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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

I am really dumbfounded by the pricing. $600 a month for 5GB storage and 50 writes per second?? Meanwhile, a DO droplet is 5$/Mo, has 1TB traffic and 20GB SSD. Am I overlooking something? I agree with most of the points this article makes, but leveled logging has always served me well, with the exact levels she* mentions in the article. And of course logging is expensive if you pay 600$ per month for 50 writes per second. Also, there's no be-all-end-all logging solution, it always has to be tailored specifically for your needs.

*EDIT

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Rolling your own makes sense only to a point; anything much more operationally complex than "an rsyslog collector" rapidly crosses the boundary of "I don't care what the hardware costs me, it's dwarfed by the costs of engineering time / loss of focus."

Unless logging is the core of what your company does, I'd suggest not reinventing this particular wheel; those stories never end well.

The author isn't a "he", and the hardware cost of running 512MB of RAM infra doesn't capture at all the cost of running a logging solution. By expensive, the article mentions the word in the context of performance overhead, which is absolutely right.

Their pricing seems a bit high for the write throughput but the equivalent cost in engineering time, for equal capabilities, is way in their favor.

>The author isn't a "he"

Historically, "he" has been a gender neutral way of referring to another person when gender is irrelevant to the conversation (such as it is now). "They" may be more politically correct, but "he" is still a completely valid gender-neutral term. There's no need to correct that, gender is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

Using "they" makes gender irrelevant. It's not politically correct, it's precise. Meanwhile, using "he" is a statement of assumption, or a statement of not caring about changes in society. I think this was involuntary by OP. Yet, I also think those need to be corrected. What was seen as the norm historically is not an argument for what we should make the future from. If gender is irrelevant in a sentence, then let's correct that by using and encouraging gender neutral pronouns.

If anything, this struck me enough in the OP's paragraph to wonder if I had misattributed the article, which is why I raised the point after verifying that the author was indeed who I thought it was. To a sample size of at least 1, the usage of the gendered pronoun was noticeable. Maybe that's just me.

"They" is possibly more precise on gender, but adds a new layer of ambiguity about how many people you're talking about. If the OP saying "he" led you to second guess the gender of the author, saying "they" may lead you to second guess how many authors had contributed to the article. What really stands out to me is how quick some people are to correct the gender of someone when a comment may misrepresent them as if the content of the article was somehow altered by the word. The OP "involuntarily" wrote "he" because "he" is completely grammatically correct.

But you're right, since what was seen as the norm historically is not an argument for what we should make the future from, I propose we just use the word "floobity" to represent the singular, gender-neutral pronoun. Floobity wrote a great article, no matter what gender floobity happens to be.

Yeah, I know about the performance overhead of logging. We have some embedded devices that do minimal logging on flash storage and if you log that you missed a timing on the critical path, it causes you to miss another timing, and this leads to a cascade that bricks the entire device because the CPU only does logging and can't even receive any commands.

Throw an MRAM chip or something similar on your next design. They're basically battery backed SRAM without the battery. Awesome for logging data plane errors.

Their competition is more like Splunk Cloud, or Dynatrace APM.

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