So many gems in here but this one about microservices is my favorite:
grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too
replies(8):
grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too
- Cannot be run without an orchestrator like K8S, which is a bear to install and maintain, which helps sell managed cloud.
- Uses more network bandwidth, which they bill for, and CPU, which they bill for.
- Makes it hard to share and maintain complex or large state within the application, encouraging the use of more managed database and event queue services as a substitute, which they bill for. (Example: a monolith can use a queue or a channel, while for microservices you’re going to want Kafka or some other beast.)
- Can’t be run locally easily, meaning you need dev environments in cloud, which means more cloud costs. You might even need multiple dev and test environments. That’s even more cloud cost.
- Tends to become dependent on the peculiarities of a given cloud host, such as how they do networking, increasing cloud lock in.
Anyone else remember how cloud was pitched as saving money on IT? That was hilarious. Knew it was BS way back in the 2000s and that it would eventually end up making everything cost more.
Don't forget various pipelines, IaC, pipelines for deploying IaC, test/dev/staging/whatever environments, organization permissions strategies etc etc...
When I worked at a large, uh, cloud company as a consultant, solutions were often tailored towards "best practices"--this meant, in reality, large complex serverless/containerized things with all sorts of integrations for monitoring, logging, NoSQL, queues etc, often for dinky little things that an RPI running RoR or NodeJS could serve without breaking a sweat.
With rare exceptions, we'd never be able to say, deploy a simple go server on a VM with server-side rendered templates behind a load balancer with some auto-scaling and a managed database. Far too pedestrian.
Sure, it's "best practices" for "high-availability" but was almost always overkill and a nightmare to troubleshoot.
It’s hard to hire people to do anything else. People don’t know how to admin machines so forget bare metal even though it can be thousands of times cheaper for some work loads (especially bandwidth).
You’re not exaggerating with a raspberry pi. Not at all.
The "entire generation of developers" paradigm is all over in different domains too--web programmers that seem to honestly think web development is only React/Angular and seem to have no idea that you can just write JS, python programmers that have no idea a large portion of the "performant codebases" are piles of native dependencies etc
Same goes for users. There are about the same number of computer literate users as there were back then. There’s just a new class of iPad/iPhone user who is only a casual user of computers and the net and barely knows what a file is.