; right now it's just Node and Mono (soon to be CoreCLR), but the build environments (both through Chef and, later, through Docker) support multiple languages. To use something else, one will have to make their case. But instead of assuming a certain level of professional rigor, you started frothing and assuming everything would be written in whatever struck somebody's fancy.

Seriously: fanboy harder. It's clearly working.

[tacos]

You said "polyglot on Linux." And then you describe languages as follows:

> - Languages must be approved; right now it's just Node and Mono (soon to be CoreCLR)

I'm not a troll but dude, those aren't languages.

There's also no need to be adversarial here. What you're talking about is a refactor using .NET and hosting on Linux. This is not radical thought and is actually part of the official ordained .NET strategy. It'll work fine.

A need for "5 second container startups" sounds like bullshit to me but this will be solved on all platforms within the next two years. In the interim AWS Lambda and Node.js is an interesting place to play.

None of this has anything to do with the fact that .NET libraries are large and robust and the fact that Microsoft shipped such a huge, working platform had an impact on OSS bootstrap-style development of components, for better and for worse.

[manigandham]

Specific question: What kind of load needs scaling within seconds? If it's so sensitive why not have extra capacity available?

[mistermann]

I also wondered that. I think a lot of technical people are irresistibly drawn to solving scale & performance problems by resorting to ever more complex rube goldberg machines & processes rather than just throw a few measly grand of hardware at it and be done.

Stackoverflow is one example of scale with a pretty boring architecture.

[WorldWideWayne]

Sounds like you work at a startup, not an "enterprise-by-any-reasonable-standard place".

Lying to shape your argument doesn't really fly around here.

EDIT: Furthermore, looking at your sites pretty much proves that you're a liar. You don't work at some enterprise shop that just decided to go open source, you're a consultant that pushes open source.

[eropple]

From my original post:

> I'm currently consulting

Yes, very lie.

The remarkable thing is that I don't need to push anything (well, okay, I pushed Chef over Ansible, because for nontrivial setups you end up needing some sort of unified orchestration layer and at that point you might as well use the more mature Chef than Ansible Tower). The still-Windows shops I talk to are pretty unified in their desire to branch out into other languages and environments. That one in particular was sold and already well underway before they brought me on-board to help them through it. But, y'know. Whatever you want to believe, chief. :)

[WorldWideWayne]

Let's quote the whole thing, shall we?

> I wonder why, then, the enterprise-by-any-reasonable-standard place I'm currently consulting is moving away from .NET and Windows...

This was in response to someone who said that Microsoft non-open .NET framework and Windows works really well for most enterprise shops.

Then you come along with your anecdote that "the 'enterprise' place I'm currently consulting at is moving away from Windows" as if that were some sort of trend that you just happened to be involved in.

I bet it's not even a typical enterprise. Tell the truth - it's a game company, right? Or something else that is equally non-enterprisey...

[WorldWideWayne]

Good luck with that! I hope it goes better for you than it did for the city of Munich.

[eropple]

So, okay, dude, let's have some real talk: you're generally a low-information troll here on HN--not bad enough to flag, bad enough to notice when your name comes up because it's almost never constructive or useful. But literally even you, as wrapped up in the weird little agendas you consistently show through your posting history, should know that attempting to use a desktop transition program (which, as it happens, I said nothing about) to slag on a migration of server software to another environment--and with CoreCLR, a very similar one by the same people--is weak sauce.

HN doesn't need shitposters. Do better, yeah?

[WorldWideWayne]

That's your real talk?

At least you could have been a tad more original or at least entertaining if you're going to resort to insults.