To a non-technical individual IBM is still seen as a reputable brand (their consulting business would've been bankrupt long ago otherwise) and they will absolutely pay attention.
Agree, They could have owned the home computer market, but were out-manvoured by a couple of young programmers. They are hardly the company you want to look to for guidance on the future.
Security as in sending code to a random Datacenter, or security as in security holes? Because the latter has gotten a lot better with good workflows. The former is hard without self hosting
My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.
When you’re in the middle of a production down event and your whole team is diagnosing the issue, and your log server is unresponsive, who do you contact for support?
No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers.
See the problem?
Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this path for our company, but at least on our team we just don’t have enough (redundant) expertise to deploy and manage these systems. We’d have to hire an extra FTE.
If you’re having a correlated outage like that, then it’s likely you fix the prod issue before the cloud engineers at some giant cloud company even respond to an internal escalation much less fixes an issue. More than likely your prod issue is causing the logging problem.
If you mean you are experiencing two totally unrelated issues at the same time, then I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely.
Half of $30k/mo trivially pays for an engineer you hire to only manage such a cluster for you and just works an hour a week unless a pager goes off if you truly need that level of peace of mind. If you’re hiring for such a position I have a few rock star level folks who would love such a job.
The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-prem infrastructure get really strange to me. I could come up with the same sort of scenarios for cloud based SaaS infrastructure just as easily.
> I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely.
In my experience the systems/tools needed to debug production issues are often only used when they’re needed.
Which now means you need health and uptime monitoring on your log server since without that, it might break randomly and no one notices until you need it.
> The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-prem infrastructure get really strange to me
It really comes down to the people and whether you have the expertise on the team. And whether the team can realistically manage the system long term. It’s typically safer to spend more money for the managed service.
100% agree. If I am using a cloud log provider I wouldn't expect them to solve my logging issue(s) as fast as I need, more importantly I have no real way to put more resources on that fix.
More importantly, with a third party service I'd be very surprised if both went down at the same time and it wasn't a further upstream issue like AWS. If its my own logging service and it went down during a prod outage, I likely didn't properly isolate my logging service in the first place.
> Half of $30k/mo trivially pays for an engineer you hire to only manage such a cluster for you and just works an hour a week unless a pager goes off if you truly need that level of peace of mind. If you’re hiring for such a position I have a few rock star level folks who would love such a job.
Yep, absolutely. I’ve come up with the term “man on the mountain” for such positions.
It’s when one person is exceedingly talented at exactly one thing - but isn’t exactly a typical employee who is good or interested in doing much else other than keeping that one thing online and reliable.
Their job is to go live on their mountain for weeks or months at a time without so much as doing anything other than keeping their phone on and answering it within the first couple rings regardless of when called. If they are good at their job you likely don’t even need to call - they already know it’s broken before you do.
I’ve employed a few such folks over my career. They tend to be the “alternative” style candidate - exceptional people with exceptional flaws. They love the simple tradeoff.
That said of course this is ignoring bus factor and overly simplifying things. Typically this is one deep subject level matter expert who sits off on the side of a small team, so there is at least one “understudy” hanging around as well.
I still advocate for such positions when they make sense though. I would much rather in-house my own “insurance” vs overpay some giant company for each month only to find out the insurance didn’t exist when I needed to make a claim. It’s certainly more risk to my career - but I have very strong feelings that as a manager or executive my job is NOT to cover my own ass because it’s easier.
The old argument for being locked in to legacy software costing 6-8 figures a year was that you had no choice. Now you have a choice! Clearly that is better, and everyone should evaluate that choice on its merits, and the stock market sees that people are voting with their dollars. If your whole sales pitch is "good luck when it breaks!" you might want to reevaluate your business model.
The stock market is trying to predict that people will vote with their dollars in the future. I’m not quite sure people are really replacing enterprise Saas at large corporations yet. It’s more of a projection.
Fair, however at some point of a companies size/spending the complexity of integrating with a SaaS becomes as large as the one to run your own open source tool.
Beyond that, and Im aware this is very much application/company dependent, theres plenty of SaaS companies that offer horrendous or no support no matter what you pay. We used to use splunk for monitoring and logging. Paid a ton of money because we were handling financial data and needed tracibility and reliability. We constantly had to put out fires that were caused by their unreliable platform. It was not a good experience.
Ultimately, we jumped ship to Prometheus. We pay a fraction of the price and spent less time on it.
The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot. They do go down and don't work and often times there's simply nothing you can do. The worst offenders will seize upon the moment and force you to upgrade a support plan before they will even talk to you, even if the issue is their own making.
Unless you're a huge customer and already paying them tons of money, expect to receive no support. Your only line of defense if something happens and you're not a whale is that some whale is upset and they actually have their people working on the problem. If you're a small company, startup, or even mid-size, good luck on getting them to care. You'll probably be sent a survey when you don't renew and may eventually be a quotient in their risk calculus at some point in the distant future, but only if you represent a meaningful mass of customers they lost.
