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Docjowles posted:For my money it’s some very basic info on how networking and/or dns work. I’ve had some absolutely I've worked at huge tech companies and I can confirm that the number of senior devs who believe that network is basically magic is concerningly high. "I think we need networking." "Alright, what's the issue you're seeing?" "Uh...I'm getting errors." "What kind of errors?" "HTTP 500 errors." "I don't think you need networking."
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Jul 12, 2022 02:46
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conversations with senior devs where you suddenly realize that what they’re trying to explain only makes sense if their world view about how two computers communicate is totally and fundamentally broken.
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After 6 years at AWS I can assure you that even there, most engineers only vaguely know HTTP, and anything below that might as well be magic.
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Jul 12, 2022 02:54
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Ya'll are making me think I need to devote a few days to get a better understanding of networking...
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Jul 12, 2022 03:33
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Falcon2001 posted:I've worked at huge tech companies and I can confirm that the number of senior devs who believe that network is basically magic is concerningly high.  My passive-aggressive, not-real-because-I-want-to-remain-employed answer would be "how to read error messages". Because Jesus Christ the number of tickets and questions I've dealt with in my career that were resolved by simply reading and comprehending the text that was blindly spammed into the ticket at the first sign of trouble is astronomical. Sometimes it requires breaking a sweat, like pasting the error message into Google or in extreme cases going to the software's Github readme or issue tracker. But often it's just literally reading the text of the error and fixing what it says is wrong.This is fine when it's a non-technical user hitting up the help desk. That's why a help desk exists. I feel like it's less fine when it's an engineer making deep into six figures grinding work to a halt and escalating to peers with Ops expertise because "I am trying to call the password reset API endpoint /pussword and I get a 404 error please advise @ALL_MANAGERS"
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Jul 12, 2022 03:37
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you don't even need a few days just a few hours to read up on osi + a handful of the most common protocols and you'll be in the top 10% easy
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Jul 12, 2022 03:38
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Having to tell frontend devs how to read network traces in developer tools and the difference between timing out, active denial, and DNS lookup failure seems embarrassingly condescending and patronizing in most circumstances but having had to do it at almost every company I’ve been at reluctantly I think developers that don’t understand networking when working on uh… web applications is a handicap for day to day work. I don’t expect software devs to know what the three way handshake or what the OSI model is, but I do want to know that they won’t be asking me to help them figure out why their application on their laptop can’t be accessed from the public Internet (and for that I just point people to ngrok anyway).
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Jul 12, 2022 03:51
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necrobobsledder posted:Having to tell frontend devs how to read network traces in developer tools and the difference between timing out, active denial, and DNS lookup failure seems embarrassingly condescending and patronizing in most circumstances but having had to do it at almost every company I’ve been at reluctantly I think developers that don’t understand networking when working on uh… web applications is a handicap for day to day work. I don’t expect software devs to know what the three way handshake or what the OSI model is, but I do want to know that they won’t be asking me to help them figure out why their application on their laptop can’t be accessed from the public Internet (and for that I just point people to ngrok anyway). Yeah this is the level of detail I am talking about. I am not asking devs to pass the CCNA. I would be elated if they understood the significance of an IP address that starts with 10.x and one that doesn't. What a private vs public subnet means in AWS. And, yes, the significance of a DNS lookup failure. Not even how to troubleshoot it, just that it's a distinct failure mode. I don't feel like this is "embarrassingly condescending and patronizing" at all, devs I've worked with across several companies struggle with this.
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Jul 12, 2022 04:28
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Docjowles posted:Yeah this is the level of detail I am talking about. I am not asking devs to pass the CCNA. I would be elated if they understood the significance of an IP address that starts with 10.x and one that doesn't. What a private vs public subnet means in AWS. And, yes, the significance of a DNS lookup failure. Not even how to troubleshoot it, just that it's a distinct failure mode. I don't feel like this is "embarrassingly condescending and patronizing" at all, devs I've worked with across several companies struggle with this. *Yup*. Like the amount of networking knowledge needed to run a service is not that much. But it is greater than most devs know about as far as I can tell.
