And it was supposed to mean the exact opposite.

That's amazing.

I love that there is a real competition happening. We're going to see some insane innovations.

I figured something like this is what drove Hashicorp's licensing decision, but thought it would be Amazon.

I mean, I understood this was satire immediately, but I was definitely still looking for the tutorial at the end of the article.

"Retiring services isn’t something we do at AWS. It’s quite rare."

I read this while I was taking a break from working on an epic to migrate our stuff off of OpsWorks before it gets shut down in May.

Bloody shame, OpsWorks was a great service in my experience. I built a few clusters with it before Kubernetes and terraform were a thing.

That said, I heard from folks at AWS that it was not well maintained and a bit of a mess behind the scenes. I can't say I'm surprised it's being shut down given where the technology landscape has shifted since the service was originally offered.

RIP OpsWorks.

OpsWorks was based on a really old fork of the Chef code. I did quite a bit of Chef in my day, but it really only made sense in a physical hardware/VMware virtual instance kind of environment, where you had these "pets" that you needed to keep configured the right way.

Once you got up to the levels of AWS CAFO-style "cattle" instances, it stopped making so much sense. With autoscaling, you need your configuration to be baked into the AMI before it boots, otherwise you're going to be in a world of hurt as you try to autoscale to keep up with the load but then you spend the first thirty minutes of the instance lifetime doing all the configuration after the autoscale event.

A wise Chef once told me that "auto scaling before configuration equals a sad panda", or something to that effect.

Chef did try to come up with a software solution that would work better in an AWS Lambda/Kubernetes style environment, and I was involved with that community for a while, but I don't know what ever became of that. I probably haven't logged into those Slack channels since 2017.

IMO, there are much better tools for managing your systems on AWS. CDK FTW!

That was jarring for me, I wasn't quite sure what the article wanted to say at first. Title "we're doing X", body "we don't do X here".

Chef has been dying for a long time and was beaten to death when the company was bought by some VC and everyone was fired a couple of years ago. I can understand why the service is going away as Chef and Puppet are not exactly gaining marketshare.

AWS rarely retires services and when they do they pretty much give months/year(s) worth of notice before forcing you to migrate which is very nice.

Compare this to Azure and you'll understand.

and I, while dealing with the fallout of migrating something from AWS Data Pipeline (it entered "Maintenance Mode" and they removed console access earlier this year.)

Data pipelines was also a perennial shit show behind the scenes. Turns out integration is a lot of complexity even if the service is "simple" in concept and doesn't need to be so real time.

I feel like data pipelines and swf have been replaced by step functions+event bus+lambdas/fargate. We've furthered abstractions over time, and that's a good thing.

Edit that said no idea how they scale in comparison

What about the employees that have a requirement to work remotely due to a disability?

C'mon -- every corporate mandate has its exceptions and allowances. This one's obvious. And when I worked at a company and had a full-time remote allowance per my employment contract, guess what? The RTO mandate didn't apply to me.

While yes, I have to assume that folks with disability related requirements will keep them, anecdotally I have one friend who was explicitly hired as remote at Amazon who's being told to RTO now.

I think that would be an interesting ADA suit.

Well yes, that's obviously true. There are a lot of companies out there that don't treat their employees like cattle who are eager to be driven from field to field.

Impressively callous reply, though. Top notch heartlessness.

People don't seem to get sarcasm anymore.

You have to add a /s or something. There are too many people on the Internet who are broken like this.

is that you Bezos?

No, it's me, sarcasm.

Waiting for more labs to weigh in. Every scientist whose name we know was called an idiot by a room full of experts first.

Test yourself, they link to their site from their profile and it's definitely delayed.

https://twitter.com/nytimes

Just tried this - loaded almost instantly. But that's only the link in the profile. Not shared links in tweets.

Leaning towards there's something else going on deep in the DNS/ad servers/cdn/who knows. Not the first I've seen/heard of resolving delays with t.co... maybe it's even just something with legacy non-SSL links being redirected etc

You’re really twisting yourself into a buzzword cloud there aren’t you?

The link you clicked in the NYT bio is not a t.co link - I assume you noticed that but still are using it as counter-proof?

