Title: When Everything Old Is New Again

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January 15, 2024. Today feels like a mix of déjà vu and the future all at once. The tech world is buzzing with AI/ML infrastructure growth, platform engineering becoming a mainstream discipline, and FinOps driving cloud cost pressures. It’s funny how we cycle back to basics while building on top of mountains of new technology.

Reflections on the Era

This month, Hacker News was filled with stories that resonated in different ways. Losing my son was a personal tragedy that struck close to home for many. But beyond that, there were some tech discussions that stuck out. Apple’s changes to iOS and Safari in the EU felt like another wave of regulation hitting us from all sides. And then there was Zed, the collaborative code editor going open source—how times have changed since I remember writing code alone at my desk.

AI and Infrastructure

The AI/ML landscape is exploding post-ChatGPT. We’re dealing with massive infrastructure challenges as we scale these models to production. Our team has been working on optimizing our LLM (large language model) deployment, tweaking Kubernetes pods to fit the compute needs of the day. It’s a balancing act between performance and cost, especially when you consider DORA metrics and FinOps pressures.

Platform Engineering

Platform engineering is now mainstream. We’re no longer just about deploying services; we’re building reusable components that can be composed together like LEGO bricks. One of our recent projects was migrating from a monolithic approach to microservices architecture using Knative for serverless functions. It’s fascinating how quickly these tools have matured, but the trade-offs are still there.

WebAssembly and Server-Side

WebAssembly on the server side is gaining traction. We’re exploring ways to offload CPU-intensive tasks like image processing and video transcoding to WASM modules running in Node.js. It’s a game-changer for performance, especially when dealing with heavy workloads that can benefit from native code execution.

Developer Experience

Developer experience has become its own discipline. Tools like Zed are just the tip of the iceberg—there are more sophisticated IDEs and editors that offer real-time collaboration features. We’ve been experimenting with VS Code Dev Containers to provide a consistent development environment across all our engineers. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely moving us in the right direction.

Debugging Real-World Issues

This week, I spent some time debugging an issue where one of our services was consistently timing out when hitting high traffic. The culprit turned out to be an improperly configured service mesh that was overloading the ingress controller. Once we optimized the mesh and adjusted the ingress settings, the service performance improved significantly.

Learning and Arguing

There’s always something new to learn in this field. I recently had a heated debate with one of my team members about whether to use Istio or Linkerd for our service mesh. The argument was as much about personal preferences as it was about the latest release notes. In the end, we decided to stick with Linkerd due to its smaller footprint and faster performance on our Kubernetes cluster.

FinOps and Cloud Costs

FinOps is still a hot topic. As more teams adopt these practices, cloud costs are becoming a major concern. We’re working closely with our financial operations team to set up cost alerts and quotas in AWS. The challenge lies in finding the right balance between performance and cost, ensuring we don’t overspend on unnecessary resources.

Wrapping Up

It’s an exciting time to be in tech, but it comes with its share of challenges. We’re constantly learning and adapting, debugging real-world issues, and arguing over tools and approaches. It’s a bit like the old days when everything felt new again. But this time, we have decades of experience under our belts, making us better prepared for whatever comes next.

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That’s where I am today. The tech landscape is ever-evolving, and so are we. Stay tuned as we navigate through the complexities and embrace the opportunities that lie ahead.