> The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot.
Tremendous opportunity announcement!
If you are building a dev-focused SaaS, treat your support team exactly as they are: a key part of the product. Just like docs or developer experience, the support experience is critical.
Trouble is, it's hard to quantify the negative experience, though tracking word of mouth referrals or NPS scores can try.
people are sleeping on openai right now but codex 5.2 xhigh is at least as good as opus and you get a TON more usage out of the OpenAI $20/mo plan than Claude's $20/mo plan. I'm always hitting the 5 hour quota with Opus but never have with Codex. Codex tool itself is not quite as good but close.
I do not think so. I have been using both for a long time and with Claude I keep hitting the limits quickly and also most of the time arguing.
The latest GPT is just getting things done and does it fast. I also agree with most of them that the limits are more generous. (context, do lot of web, backend development and mobile dev)
But if you are too small for celery, it seems a hard sell to buy a premium message queue?
My top problem with my celery setup has always been visibility. AI and I spent and afternoon setting up a Prometheus / grafana server, and wiring celery into it. Has been a game changer. When things go crazy in prod, I can usually single it down to a specific task for a specific user. Has made my troubleshooting go from days to minutes. The actual queue and execute part has always been easy / worked well.
IE was not just used to break the internet. It also had advantages. It supported features other browsers didn't.
Without IE, we wouldn't have had XMLHttpRequest, which means we wouldn't have had Gmail, which means we wouldn't have seen the bloom of "web 2.0" websites.
As for Java, Microsoft's C# is way ahead of Java in terms of language features. No idea how the runtime performance compares these days (both are very fast), but I'd rather have Microsoft Java than Oracle Java.
Microsoft's intent was always to break the competition, but they did it by offering features others wouldn't or couldn't. Evil Microsoft's Windows was the most feature-packed operating system out there because they threw every possible feature at the wall, kept what sticked front and center, and bothered to maintain what didn't stick. Microsoft Agents, the shitty Clippy things, were supported well into the Windows 7 era despite dying out the moment Bonzi Buddy was found out to be malicious. But Microsoft dared to break backwards compatibility with .NET 1 to fix the typing problem with generics that Java has to this very day; they just ended up supporting both, side by side.
I have a theory that they've actually succeeded with the latter too. I mean, look at Java now, and look how many mini-Javas (all those JIT-compiled languages and their runtimes) have emerged since. The point of Java was to unify, we've got more division than ever instead.
The point of Java was write-once, run everywhere, and that is perfectly viable these days. I don't want to live in a world where everyone is a Java programmer, and I don't think there is really any reason to suppose that unifying on a single programming language would be desirable for developers. IMO, Javascript already shows the dangers of over-unification; you get an ecosystem so full of packages that a significant portion of the language's developers are only capable of developing by stacking 1000 packages on top of each other, with no ability to write their own code and accordingly no ability to optimize or secure their programs according to the bespoke needs of the project rather than using general purpose off-the-shelf libraries.
I can quickly think of problems we have to deal with trying to make a real cross-platform application, or worse, a cross-language interface to a system/library, but not many that would stem from having a single dominant (non-stagnant or proprietary) language.
The overuse of dependencies is a problem, sure, but it's completely unrelated to "over-unification". Every ecosystem with a built-in package manager suffers from this, be it Node.js, Python, or Rust, to name a few. In fact, it's not even the package manager, it's the ease in adding new dependencies. Go demonstrates that pretty well.
> a significant portion of the language's developers are only capable of developing by stacking 1000 packages on top of each other, with no ability to write their own code
That's because those devs are incompetent, not because there are a ton of packages.
I believe one enables the other. If the package ecosystem wasn't oversaturated to the degree it is, they wouldn't be able to masquerade as developers and publish anything. But because there is a Javascript component for everything, they can do enough of an impression of a developer to ship things and get hired without ever learning how to actually program.
If you mention Java, I think you may only incite more nostalgia for the monopolies of yesteryear. Was Microsoft's approach to Java evil and ill-intentioned, yes, absolutely. But it eventually resulted in .NET and C#, so I'd say that particular battle was a net benefit to humanity in the end. .NET is even truly cross-platform now, and open-source. Meanwhile Apple achieves interesting technical advances with their new hardware but I will never benefit from the existence of it because I will not use hardware that is locked to a prison OS.
For some reason I am assuming that they are talking about dot net web servers with the servers running windows (though I can be wrong and I am a little confused by what they mean break the internet as well in this context as well)
Kind of, but also it’s complicated. For example, Chicago is blue blue blue. 500 miles in every direction outside the city is red. 90% of the area of Illinois is red. But Chicago is so much more massive that Illinois votes blue in the end. So what the heck region is Chicago in, and the red part of IL?
I don’t know CA well but I know it’s blue with very deep red pockets.
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