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authorFranck Cuny <franckcuny@gmail.com>2016-07-31 10:16:40 -0700
committerFranck Cuny <franckcuny@gmail.com>2016-07-31 13:42:48 -0700
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+I'm more and more annoyed by how the tech community is super enthusiastic about new pieces of
+technology, and how hard they try to convince you it's the best next thing in the world. Way too
+often, at conferences or meet-ups, the talks tend to glorify a product or a technology, and only
+focus on how it will make your life easier. It's too common to have someone do a demo on stage on
+how to build, in 5 minutes, a trivial application running with X many instances in a container in
+the cloud and be like "see how easy it was !?".
+
+What will not be mentioned is how your team is going to transition to this technology or
+infrastructure; what are the traps hiding; what will not work; what are the real limitations (can it
+scale to more than 10 instances ? 100 instances ? 10k instances ?); how do you manage it in your
+data-center; in your cloud; how easy is it to debug; what are the current issues that people running
+it in production have met; what's the worst case scenario for an incident; how long can it take to
+recover; and way too many other things.
+
+Over the last few days, I binge-watched many of the
+[MesosCon](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVjgeV_avap2arug3vIz8c6l72rvh9poV)'s' videos. One of the
+talk I really enjoyed was by [Joseph Smith](https://twitter.com/Yasumoto). In [his
+talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNrh-gdu9m4&index=8&list=PLVjgeV_avap2arug3vIz8c6l72rvh9poV),
+he shared about various ways Mesos and Aurora failed at Twitter.
+
+Joseph's talk was the opposite of what I described earlier. He mentioned at length issues and
+problems we've encountered running Aurora. Some of the issues he explored were recent (from a couple
+of weeks ago); some were pretty old and are fixed by now; and also what would be the worst case
+scenario that could happen. This is exactly what I want to hear when someone introduces a piece of
+technology. I need to be aware of them. It doesn't mean that I'm going to be scared and will not use
+it.
+
+I believe this is important. The public who come to a talk is, most of the time, here to learn about
+a piece of technology. They might have some prior knowledge, but most of them don't. They want to
+learn what can be done with it; how to use it; how it's an improvement. But more importantly, we
+need to talk about the cost and path to adopt the piece of technology. Going from a simple demo
+running on 2 hosts to a something running on production with hundred of thousands of users and on
+thousands of instances is a different story.
+
+And yes, these could be questions asked by the public at the end of the talk. But not everybody
+feel comfortable asking them out loud in front of their peers.
+
+I feel the same way about post-mortems. Companies should share them more frequently. Some companies
+are [pretty good about it](https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems). I can understand, if your
+product is not a service for developers, that you might not want to share them on your blog to not
+scare your users. But we should still share them during conferences. Maybe there's even an
+opportunity for a meet-up focused on post-Mort em ?
+
+Talking about issues and how difficult it might be to adopt something is not doing is disservice to
+something you really enjoy working with.