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Jul 12, 2022 05:31
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The bar for knowing computers as a software developer is oftentimes quite low depending upon domain. Every other researcher in CS I ever worked with was either an absolute GOAT at computers or a complete dunce, not much in between, for more anecdata. This probably won't fly for folks that are working on network stacks at Cisco, but it certainly is common for enterprise CIO-fleecing-bullshitware that's so common around the world.
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Jul 12, 2022 15:49
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This might be a dumb question. Configuring some ECS services and trying to figure out the security group permissions I need. I have an ALB which has its own security group, then an Auto Scaling Group, which has its own, and finally a service with its own. Who needs to talk to whom to get this sorted out? I have the ALB set up to allow inbound traffic on port 80, the ASG to allow inbound traffic from the ALB SG on port 80, and the Service to also allow inbound traffic from the ALB on port 80. But I'm unable to hit any API endpoints running on the service, so I'm pretty sure something is misconfigured, but I don't really understand how the 3 components talk to each other.
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Jul 12, 2022 21:02
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Well, as I've mentioned in other threads, I got fired from that job yesterday so now I don't have to do that at least, silver linings. I'm looking at setting up a case management system for my side job to get some extra hours, and want to host it in AWS since we don't have any physical infrastructure. Here's what I'm thinking so far for the general structure, I'm sure I'm missing something so I'd appreciate if people can point it out. Cloudfront distribution -> ??? -> ECS running one task for React and one for Express and Node (this will not be a high volume or high urgency application so redundancy is unnecessary) -> MongoDB on RDS, S3 for object storage -> Glacier for old objects that are just needed for retention compliance. As I understand it Cloudfront can't point straight to ECS because the tasks change ARNs when they cycle out, so people tend to use an ALB or ELB, is that the most cost efficient option? It feels like a load balancer shouldn't be needed when I'm only running one instance of each task. I'm just using ECS for the self-healing to reduce maintenance workload. ECS seems like it has enough management built in that I wouldn't need to use EKS for orchestration on the individual containers, does that sound accurate? Then from there I'll set up either a Jenkins or GitHub Actions pipeline to push my updates, and will set up the overall application through Terraform. Any opinions on Jenkins vs GitHub Actions? I'll have to learn either from scratch. Cost is a pretty big factor in all of this, this is a non-profit and while they're willing to spend whatever it takes to get a proper workflow going and get in compliance with legal retention requirements they aren't rolling in money. I would feel very guilty if I got them something that ends up costing more than a proper SaaS product in recurring costs.
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Jul 13, 2022 22:01
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don't use ecs for your frontend, publish it to s3 don't use jenkins I don't have opinions about the rest of it
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Jul 13, 2022 22:11
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My understanding is that S3 is only for static websites, this would need to be able to have text fields, radio buttons/modals, and would be creating new subtasks based on what the user enters. Am I wrong about S3's website capabilities? It would be kind of like a ticketing system but with a different focus so it doesn't feel like an existing ticketing system would be a good choice. E: Actually, Amplify seems like it might be a good choice, especially for a low volume site. And then I could use Amplify studio for the low code development since I haven't done webdev since early 2019. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jul 13, 2022 |
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Jul 13, 2022 22:16
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I assume they've already looked at SaaS products that exist in this space, like Clio? I can't imagine a small place rolling their own.
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Jul 13, 2022 22:24
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22 Eargesplitten posted:My understanding is that S3 is only for static websites, this would need to be able to have text fields, radio buttons/modals, and would be creating new subtasks based on what the user enters. Am I wrong about S3's website capabilities? It would be kind of like a ticketing system but with a different focus so it doesn't feel like an existing ticketing system would be a good choice. You're fundamentally wrong about how client-side js and modern web dev works and need to bone up on those concepts before you make anything that will be used by a paying customer. Your clients money would be better spent on a SaaS product.
