Readit NewsWhile I absolutely believe that there are pockets of the company that work this way, more because of sheer scale than anything systemic, I have sat in the annual ratings meeting for engineers enough times, in enough organizations within the company, that I am pretty confident that this experience isn't universal.
It sucks that this author had this experience, and I wish they had said which team that was, so that I could use what social cachet I have to steer people clear of it from inside. Nobody should have that experience.
To illustrate why that is, think about a state like Ireland. So far, Ireland has gotten corporations to be HQ'ed there, or pay taxes there, because the tax rate is only 12.5%. The detriment for Ireland has been minimal, if any, from that corporate presence. It _could_ have gotten more but that's just theoretical.
If this goes into effect, then a corporation will no longer benefit as much from being Ireland-based: It will pay 12.5% corporate income tax annually, but will pay extra in other countries it's active in. Who's going to subsidize the extra 2.5%? Ireland? Technically possible, but it's unlikely for Irish politicians to subsidize the taxes a private corporation pays _elsewhere_. Showering a corporation with money to that extent requires corruption on a whole new level.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/03/microsoft-iris...
Larger streamers on Twitch can get ~20k concurrent viewers. A long streaming day would be 10 hours. They would also be streaming from NA so using their example pricing suggests:
Input: $2/hour * 10 hours = $20
Output: $0.15 * 10 * 20,000 = $30k
A worst case scenario of $30,020/day of streaming. Still seems financially unviable. I guess Twitch can stay in business for now.
EDIT:
Basic table
Viewers Hours Min Best Worst
20000 10 $7,520 $14,020 $30,020
2000 6 $462 $852 $1,812
500 4 $83 $148 $308
200 2 $19 $32 $64• Lets companies brag about having # many production services at any given time
• Company saves money by not having to hire Linux sysadmins
• Company saves money by not having to pay for managed cloud products if they don't want to
• Declarative, version controlled, git-blameable deployments
• Treating cloud providers like cattle not pets
It's going to eat the world (already has?).
I was skeptical about Kubernetes but I now understand why it's popular. The alternatives are all based on kludgy shell/Python scripts or proprietary cloud products.
It's easy to get frustrated with it because it's ridiculously complex and introduces a whole glossary of jargon and a whole new mental model. This isn't Linux anymore. This is, for all intents and purposes, a new operating system. But the interface to this OS is a bunch of <strike>punchcards</strike> YAML files that you send off to a black box and hope it works.
You're using a text editor but it's not programming. It's only YAML because it's not cool to use GUIs for system administration anymore (e.g. Windows Server, cPanel). It feels like configuring a build system or filling out taxes--absolute drudgery that hopefully gets automated one day.
The alternative to K8s isn't your personal collection of fragile shell scripts. The real alternative is not doing the whole microservices thing and just deploying a single statically linked, optimized C++ server that can serve 10k requests per second from a toaster--but we're not ready to have that discussion.
To that point, I know personally the engineers who triggered several of the AWS outages you will have read about in the news over the last decade and more. Some of them are still with us, some have been promoted since then.