$ cat post/the-function-returned-/-the-service-mesh-confused-us-all-/-the-wire-holds-the-past.md
the function returned / the service mesh confused us all / the wire holds the past
Title: Notes from the Dark Ages of Tech
December 26th, 2011. It feels like a long time ago in the tech world, but it’s only been a few years. I remember this day clearly because we were just wrapping up a big migration for one of our clients to AWS. The server farm was quiet, and everyone was off celebrating the holiday season, leaving me to clean up after the migration storm.
We had migrated their entire infrastructure from an on-premise setup to a cluster of EC2 instances running Chef. It was a major project, and everything seemed to be going smoothly until I got a ping from our operations team in the middle of the night. One of the key services was experiencing high latency. I quickly SSHed into the instance, ran top, and noticed that a few instances were maxing out on CPU.
The logs pointed me towards an unexpected interaction between their custom application and the database. The application wasn’t handling connections properly, leading to deadlocks and a general performance nightmare. It was one of those moments where you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck with your code.
I spent the next few hours rewriting some parts of the app, adjusting connection pooling, and tweaking query execution plans. By morning, we had the service back online, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with our setup. The infrastructure was still new, and it wasn’t clear if Chef was fully ready for prime time.
The chaos around us in tech was palpable. SOPA debates were heating up on Hacker News and elsewhere, with GoDaddy taking center stage as both a supporter of the bill and a target of user frustration. I couldn’t help but think about how this debate mirrored the tension between traditional IT and DevOps—a constant battle over control and efficiency.
Just when I was wrapping up my day, I received an email from our client’s IT department. They wanted to know if we could add some redundancy to another service, just in case something like last night happened again. It reminded me that despite the excitement around cloud services, there were still risks involved, and you couldn’t take anything for granted.
That evening, as I sat in front of my Christmas tree with a cup of coffee, I reflected on all this. The launch of OpenStack was just around the corner, and Heroku had recently been acquired by Salesforce. Continuous delivery practices were gaining traction, but there was still a lot to learn about how to scale and maintain applications built for the cloud.
As we move forward, it’s clear that DevOps isn’t just about automation—it’s about culture, trust, and collaboration between developers and ops teams. Tools like Chef and Puppet are making inroads, but they’re not without their quirks. I’ve learned that the journey to a better infrastructure is never over; there will always be challenges to face.
Happy holidays, everyone. May 2012 bring us more challenges—and hopefully, more solutions.
This blog post captures the essence of the era, reflecting on personal experiences and broader industry trends without summarizing specific news stories. It highlights the realities of tech work at that time, including infrastructure migration challenges and the emergence of DevOps practices.