Re:You don’t need all that complex/expensive/distracting inf...
by jameshart on Thursday March 11, 2021 @09:32AM
(#26424374)
So I agree there’s definitely a need for more writing in this space (and you’d think it might be particularly of interest to incubating startups...)
My top level take on this is that the cues to take things up a level in terms of infrastructure diligence are when the risk budget you’re dealing with is no longer entirely your own. Once you have a banker, a lawyer, an insurance policy, an investor, a big customer, a government regulator, shareholders... ultimately once there’s someone you have to answer to if you haven’t done enough to protect their interests.
And risk management isn’t just ‘what will happen if the server catches fire’, it’s ‘how do I guarantee the code running in production is the code I think it is?’ And ‘how do I roll back if I push a bug to production?’ And ‘how can I make sure all the current versions of the code come back up after patching my servers?’
And it turns out that things like kubernetes can help you solve some of those problems. And things like serverless can make some of those problems go away completely. But of course they come with their own problems! But when those things become important enough that you need to solve for them to answer the risk aversion of sufficient stakeholders, the cost of adopting those technologies starts to look sensible.
My top level take on this is that the cues to take things up a level in terms of infrastructure diligence are when the risk budget you’re dealing with is no longer entirely your own. Once you have a banker, a lawyer, an insurance policy, an investor, a big customer, a government regulator, shareholders... ultimately once there’s someone you have to answer to if you haven’t done enough to protect their interests.
And risk management isn’t just ‘what will happen if the server catches fire’, it’s ‘how do I guarantee the code running in production is the code I think it is?’ And ‘how do I roll back if I push a bug to production?’ And ‘how can I make sure all the current versions of the code come back up after patching my servers?’
And it turns out that things like kubernetes can help you solve some of those problems. And things like serverless can make some of those problems go away completely. But of course they come with their own problems! But when those things become important enough that you need to solve for them to answer the risk aversion of sufficient stakeholders, the cost of adopting those technologies starts to look sensible.