Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #22.
Tech
The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox
Sarah Wang and Martin Casado:
However, as industry experience with the cloud matures — and we see a more complete picture of cloud lifecycle on a company’s economics — it’s becoming evident that while cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows. Because this shift happens later in a company’s life, it is difficult to reverse as it’s a result of years of development focused on new features, and not infrastructure optimization. Hence a rewrite or the significant restructuring needed to dramatically improve efficiency can take years, and is often considered a non-starter.
This is why it’s really amazing to me when you see “cloud transformations” at big, established companies with entrenched, efficient data center operations. Of course, the calculus is different at every company, but when you already have infrastructure, there is no real, organic need for “the cloud.”
I recently worked through a Cloud Transformation project at Booking.com. It was inarguably an exercise in careening from one disaster to another, largely held together by my incredibly talented team.
The biggest problem we faced was that there was not really any organic demand for anything that the cloud offered. Defining our roadmap was like trying to nail jello to the wall because we didn’t have any internal customers who actually wanted to move! Even so, management continued to beat the drum. Loudly. Any time we scrounged up an early adopter, we’d inevitably find that they’d been coerced by their own management but didn’t actually have any interest. Before long they’d ghost us.
The cloud does solve some interesting problems though: staffing shortages.
There is, for instance, a scarcity of qualified DBAs in this world. While RDS may be quite expensive, it could be cheaper than getting into the market of hiring and retaining large numbers of DBAs. There’s a handful of other areas where this is true. At any interesting sort of scale, you probably need at least a few… but cloud vs on prem might be the difference between needing 3 and needing 12. I could build a team of 3 DBAs in small handfuls of months. Building a team of 12 DBAs might take me years unless I lower my standards considerably. That trade off might be worth the cost of adopting the cloud.
Or, I could just take that money and throw it into payroll.
Google revives RSS
Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch:
In Chrome, users will soon see a “Follow” feature for sites that support RSS and the browser’s New Tab page will get what is essentially a (very) basic RSS reader — I guess you could almost call it a “Google Reader.”
Just bring back Google Reader, you cowards.
Naming Names In Incident Writeups
Lorin Hochstein:
I take the opposite approach: I never write any of my reports anonymously. Instead, I explicitly specify the names of all of the people involved. I wanted to write a post on why I do that.
I understand the motivation for providing anonymity. We feel guilt and shame when our changes contribute to an incident. The safety literature refers to this as second victim phenomenon. We don’t write down an engineer’s name in a report because we don’t want to exacerbate the second victim effect. Also, the incident is about the system, not the particular engineer.
Engineers who’ve worked for me will definitely remember that I don’t usually expect them to name names in writeups, but it is my preference.
Usually I enforce a “no names” policy when the company has a toxic culture and I’m trying to fight back against that.
“I Could Rewrite Curl”
Daniel Stenberg is on a roll recently:
These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add here, please let me know!
Honestly, I have nothing to add here.
Choosing SLOs that users need, not the ones you want to provide
Adam Hammond for Squadcast:
However, they are far more than that: SLOs are a powerful tool that can be used not only by the “business people” but also by technical staff to drive process improvement and technological advancement. SLOs have a formidable use as metric-based indicators that show you what needs to be improved in your systems, its capabilities, and where you can get your best “bang for buck” when it comes to focusing your work efforts.
100%.
Grab Bag
A driverless Waymo got stuck in traffic and then tried to run away from its support crew
Andrew J Hawkins for the Verge:
One of Waymo’s fully autonomous minivans got stuck at an intersection in Chandler, Arizona, prompting the company to send a roadside assistance team to come extract it. But when the crew arrived, the vehicle started to drive away before pulling over and completely blocking a three-lane road. It was a rare moment captured on video of one of Waymo’s driverless vehicles performing erratically.
It feels cheap to bash on driverless cars lately, but this made my week.