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How the Cloud Has Changed (Since Last You Looked)
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a look at the new services and pricing models that are making cloud computing more powerful, complex, and cheaper than it was a few short years ago. 'We get more, but using it isn't always as simple as it could be. Sure, you still end up on root on some box that's probably running Linux, but getting the right performance out of that machine is more complex,' Wayner writes. "But the real fun comes when you try to figure out how to pay for your planned cloud deployment because there are more options than ever. ... In some cases, the cost engineering can be more complex than the software engineering."
> And the git bullshit.
Yeah, we never needed this new-fangled version control bullshit in my day. We just email our code changes around the office. Like men.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
At least the hipsters successfully buried all the needlessly complex crap the prior (my) generation of engineers inflicted upon the world, the whole horrible XML ediface for one: XML, SOAP, XSLT etc. My hats off to them. Fuck I hated XML, and I dance on it's grave. Good also to see insanely heavy weight app frameworks like J2EE slowly slide away too, great stuff hipsters: it's a terrible legacy you are painstakingly superceding, my apologies for my part in creating it.
Maybe it is in our blood, to channel our energies into at least one needlessly complex endeavour. Their baby is HTML apps (which we foisted upon them BTW so not entirely their fault), and the 'web-scale' cloud.
YMMV but I've found unless you are processing volumes that require rows upon rows of servers, not a couple of slots in a rack, bare metal dedicated gear from a decent 'cloud' provider works just fine. Still simple, and from my personal experience performance and reliability smashes my competitors who use shared cloud based gear. Tried Amazon a while back for a non-profit high volume site I helped migrate. Pricing and complexity of amazon did my head in, nice to hear it has only gotten worse since then. Finally got it running and the thing just crashed into the mountain no matter how many resources and elastic ips and other inscrutable voodoo we threw it at, did some benchmarks and figured DB IO was absolutely abyssmal. Switched to a simpler visualized single host (volumes high enough to justify bare metal but incredibly cost conscious so needed to make virtual work), running years without a hitch.
Segmented content dynamically loaded via AJAX or similar is the devil.
It's the modern "article split across 10 pages for no reason". Give me a view-all link, and I'll wait for it to load.
For SOME content it's understandable (Twitter's result set for a hash tag, for example, but NOT the result of a user's entire tweet history), but the AJAX loading is still the devil. Give me traditional paginated loading as an option as well as a way to reliably trigger more content to load without making me hold the end key.
I believe the AC is complaining about the general lack of quality, substance, documentation, reliability, and function of many of the new and popular "languages" (which are really frameworks). The examples of Ruby on Rails and Node.js are indeed "fucking awful" from the standpoint of getting worthwhile shit done, especially considering the amount of things you have to seek out and bolt on in order to get them to function as you would expect any other framework to (see the references to gems and npm). The "hipster" label seems to fit. These things are popular not because of their quality or utility, but because of their lack of quality and utility. And despite being popular, the people using them think they're unique for doing so. As soon as the users and developers see that they are no longer unique, they abandon ship and look for the next niche thing to claim as their own.
NoSQL is trash through and through. I have yet to meet a dataset worth looking through, ever, that didn't fit into a relational model of some sort. The anti relational model for data is a joke. If there is any information in data it can be modeled, and if any dataset contains more than one piece of the same type of data then you can develop useful relationships. NoSQL literally throws completeness, correctness, and consistency out the window. "Big data" people love NoSQL and the crazy variants used by Google, Amazon, etc. because they just want to dump data in and sell access to it. They don't care if it's correct, complete, or meaningful. Of course, even Google realizes they need ACID for data that matters, and have basically thrown the non-relational model out the window for their own purposes.
I sure as shit am glad I don't know what Docker is. I've heard references to it before (and I think there was a story on Slashdot about "one weird trick to make Docker take 99% less storage space!!1"), but I simply don't care. As for Git, I fail to see why it's needed when other version control systems already exist and work. My guess is that it gained popularity because of how brain dead simple it is to throw something up on github (which has its own problems, as was discussed on Slashdot recently).
Hipster software IS a fucking problem. Shit like RoR and Node.js fucking suck for most things, but idiots try to shoehorn it and adapt it to do what they need instead of using something better-suited to the task. Ruby (and RoR) is good for certain things, and I presume Node.js may have some sort of valid use case, but certainly not what people usually end up using them for. NoSQL is shit, and Git may be useful but the things people use it for rarely are. The bottom line is that there are people who will scream from the top of the mountain about their new project using Node.js and a non-relational database model that's hosted on github by developers using agile and trending on Twitter, but they won't be able to tell you what their project is or does, or why it's better than the existing solutions.
When the process becomes the project, the project becomes pointless.