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Jul 13, 2022 22:27
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Sorry if that sounds harsh, just trying to be up front about the difficulties of actually producing a usable application that a paying customer would use.
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Jul 13, 2022 22:30
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Fair enough, I was considering telling my boss to get someone else to do the app itself since I'm so out of the loop and was never great at it in general. OTOH I have all the time in the world to learn it right now  We haven't looked at Clio, the one software we found specifically for our industry that would actually give us a price was about $4k a year which is not great with how tiny we are (I can't give specifics about this place without doxxing). Based off of the expenses my last company had at their size I'm confident that I could get it under $2k a year, probably under $1k. My boss had actually wanted to roll our own from the beginning but when I was working so much as the only technically competent person here I said "I have zero time to handle this" but now I do. E: I should say he's technically competent too, just not familiar with cloud stuff, and he's already working more than full time for garbage wages so he has no time either. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jul 13, 2022 |
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Jul 13, 2022 22:33
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$4000/year for software that makes your business run is incredibly good value. That's like a day a month of someone's time if they're on a salary of $80k, and instead of some minimum viable product that has a bus factor of 1, you get a solution with a support team behind it. If you have to have something built in house then would you be able to do it with something like AppSheet?
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Jul 13, 2022 22:59
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If you’re looking for a PMS for a law firm suggest Clio as well we were on Practice Panther, evaluated 6 others and migrated to Clio. Clios API is pretty easy to build on top of as well. There’s CRMs/[ ] Management systems for every industry that have had millions invested into their development, many of which have APIs so you can extend them. EDIT: to this day the easiest to dev and deploy dashboard to extend a CRM/productivity tool system I’ve seen is Plotlys Dash. Deploy to hobby tier heroku for $7 and push with git. Dead simple. Only downside is the free version only has HTTP basic auth.
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Jul 14, 2022 00:09
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You could also do something as simple/ dumb as a table in notion.so
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Jul 14, 2022 00:10
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22 Eargesplitten posted:My understanding is that S3 is only for static websites, this would need to be able to have text fields, radio buttons/modals, and would be creating new subtasks based on what the user enters. Am I wrong about S3's website capabilities? It would be kind of like a ticketing system but with a different focus so it doesn't feel like an existing ticketing system would be a good choice. My understanding is Amplify is the right choice, we use it to link our GitHub source and AWS. I don't know how the pricing works. Good luck to you!
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Jul 14, 2022 00:50
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Amplify is cute, but for building anything where I want to serve React and have some sort of API backend, I'd start with Next.js on Vercel. It's real slick and easy to get going. Of course, for $4k/yr i'd just buy Clio or whatever.
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Jul 14, 2022 00:59
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StumblyWumbly posted:My understanding is Amplify is the right choice, we use it to link our GitHub source and AWS. I don't know how the pricing works. Good luck to you! The pricing seems very good, by my rough estimate it would be under $30 a month given our limited size, especially if I ran a cloudfront function to compress photos and videos to more manageable sizes. I spoke with my boss earlier and he's 100% on board with the homegrown software idea, he's very particular about how he wants our stuff to work so he wants me to build stuff exactly to his specifications and then add features as time goes on. That particularity is apparently also why he doesn't like the other options he's looked at. This place is, as he puts it "really loving weird" and the other ones he has looked at don't provide support for some use cases. He even suggested I make it open source after I've got something worth showing, although I don't know how many companies in this industry are in as weird of a situation as we are. I was honest with him about how much time I expect it to take to get a minimum viable product and that a lot of what he's talking about would be add-ons down the line after I get basic functionality going. If he's on board with me billing those hours then gently caress it, I could use the income and the portfolio project.
