Thought the same thing. Finding the root cause is easier when you don't have to debug dozens of abstraction layers (KVM, Containerd/Docker, Kubernetes, etc).

Operating at this scale you can assume that all these things you mentioned do exist :)

It's all public: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_infrastructure

You can even get access to devops/SREs tickets (and IRC messages)

Docker? You’re probably right. K8s? Wouldn’t be so sure. Would like to hear from the horse’s mouth though.

Edit: looks like it’s used. Wonder if it’s more tooling than production traffic. No time to dig further.

You’re implying serious and useful work can be done in a stable tech stack? Preposterous.

Seriously though, not a fan of php at all but the js tooling is rocket science in comparison.

> Seriously though, not a fan of php at all but the js tooling is rocket science in comparison.

laughs in left-pad, Webpack, Grunt, ...

JavaScript tooling absolutely sucks - even for a moderate sized project, `npm install` can take many minutes, often enough because some native code has to be compiled. Webpack builds can take even longer.

In contrast, with PHP you run `composer install` and it works, no bundling or whatever required.

Back when I was doing serious work in php it was ftp (yes, no ‘s’) the php files onto an Apache box and that was it! Go went the same way, at least.

I think that’s what they meant - “rocket science” as in “way too complicated for 99% of down-to-earth jobs”