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37 comments

  • You can’t run vmalert without flags

    Running grep without parameters is also pretty fucking useless.

    500 words in to the over 3,000 word dump, I gave up.

    Claims to have a Unix background, doesn't RTFM.

    Nobody really uses Kubernetes for day-to-day work, and it shows. Where UNIX concepts like files and pipes exist from OS internals up to interaction by actual people, cloud-native tooling feels like it’s meant for bureaucrats in well-paid jobs.

    Translation: Author does not understand APIs.

    Want an asynchronous, hierarchical, recursive, key-value database? With metadata like modified times and access control built-in? Sounds pretty fancy! Files and directories.

    Ok. Now give me high availability, atomic writes to sets of keys, caching, access control...

    I’m ashamed enough that I can’t really apply to these jobs

    This reads as "I applied to the jobs and got rejected. There's nothing wrong with me, so the jobs must be broken".

    • Nobody really uses Kubernetes for day-to-day work, and it shows.

      Wat.

    • Running grep without parameters is also pretty fucking useless.

      The difference is grep is a simple tool that can take in text, transform it, and output it to a console. It operates in a powerful and easy to understand way by default (take in text and print lines in the text containing the search parameters). This vmalert tool is just an interface to another, even more complicated piece of software.

      Claims to have a Unix background, doesn't RTFM.

      Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don't even come close...

      Translation: Author does not understand APIs.

      The point is that these abstractions do not mesh with the rest of the system. HTTP and REST are very strange ways to accomplish IPC or networked communication on Unix when someone would normally accomplish the same thing with signals, POSIX IPC, a simpler protocol over TCP with BSD sockets, or any other thing already in the base system. It does make sense to develop things this way, though, if you're a corpo web company trying to manage ad-hoc grids of Linux systems for your own profit rather than trying to further the development of the base system.

      Ok. Now give me high availability

      I would hope the filesystems you use are "high availability" lol

      atomic writes to sets of keys

      You're right, that would be nice. Someone should put together a Plan 9 fileserver that can do that or something.

      caching, access control

      Plan 9 is capable of handling distributed access controls and caching (even of remote fileservers!). There's probably some Linux filesystems that can do that too.

      In the end, it's not so much about specific tools that can accomplish this but that there are alternatives to the dominant way of doing things and that the humble file metaphor can still represent these concepts in a simpler and more robust way.

      This reads as "I applied to the jobs and got rejected. There's nothing wrong with me, so the jobs must be broken".

      This is the maybe the worst way of interpreting what they said. They can come and correct me if I'm wrong but I read that as: they have a particular ideological objection to this "cloud" ecosystem and the way it does things. It's not a lack of skill as your comment implies but rather a rejection of this way of doing things.

  • I've struggled with many of the same tools. What we need is real distributed operating systems, like Plan 9, not increasingly complicated hacks and kludges to keep old-world operating systems relevant in a networked world.

  • “Clould-native” software co-exists with corporate jargon. They obscure and complicate in the interest of perpetuating lucrative contracts over productive environments.

    “Cloud Engineers” get paid $150K+ to fiddle with these strings and make sure it’s all escaped/delimited correctly in YAML files. It’s a fucking mess. I’m ashamed enough that I can’t really apply to these jobs. Maybe writing and running software on servers in the commercial world is not a good fit for someone like me who despises corporate jargon.

    This.

37 comments