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**Gerhard Lazu:** And if this works for you, that's great. Yeah. And since I do consulting for a number of different clients, I always have to adapt to whatever is already there. So the client that I will be shipping on-prem for doesn't actually have a thing in place, so that's sort of me putting my opinions and stamp ... |
\[20:09\] I don't really believe in making radical changes to software that's already working, even if it's not working in the way you think it maybe should. But there is this trend also, particularly in the BEAM ecosystem, where there's a lot of things you can get done by using only the BEAM. The BEAM actually ships w... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Do you know which is the biggest Erlang project that uses Mnesia? |
**Lars Wikman:** It would probably be WhatsApp. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** They do, but they use it in a different way; in a very different very way. As far as I know - and this was many years ago - they used it on just a few servers, and they used it for (I think it was) just metadata, but very small metadata. So nothing that is heavy writes or heavy reads, and I think the ... |
The project which I have in mind, and I had a first-class seat to it, was RabbitMQ. It's one of its Achilles' heels. Mnesia - oh, wow. At any sort of scale, you start seeing some serious issues. 10,000 writes per second? No way. No way. Because it's the synchronization part, and you have to go over a network, and you h... |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. So you have to typically look at Mnesia in the context it was created, which was telecom. And as far as I understand, it was typically between machines that were very tightly coupled together. I've heard people talk about [backplanes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backplane) and I have no idea wh... |
I've definitely looked for something that would essentially scale arbitrarily as a database across nodes as you add more... Not that I have the need, just because I want to see if there's the perfect solution out there... And I've found CockroachDB to be very appealing in that sense, because it's Postgres-compatible, a... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Oh, yes... |
**Lars Wikman:** \[23:45\] I thankfully haven't had a reason to spend too much time replicating Postgres. But yeah, looking at Cockroach though, you'll also see that sort of suggested specs and what they suggest for setting up Cockroach - there's a lot of concerns and a lot of things to think about, and a lot of detail... |
**Break:** \[24:47\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You've mentioned a couple of things which I would like to dig in a little bit more. First of all, you mentioned about using PostgreSQL in your most recent project that you're doing for the customer, the one that you are deploying using docker-compose, or that you're using docker-compose to run it... A... |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. That's actually a very good question, and I've been wrestling with it myself a little bit. So one of the bigger reasons is that the current SQLite adapter for Elixir is fairly new... And SQLite is very reliable, but I don't feel like that particular adapter has necessarily been proven out yet, an... |
Partly, I want to leave the client with something that other developers will definitely recognize and be capable of working with, if it ends up that I'm not around in the long run, or for whatever reason. I wanna bring us closer to the main line. And there are a few very cool projects and very useful projects in the El... |
\[27:50\] There's also a little bit of a question mark around some back-ups... Like, okay, then we will want to use Litestream. But do I have something S3-compatible to ship it to, or do I need to stand that up myself and then pull the file out and throw it at -- yeah... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Those are really good points, and I really like the way you're thinking about this, because it's about confidence. Whatever you're giving when you're (let's say) shipping it, and "Here you go, customer. This is what was done for you", someone has to maintain it. Someone has to deal with all the issues... |
So - sure, you can use MongoDB, but why would you, with your Ruby app? Just stick to MySQL. That's what the majority does. |
I do remember being in situations in the past when we did that, and there was some pain there. The drivers were great, I still remember many discussions with Jordan - I forget his family name, but he was the maintainer of Mongo, I believe, if I remember it correctly... And that was a great library, but still, there wer... |
