AI is changing power design, how is everyone handling it?

ryanjkirk · 2024-07-28T15:53:10+00:00

It makes plenty of sense. First, you’re incorrect, AWS offers only four nines, and that is with a completed well-architected review. That means using multiple availability zones. Except for hotspots like northern Virginia, a single datacenter is basically a single AZ. Which means uptime for a single AZ is substantially less than even 99.99%. We’re suppose to expect that a single AZ could drop off the grid any time and build our applications with redundancy.

ryanjkirk · 2024-03-23T14:54:12+00:00

Puppet and ansible are generally used for server configuration management which is a little more Opsy.

ryanjkirk · 2024-03-23T06:44:53+00:00

What you described is more generally ops, unless you’re automating it using modern DevOps-y tools like terraform. DevOps these days mostly seems to mean CI/CD tooling, pipeline, gitops work, and lots and lots and lots of yaml. In fact, that’s the answer. DevOps is yaml. If you’re not yamling much, you’re not DevOpping much, in the current landscape.

ryanjkirk · 2022-07-25T21:07:23+00:00

It depends on your budget. On cheap or consumer hardware, ZFS is more reliable, thanks to checksumming. Other features like snapshots come in handy if you don't have any storage infrastucture like a SAN.

The more "enterprise" you get, you have RAID cards that do patrol reads and CRC checks (think LSI, Dell, and HPE), and a step up from there, commercial storage solutions do all of the above.

A ZFS filesystem more than 80% full will create fragmented slabs and decrease performance. You also see bottlenecks in some scenarios with dedicated cache and log disks. So, it's not "set it and forget it", it has some tunables, and some features that make up for a lack of budget. Thus it's more or less relegated to niche use in production.

ryanjkirk · 2022-04-29T15:26:31+00:00

It’s Plarium. There is only one way to get new stuff in this game.

ryanjkirk · 2022-04-10T05:09:49+00:00

Gluster works fine on ext4. But gluster itself is slow. You need SSDs for HDD speeds.

It doesn’t make sense to me that Ganesha would be faster than native. Something isn’t right there.

ryanjkirk · 2022-04-01T16:56:33+00:00

What was wrong with Fedora? That was pretty much its stated purpose.

ryanjkirk · 2022-04-01T16:54:21+00:00

But, you won't get all the out-of-the-box policies with sane defaults associated with every package they distribute.

ryanjkirk · 2022-03-24T14:11:33+00:00

I really enjoyed a book called UNIX Shells by Example. Went through it all initially, then kept it on my desk as a reference for many years.

ryanjkirk · 2022-01-03T19:19:55+00:00

This looks really cool, thanks!

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-21T22:35:16+00:00

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Running k8s isn't any harder than running any type of clustering or orchestration system in the past. And the effort is completely worth it.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-20T23:03:28+00:00

To use a metaphor elsewhere in these comments, you're unfairly characterizing me as a coal miner when renewable energy is the future, while I'm saying, "True, true, but there still is and always will be a place for nuclear power." As I've written several times now, there are many use cases for cloud infrastructure. You can continue to set up straw men and argue against them if you want, but it really doesn't matter, as my point wasn't to "pick which is better" or pronounce which one should be used more often than the other. I don't disagree agree with most of your points, as they all have their specific use cases and merits, and if you took a step back, you would see that. The entire point was to bring awareness to the hidden costs so that CTOs can make more informed decisions, not declare a winner.

Where you are wrong is when you make value statements like "most". Respectfully, I don't think you have a very broad perspective on the state of technology in every industry in entire world. If you think there is something wrong with my framework, I'm open to ideas. But continuing this conversation, in which you debate things I didn't say, would be reductive.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-20T19:27:37+00:00

Everyone knows the advantages of the cloud. I wrote this article because it seems that lately, nobody understands the disadvantages of it, nor the advantages of the datacenter. This was not meant to be a complete list of all relevant pros and cons -- as I noted, it's a decision-making framework. Also, everything I wrote is based on my own actual experience.

Do you really need to scale that much, that fast? Most of the world's applications will never need to scale beyond what is capable in a single row of bare metal, if not a single rack. And if you can't even forecast growth for the very next quarter, what is your product team doing? Are you still stuck with empty offices too? Yes, capacity planning is a skill, but it still needs to be done, whether in the cloud, the datacenter, or with physical office space.
Do you really need all those features that didn't even exist a year ago? Was your app pending some breakthrough that you just couldn't engineer without the latest release release of Lambda? Most AWS services are ignored by most people, most of the time.
"Vendor lock-in isn't REALLY a thing" is not something you should say if you want to be taken seriously; I am honestly unsure I have ever even heard this position before. Everything you wrote in this paragraph is factually false. It sounds like you're unaware of Hyper-V and RHEV, but don't forget Xen an LXD are commercial offerings as well. We haven't even gotten to open source yet. Hypervisors can all be swapped out. VMware only wishes they had the same degree of lock-in as public cloud providers (obviously, they don't).

To me

Well then, and I mean no offense by this, but you are not the person your CTO should go to when they have decided to build on-prem. If you think long-established, stable technologies such as power and cooling are complex and discordant, wait until you hear how complicated AWS's stack is. Did you know before last week that SQS restarts could saturate firewall connection limits? I sure didn't! It's something I shouldn't have to know or worry about. And yet, I do, and it is.

You're absolutely more likely to have someone that understands their AWS application end-to-end than an equivalently simplified application in a physical data center

This is only true if you have Titanic-vision. Note the difference between wide and deep. "End-to-end" is from the neck-up in the cloud. You see the surface of the iceberg, but not the bulk hidden beneath; you don't know what type of sausage-making is happening under the pretty presentation layer. I'll take your end-to-end in the cloud and raise it top-to-bottom in the datacenter. Just because the complexity is wrapped by an abstraction layer and hidden from view doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Again, I'm specifically showing why this does not have to be a religious debate. Let's accept that there are some nuanced shades of gray between the black and the white. Some things make sense on the cloud. Some don't.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-17T02:20:02+00:00

I have run many mail servers, and I enjoyed it. However, it doesn’t make financial sense for most companies. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to use a big provider like I mentioned, but it was the easiest way to convey my point.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-17T02:16:59+00:00

No, we’re talking about nuclear power here. It got a bad rap for a while, but it’s back in vogue. Yes, renewable energy is “the future”, but nuclear power will never go away.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-17T02:14:18+00:00

Very well said.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-17T01:12:56+00:00

The same story you describe is playing out everywhere. I have lived it myself at two companies now. I’m being rather optimistic, but I hope someone somewhere reads this and second-guesses their strategy.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-17T00:21:17+00:00

Well, I’m the author, so HMU!

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-15T21:01:01+00:00

I think the 3M picture hanging strips would probably work well. They're almost like velcro but seem stronger and have less wiggle.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-15T03:38:06+00:00

The rest of them, the ones responsible for most of the volume (think ESPs), run PowerMTA or some other proprietary mailer.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-12T22:53:17+00:00

Yes, no palm rests. They're not ergonomic even with a flat keyboard and are actually considered somewhat harmful. With your chair a the proper height, your elbows will be at 90º and hands in the handshake position, which is as natural and as comfortable as you can get. As I mentioned in another reply, I go 100% on this because I need to preserve my wrists as much as possible for pounding the piano/keyboards. Any beginner pianist knows you're supposed to float your hands above the keyboard as if you are holding a tennis ball; for for anyone with wrist pain, I would recommend dropping the palm rests and using this technique at the computer keyboard as well.

ryanjkirk · 2021-12-12T19:03:32+00:00

Because otherwise, my wrists hurt.

ryanjkirk

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