th3raid0r

I very much agree. I self-identified as a socialist for a long while before actually getting on the ground and building things. And you know what? I found that online "socialism" or "communism" is absolutely nothing like the folks you meet in real life.

Turns out that the loudest on the left doesn't always correlate with who shows up to their community. It's easy to be loud these days, after all. Not so easy to build.

I find that those I help clean the streets with or building new community spaces with are far more pragmatic than any of the "chronically online" socialists/communists - and that pragmatism is derived from a deep experience of what does and doesn't work. What does and doesn't build power and community solidarity.

See, I fear that the chronically online "socialism" is largely insular, idealistic, and uncompromising - and so that's what many see it as.

Just like the "good Christians" are basically invisible right now compared to the authoritarian bible thumpers - so too are the "pragmatic socialists" because we're being hidden behind the loudest, craziest, and dumbest at the behest of corporate owned media.

So yeah, it doesn't really matter what ideology you subscribe to, the most important thing is getting out there and building with other like-minded people and figuring out the path to power in your area. It requires pragmatism, patience, and lots of really hard and unforgiving work with no assurance of making the change in your lifetime.

"Your application" - the customers you mean. Our DB definitely does it's own rate limiting and it emits rate limit warnings and errors as well. I didn't say we advertised infinite IOPs that would be silly. We are totally aware of the scaling factors there and to date IOPs based scaling is rarely a Sev1 because of it. (Oh no p99 breached 8ms. Time to talk to Mr customer about scaling up soon)

The problem is that the resulting cluster is so performant that you could load in 100x the amount of data and not notice until the disk fills up. And since these are NVME drives on cloud infrastructure, they are $$$.

So usually what happens is that the customer fills up the disk arrays so fast that we can't scale the volumes/cluster fast enough to avoid stop-writes let alone get feedback from the customer in time. And now that's like the primary reason to get paged these days.

We generally catch gradual disk space increases from normal customer app usage. Those give us hours to respond and our alerts are well tuned. It's the "Mr. Customer launched a new app and didn't tell us, and now they've filled up the disks in 1 hour flat." that I'm complaining about.

It is definitely an under provisioning problem. But that under provisioning problem is caused by the customers usually being very very stingy about what they are willing to spend. Also, to be clear, it isn't buckling. It is doing exactly The thing it was designed to do. Which is to stop writes to the DB since there is no disk space left. And before this time, it's constantly throwing warnings to the end user. Usually these customers tend to ignore those errors until they reach this stop writes state.

In fact, we just had to give an RCA to the c-suite detailing why we had not scaled a customer when we should have, but we have a paper trail of them refusing the pricing and refusing to engage.

We get the same errors, and we usually reach out via email to each of these customers to help project where their data is going and scale appropriately. More frequently though, they are adding data at such a fast clip that them not responding for 2 hours would lead them directly into the stop writes status.

This has led us to guessing what our customers are going to end up at. Oftentimes being completely wrong and eating to scale multiple times.

Workload spikes are the entire reason why our database technology exists. That's the main thing we market ourselves as being able to handle (provided you gave the DB enough disk and the workload isn't sustained for a long enough to fill the discs.)

There is definitely an automation problem. Unfortunately, this particular line of our managed services will not be able to be automated. We work with special customers, with special requirements, usually fortune 100 companies that have extensive change control processes. Custom security implementations. And sometimes even no access to their environment unless they flip a switch.

To me it just seems to all go back to management/c-suite trying to sell a fantasy version of our product and setting us up for failure.

That is exactly what we do. The problem is that as a managed service offering. It is on us to scale in response to these alerts.

I think people are misunderstanding my original post. When I say that customer cluster will go into stop writes, that does not mean it is not functional. It is an entirely intended function of the database so that no important data is lost or overwritten.

The problem is more organizational. It's that we have a 5 minute SLA to respond to these types of events and that they can happen at any random customer impulse.

I don't have a problem with customers that can correctly project their load and let us know in advance. Those are my favorite customers. But they're not most of our customers.

As for automation. As I had exhaustedly detailed in another response, we do have another product that does this a lot better. And it's the one that we are mass marketing a lot more. The one where I'm feeling all the pain is actually our enterprise level managed service offering. Which goes to customers that have "special requirements" and usually mean that they will never get as robust automation as the other product line.

Our database is actually pretty graceful. It just goes into stop writes status. You can still read any data and resolving the situation is as easy as scaling the cluster or removing old records. By no means is the database down or inoperable.

Essentially our database is working as designed. If we rate limited it further then we have less of a product to sell. The main feature we sell of our database technology is its IOPS and resiliency.

Further, this is just for a specific customer, it has no impact to any other customers or any sort of central orchestration. Generally speaking the stop writes status only ever impacts a single customer and their associated applications.

Also, customers can be very stingy with the clusters they are willing to buy. We actually are on poor terms of the couple of our customers who just refuse to scale and just expect us to magic their cluster into accepting more data than its sized for.

Probably not feasible in our case. We sell our DB tech based on the sheer IOPS it's capable of. It already alerts the user if the write-cache is full or the replication cache is backing up too.

The problem is, at full tilt, a 9 node cluster can take on over 1GB/s in new data. This is fine if the customer is writing over old records and doesn't require any new space. It's just that it's more common that Mr. customer added a new microservice and didn't think through how much data it requires. Thus causing rapid increase in DB disk space or IOPs that the cluster wasn't sized for.

We do have another product line in the works (we call it DBaaS) and that can autoscale because it's based on clearly defined service levels and cluster specifications. I don't think that product will have this problem.

It's just these super mega special (read: big, important, fortune 100) companies have requirements that mean they need something more hand-crafted. Otherwise we'd have automated the toil by now.

From what I understand this is incredibly common amongst us. Essentially picking out the "relevant" information is really hard when there's a lot of other loud signals blaring.

For my Sony headphones I have a slider to set how strong the noise cancellation is set. If it's set to anything lower than max/wind reduction you can check a box to amplify voices. It's pretty darn good.

From what I understand the Pixel Buds can also do this REALLY well, but I haven't used those. Lots of smart earbuds can do it these days, just expect to pay a couple hundred for it.

I'd like to report in as someone at the end of that process and is actually making good money.

Now I need:

More time to hang out with friends and family. 🥲

Rush - 2112 - 21 minutes and some change

Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick - more than 40 minutes

Keygen Church - Bullug Gegbug Ibgabiug Gixcure Dagabciea Fuic - 18 minutes

And I definitely agree. It's hard to over listen to songs you have to make time for. Lol

Oh for sure! They tend to be music that's far more technical or difficult to listen to. I listen to a lot of metal particularly and while I LOVE Lorna Shore, I've only listened to any particular song once or twice even so.

There is one or two artists that don't get old for me due to special factors that I can't quite describe though.

That being said, there are many bands I've dropped in the annals of time because their sound grew too familiar as well.

My focus is arguably worth it as a senior developer. I am totally prepared to throw some absurd scratch to solve this problem. Lol.

Ya know, I forgot that was an option. I guess I'll schedule a visit. I could use the same mold for custom iems too right?