John Vincent
blog.lusis.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
John Vincent writes about operations, PaaS, monitoring, systemd, and running infrastructure on-premises.
What HN saysCommenters recommend his on-prem post as required reading, warning 'here be dragons', and cite his PaaS post for its critical take on the 12 Factor model.
27HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
19stories submitted
864story points
2 years agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1So You Wanna Go On-Prem6 people · 298 points · first shared 2016 · 102 comments on HN
- 2PaaS for Realists3 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 3Systemd redux: The end of Linux1 people · 235 points · first shared 2014 · 446 comments on HN
- 4Go for System Administrators1 people · 174 points · first shared 2013 · 61 comments on HN
- 5What “technical” concerns do I have with systemd?1 people · 107 points · first shared 2014 · 98 comments on HN
- 6Graphs in Operations1 people · 19 points · first shared 2012 · 7 comments on HN
- 7Book Review: Site Reliability Engineering1 people · 7 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 8How We Vagrant1 people · 6 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 9Configuration Drift and Next-gen Configuration Management1 people · 4 points · first shared 2012 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Deployment Best Practices1 people · 3 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 11What production means1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 12AWS API Gateway for Fun and Profit1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 13The Flaw in All Things1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 14There's No Konami Code for Operations1 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 15Software Empathy1 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
zenlikethat · 2014-10-17
Very good points, and as the author here (http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2014/06/14/paas-for-realists/) points out:
> I should state up front that I disagree with quite a few bits of the 12 Factor model. It’s important to remember that, imho, the 12 Factor model was designed as a business strategy for Heroku. The steps follow exactly what makes an app work best on Heroku, not what is best for an application.
sciurus · 2012-05-17
Here's a dump of blogs I follow that have lots of devops-oriented contents.
http://www.kartar.net/
http://www.kitchensoap.com/
http://www.masterzen.fr/
http://blog.nistu.de/
http://www.jedi.be/blog/
http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/
http://www.unixdaemon.net/
http://www.rottenbytes.info/
http://blog.lusis.org/
http://bitfieldconsulting.com/
http://agilesysadmin.net/
btown · 2023-02-02
Before tooling even comes into the equation, you owe it to yourself and your sanity to read this in full: http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2016/05/15/so-you-wanna-go-onprem-do-ya/
Here be dragons.
twakefield · 2016-10-12
Inspired by a previous blog post popular on HN [1]. John E. Vincent's "So You Wanna Go On-prem Do Ya" [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757669
[2] http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2016/05/15/so-you-wanna-go-onprem-do-ya/
hedwall · 2015-03-09
Obligatory lusis quote and link...
"Devops means giving a shit about your job enough to not pass the buck. Devops means giving a shit about your job enough to want to learn all the parts and not just your little world.
Developers need to understand infrastructure. Operations people need to understand code. People need to fucking work with each other and not just occupy space next to each other."
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2013/06/04/devops-the-title-match/
timf · 2014-11-21
The author responds to a number of the comments here: http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2014/11/21/a-few-things/
nosequel · 2012-04-25
You should read this as an example why many software vendors don't bother with trying to get their packages into distributions' package repositories.
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2012/03/16/why-you-should-stop-fighting-dis…
lusis · 2011-10-09
It's not so much what I consider to be missing as what others don't seem to be finding in them that encourages them to bolt on functionality into "incompatible" tools:
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2011/08/22/the-configuration-management-div…
ferrantim · 2014-09-09
This blog post about the problems running databases in container-based PaaS is a good starting point: http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2014/06/22/feedback-on-paas-realism/
Generally, you want to be able to answer these questions when it comes to operating your databases:
What are the failure points?
What is the impact of each failure point?
What are the SINGLE points of failure?
What is my recovery pattern?
What is my upgrade experience?
What is the operational overhead in the applications running ON the product?
What is my DR strategy?
What is my HA strategy?
Pure Docker, and no other tool that we are aware of in the docker/container ecosystem that we are aware of provide really good answers to these questions when it comes to databases. That is what I mean when I said running databases in containers in a nightmare. It is possible today, for sure, but it is extremely complex operationally and its why it is so rare to see prod databases running in production today.