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Jul 14, 2022 04:15
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By all means, do what you want, get paid, play with fun stuff, add resume bullet points, but I'll just say this - Every law firm thinks they are special unique snowflakes who do things weird and who absolutely cannot change their workflow one iota to adopt new case management, document management, or any main line of business app. They're all wrong and after trying to do it the wrong way, kicking and screaming, they eventually give in because they realize they have to run a business and the world doesn't revolve around them. I did IT for law firms for close to 20 years. If you don't have some level of experience dealing with law firms, trying to help one roll their own case management web app, while not knowing that JavaScript can be used with static sites... it's not going to be an easy, pain free task. If they were paying me to do the job, they'd end up using Clio. But again, do what's right for you. Just go in with eyes open.
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Jul 14, 2022 05:27
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You’re gonna learn a lot but this is probably not the right choice for your employer
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Jul 14, 2022 08:07
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Cat Army
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I'm studying for the SysOps Associate cert and I was wondering if anyone could tell me if the lab portion is as descriptive as the challenge labs on ACloudGuru? For example:
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Jul 14, 2022 14:32
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Internet Explorer posted:By all means, do what you want, get paid, play with fun stuff, add resume bullet points, but I'll just say this - Tbh this is every business. Everyone thinks they are a snowflake. Never worked in law but I’ve dealt with plenty of cases of “well I know there is a free open source solution that does 98% of what we need. But it lacks this one specific feature so gently caress it we’re building our own from scratch!!!” And you get the one feature but it’s significantly worse in every other way. Plus now you’re stuck maintaining some bespoke piece of poo poo forever that you can’t just Google answers for when the guy who wrote it leaves. The company where I’ve been for a while now had a huge bias for build over buy that is finally changing over after some changes in engineering leadership. It’s so refreshing.
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Jul 14, 2022 15:05
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Docjowles posted:Tbh this is every business. Everyone thinks they are a snowflake. Never worked in law but I’ve dealt with plenty of cases of “well I know there is a free open source solution that does 98% of what we need. But it lacks this one specific feature so gently caress it we’re building our own from scratch!!!” And you get the one feature but it’s significantly worse in every other way. Plus now you’re stuck maintaining some bespoke piece of poo poo forever that you can’t just Google answers for when the guy who wrote it leaves. On the other hand, is there anything worse than 'The solution that we picked without consulting you doesn't do $VeryImportantThing, so your new process is going to be 50% manual and 50% in this new system"
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Jul 14, 2022 20:23
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Falcon2001 posted:On the other hand, is there anything worse than 'The solution that we picked without consulting you doesn't do $VeryImportantThing, so your new process is going to be 50% manual and 50% in this new system" That why you pick Clio and then roll your own things on top of it using its API.
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Jul 14, 2022 23:18
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LtDan posted:I'm studying for the SysOps Associate cert and I was wondering if anyone could tell me if the lab portion is as descriptive as the challenge labs on ACloudGuru? For example: Good question. I've done the SysOps course but haven't got around to sitting the exam yet. I didn't even realise there was a lab portion! Tell you what, if you could come back and let me know once you have set the exam that would be super!
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Jul 15, 2022 00:24
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With this earlier talk about networking, I took online training this week about creating and deploying infrastructure through a custom portal. Networking kicked me square in the nuts on every project.  For people working with this stuff every day, how much of your time is spent troubleshooting networking issues?
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Jul 15, 2022 20:49
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very little? unless there's a performance issue or an outage, or we need to scale out a subnet most of the time if i'm starting a new project I'll take some time on the front end to design the network components then I don't have to think about it again
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Jul 15, 2022 21:25
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it's the kind of thing that comes with familiarity and practice though
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Jul 15, 2022 21:26
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The Fool posted:it's the kind of thing that comes with familiarity and practice though Yeah, I can see that. My job put me in the training, and the majority of other students were networking/sysadmin or had been working with the platform for a while. My data analyst background didn't help me much when trying to figure out why the hell a Puppet wasn't able to provision.  It was interesting training though, and I'm 99% sure they use AWS as their backend.