So if I learned anything, if you can stick with the defaults, or with the most common path, especially in these cases, it's maybe best to. Now, if you have a personal project, like you have - you have a couple of experimental projects - you can use anything you want, because your SLO is whatever you want it to be. And ... |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. Sometimes it pays to make a dull choice here and there. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Lars Wikman:** I'm happy to go absolutely wild on my own projects, but it's also things like -- if I'm shipping a library to the community, that's also where I will be looking quite closely at like "Okay, but what is a good library? What does it mean to behave well as a library in this ecosystem?" I can't just put al... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Just because you could, right? No other reason. "I can do this, so why not?" |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. Oh, we absolutely needed to scale that product so hard... That's actually what we had as an objective... "Like, this has to be scalable. The last iteration of this product was not scalable. Let's greenfield it, let's build it right. It should be able to scale." And that architecture could absolut... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a good -- like, why? Why does it need to scale? If you don't ask enough why's... Like, "Why(s)?" This is something which I have seen - teams and products that keep going in the wrong direction, and then it doesn't matter how fast you go in that direction, because it's still wrong. You're going ... |
\[32:23\] And then years later, people would be asking "But why did we do that?" and none would recall, because it doesn't make any sense. Things that don't make sense, people tend to forget. Like, you're right, it doesn't make sense... |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah. I wrote a retrospective on that particular architecture, an entire product through three different iterations, and put it on my blog... And I've had some interesting feedback on that, because people don't always share -- I wouldn't even call it a failure story, because the product was a success a... |
Some of the technical choices I would not make again, but that's where I learned that I probably shouldn't have done that, or I shouldn't have done it that way. Some of the choices checked out, some of them didn't. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So in that retrospective of a post that you wrote, by the way - what's the title of the post? |
**Lars Wikman:** I think it's "Ten years in the vertical." |
**Gerhard Lazu:** "Ten years in the vertical", okay. We will link it in the show notes for those that want to read it. |
**Lars Wikman:** Yes. It's a three-part series, one for each version of the system. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So get your coffee/tea ready, whatever you're drinking. Strap down. It's a long one, but a good one. Worth it, right? I will read it myself, by the way, because it sounds very interesting. Is it funny? |
**Lars Wikman:** I'm not sure if it's funny. I hope it's a little bit funny... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a killer combo... |
**Lars Wikman:** I've definitely had good feedback on it, so it should be bearable to read, at the very least... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Alright. The coffee will make it worth it. No, no, no. I'm joking. The fun and interesting - it's like a killer combo, and if you can do both, it's great. It's like the jackpot of content. |
**Lars Wikman:** And on the shipping side of that, that was mostly Ansible. But it ended up being a lot of Ansible, because we did split everything up into microservices... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Oh, yes. |
**Lars Wikman:** ...for a three-person team. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's what you get, right? It's one of the trade-offs that you get. You may need that; I know that some teams do... But not everyone does. And knowing the difference, when to use a microservice versus a monolith, is a very important thing. Like, know the answer before you embark on the journey... And... |
So it's one thing that you want to choose wisely... You could choose maybe your cloud provider, you can migrate, and even that can be a bit difficult, but it's easier than going back from a microservice decision... Or a monolith one. By the way, sometimes that is the wrong decision, so we're not saying that one is bett... |
Okay, so we touched on a couple of interesting things, but I still think we haven't dug deep enough in the hole, before you mention about Kubernetes. So I don't think we dug deep enough into that. One of the reason why we're even having this conversation - because I know that for you Kubernetes doesn't make sense... An... |
So why in your case you're not using Kubernetes, at all? Because I don't think you're using Kubernetes. You hear about it a lot, but you don't use it. Why is that? |
**Lars Wikman:** My experience with Kubernetes is essentially I tried K3s at some point, and started learning how to set up manifest files, and a lot of swearing ensued, and then I stopped, essentially. For one thing, I don't generally build systems at a large scale. I typically work with teams that are maybe five deve... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[36:21\] That didn't stop us from using Kubernetes at Changelog. We're like three developers, one full-time, and even that one's not full-time... And we're still using Kubernetes. \[laughs\] So that didn't stop anyone. But please continue. |
**Lars Wikman:** Yeah... I could argue with you whether Changelog should be using Kubernetes... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, please. Let's. |
**Lars Wikman:** But I for sure do not see the need for a system such as the Changelog to have a Kubernetes. Now, again, context... The guy that's responsible for operating Changelog apparently likes Kubernetes, which means that he enjoys his job more if he gets to run it on Kubernetes, so... \[laughs\] It sort of chec... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** But it's not that, because I'm that guy. So just for the listeners - that's me, right? |
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