On mobile, a quick test didn't even look at where the link pointed..... Because all links on twitter are t.co aren't they? Weird you think any links aren't t.co. It's how they track analytics on everything

No buzzwords there, just suspicion there's something else underlying with various technologies that are in play even on a 'simple' link click

Both the nyti.ms link and nytimes.com are actually t.co links for me. First one was slow, second one was fast.

I went through my own Twitter feed, and found 10 non-NYT links. All redirected almost immediately through t.co via wget, only lagging on the destination sites.

I also tried 5 NYT links. All had a very consistent 5 second delay through wget.

I could do more, but I don't care to. Everyone knows Elon has gone redpill, so it wouldn't surprise me if he's "owning the libs", but there also could be a dozen other reasons Twitter might do something like this (including plenty that are not nefarious). I just don't care to dig more...

Edit: I suppose I could have given the specific URLs, but I don't know if/how much t.co links leak info, so I'm not keen to do that. But the delay is absolutely on t.co and not the destination sites, at least as far as external users are concerned. It's possible that t.co queries the sites first before redirecting, and if e.g. the NYT is throttling their traffic that's what's delaying things. I don't know how to disambiguate that, but it's definitely a theory worth considering...

Actually, re: my edit - I think it really is worth considering whether there might be an accidental delay here that's on the NYT side. It's totally possible that Twitter is hitting the sites it redirects people to before it actually sends them there, for either analytics purposes or otherwise, and I'd trust the NYT devops less than Twitter's w.r.t. making sure things were fast.

Incompetence before malice, etc...

It's not.

If you use wget, you see that the delay happens during the first hop with t.co

It also happens with threads.net, instagram, facebook, blueskyweb.xyz

I mean, a good test is to go to go to their website in another browser tab and click around. You're over-complicating this.

That's extremely slow..

I've recently begun working within the Agile methodology for the first time and I'm not a big fan of it as a DevOps engineer at least. Going from roughly ~1 meeting per week to several meetings per day, spread across my morning, absolutely torpedoes my productivity.

Beyond that, there never seems to be anyone in these stand-ups that is capable of helping me because I'm doing stuff that nobody else in the company knows how to do. I'm learning as I go. So the meetings just tend to be me droning monotonously into the ether for no reason. If they did a quiz at the end of these things, everybody would fail it.

Also, engineers tend to have social anxiety. That's why a lot of us became engineers in the first place. It fills me with a small sense of dread knowing I have to speak publicly, every single day, and that creeping dread basically ruins my productivity in the hour of my morning before the meetings start, too.

I'm a lifelong nerd. I don't need motivation to make things. I don't need a 2 week learning period at the end of an iteration or whatever. I learn all of the time because I like to learn. I like to tinker. I like to automate things and make them more efficient. I deliver value just by getting the toys I want to play with.

Maybe Agile makes sense for lazy developers, but that's not what I am. I'm a force multiplier. You know how the special operations guys in the military get to have beards and hats and sunglasses? That's because they're not neophyte grunts trying to fake insanity to get out. They are highly skilled and they get shit done, so they get left alone to do their thing.

Agile feels like it sacrifices its special forces to make NCOs and ensigns look better. Sorry for all of these military references. I have no affiliation. I watched Band of Brothers a few times. It's just the closest thing to a human loss factory that I can think of.

Special forces soldiers are highly skilled and extremely dedicated troops who are expected to fight behind enemy lines with no logistical or artillery support. You throw agile into the mix and these highly trained troops are now expected to create PowerPoint after action slides justifying every decision they took to an audience of non military folks.

The thing is management doesn’t view developers as special forces. They don’t think we are Obi Wan Kenobi. They think we are Jae Jar Binks and they can always order more developers and Congress will literally drop ship them into awaiting open plan offices. The bizarre thing is why don’t they hire these very same developers remotely instead of H1B? Well you see they don’t think we are Obi Wan Kenobi…

Standups are the worst part of Agile. I never understand why anybody likes them. As you said, they torpedo productivity. I went from a company with standups to no standups, and oh my it was glorious. I could actually get things done! Then two years later, they started adding them. They were so worthless. They added nothing to ICs and as a manager they added nothing to me either. I left shortly after, partly because of that.