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Jul 15, 2022 21:39
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I've spent more time troubleshooting my laptop's routes and DNS than my own infrastructure's in the past three years and I'm doing a legacy datacenter migration effort of all things. I haven't pulled out mtr and iperf3 for over 5 years until yesterday. Part of the point of knowing all this stuff is to avoid needing to do troubleshooting like that down the road. Like I view half the point of trying to make more money is to not need to worry about money as much to go about the things you'd rather be doing. I used to do some brown bag lunch talks for engineers at previous companies that want to get better at networking and command line usage in a less stressful situation than an outage, difficult support ticket, or even a training class. Might be worth trying to find an infrastructure or networking buddy that's actually friendly and patient for this because I haven't found any good resources for learning this stuff effectively and quickly. FWIW, infrastructure, "devops", and other tools that touch networks have horrible usability IMO and we as an industry suck at not sabotaging each other. I don't blame vaguely sane people for being intimidated by this stuff in the least because we're probably the broke brains, not the users. I still remember the terror I felt as a little kid at the store that exited Windows and got a cold, dark C:\> prompt.
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Jul 15, 2022 23:18
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Hughmoris posted:For people working with this stuff every day, how much of your time is spent troubleshooting networking issues? Beyond a security group issue where I messed up which to add an ingress/egress to? Yeah not often. Once every 6 months or so max and that's when we're bringing up new VPCs/accounts or stuff like that.
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Jul 15, 2022 23:41
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If it’s any consolation networking in the cloud seems much simpler than traditional enterprise networking. There’s so much stuff you don’t have to care about. Like layer 2 just kind of isn’t a thing. Which is great, because later 2 sucks  I’m sure it feels like a lot if you’re coming from zero networking background, but it’s not that bad. The clouds really do insulate you from a lot of the esoteric poo poo.And once you get it set up it mostly just runs as others said. The biggest hassle is if you are forced to run a hybrid network connecting back to data centers with direct connect. Cause then you suddenly do have to care about the baggage of the last 40 years of networking again. For me the worst part is optimizing your bandwidth costs, or even understanding them. AWS at least does not make this easy or cheap out of the box. Everyone eventually has the “wait I have been paying these assholes how much to get my data in and out of S3 when I could have been paying $0 to use a VPC endpoint?” moment.
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Jul 16, 2022 02:37
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ledge posted:Good question. I've done the SysOps course but haven't got around to sitting the exam yet. I didn't even realise there was a lab portion! I forgot Amazon has Skillbuilder with free practice exams. I did one today and the practice lab was pretty similar in terms of wording so that's a relief.
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Jul 16, 2022 03:52
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Plank Walker posted:This might be a dumb question. Configuring some ECS services and trying to figure out the security group permissions I need. I have an ALB which has its own security group, then an Auto Scaling Group, which has its own, and finally a service with its own. Who needs to talk to whom to get this sorted out? I figured this out (maybe? idk but I can hit the service so it works). Maybe someone more knowledgeable can confirm that my understanding is correct: Application Load Balancer is in Security Group A, which is open to outside traffic for requests. Auto Scaling Group has Security Group B, which can receive traffic from A. This security group is applied to every EC2 instance that gets brought online for the application (I think?). The ECS Service is in Security Group C, which is set up to receive traffic from B and allows the EC2 instance to pass requests to the service running within it (also I think?) Now let's say I have some other resource that I want to talk to the service, which security group do I allow traffic from this resource in?
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Jul 16, 2022 15:05
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quote:brown bag lunch talks At the risk of starting something unhealthy: Can we use lunchtime learnings instead of brown bag? Micro aggressions are a thing and I like to do my part to minimize them. To avoid a derail, I’d be happy to talk more over PMs if you want.
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Jul 16, 2022 17:46
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