ntrepid8

I've often thought that micro-services were more of a software engineering management solution rather than a technical one.

From the perspective of a high-level architect it makes delegating certain types of responsibility a bit easier and potentially reduces the need for communication between teams while maintaining centralized control of the overall system.

However, it always seems to come with such a high overhead that IMHO it's almost never worth doing unless there really isn't another option.

What could possibly go wrong?

Hopefully this is the correct math for their example 1:

(1 * 2 * 0.00021167 * (600/60) * 30) + (1 * 1 * 0.00084333 * (600/60) * 30) = 0.380001

Because that's much better than the original:

(1 * 2 * 0.00021167 * (600) * 30) + (1 * 1 * 0.00084333 * (600) * 30) = 22.80006

Ah yes, that makes much more sense. Hopefully they will update the pricing page with the correct values soon :)

In other news: - water wet - sky blue

I think I need to get one of these.

For large code bases in dynamic languages I think the advantage grows larger over time. Even a modest amount of test coverage will allow you to build new features without breaking existing features.

It's a lot faster to catch bugs when the tests run in your local development environment or in the CI pipeline than to wait until Q/A (hopefully) catches them in end-to-end integration testing and sends it back to you for rework.

The other advantage I've noticed is that the tests can serve as an additional form of documentation. New team members can look through the tests to see how code is supposed to work from the examples there. For some web API projects I've even been able to generate the documentation from the test cases.

Yup, agree. Depending if you are working with a good static type system or with a dynamic language the value of unit tests can vary.

When working with dynamic languages I always end up writing a bunch of unit tests and a bunch of integration tests. I've experimented some with type hinting and static analysis in some dynamic languages but it's not the same as having the compiler make guarantees.

If you want to create a large number of Objects (like for rows in a data set) using __slots__ saves a lot of memory over just using the standard __dict__. I've always used named tuples for this in the past, but this is a nice way to do it.

I love it! Sublime Text is an excellent editor and I use it every day. It's worth every penny for a paid license.

I think being born white, male, and good at math at this particular time in history is the very definition of luck. I'm definitely playing the game of life on "easy" mode.

That being said I think there is a minimum level of effort, intelligence, and resilience required to take advantage of certain lucky opportunities if they present themselves. When I look at how much some of my peers had to endure and overcome to reach those minimums compared to what I had to do, it's easy to see how lucky I've been.

I really should write a blog post about it :) but right now there isn't one.

Debian packages are easy to work with and we keep them as our primary artifact for any given release.

The number of cluster nodes varies between 10 and 35 depending on the workload at the time.

Nodes join the cluster by contacting one of the three "static" nodes that are not spot instances. If they can talk to at least one of those they get knowledge of the entire cluster. When one of the spot instances is going to be killed there is a notice is the instance metadata. The nodes just watch for that and initiate a normal shutdown if they see it.

Yes we do use ELBs but just as TCP proxies and for TLS termination.

I wonder if there is any possibility of using a newer iteration of Firefox with a configurable number of threads rather than Chrome as the engine for Electron (or something like it). In the browser at least this helps a lot to bring down memory consumption.

Electron does more than just about any other tool to enable building high quality cross platform apps. As someone who runs Linux on the desktop it's quite nice to be able to use the same apps as folks running Mac/Win. I just don't have any computers with less than 16 GB of memory :)