Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

> Expecting developers to rewrite everything in Erlang is nuts.

...But I never said that?

You are correct on your points and I don't disagree. Golang is certainly a much better choice than Bash indeed. You are also correct on developer willingness to work with Golang.

I am aware that K8s and Erlang/OTP are apples to oranges comparison; they serve different needs. Whereas Erlang's runtime (the BEAM VM) can give you fault-tolerance, K8s tries to do roughly the same on a higher level - it tries to give you throwaway containers that can be switched off and on at any time.

As I mentioned in my parent comment, I admire their work.

What my point was that if you squint your eyes hard, it kind of looks like K8s wants to invent Erlang/OTP for infrastructure (as opposed to Erlang/OTP which gives its guarantees per node).

View on HN

> which gives its guarantees per node

There is no such thing, because Nodes (and even entire datacenters) can fail.

In other words, node failure is an infrastructure problem that is best NOT handled by your bespoke application code. Replacing failed nodes should NOT be custom code in your app, that way lies madness.

> kind of looks like K8s wants to invent Erlang/OTP for infrastructure

You can say "K8s and Erlang implement similar ideas implemented at different levels." But you can't pretend one is a substitute for the other, nor that "Erlang has done everything that K8s can do."

E.g. Writing in Erlang doesn't magically get you:

- deploy/upgrade of the Erlang runtime, including rollback + multiple versions co-existing, including any compiled foreign code (which is required in the article). - ability to log, monitor, probe and reroute the connections between services -- In a standard way such that the application doesn't have to be modified.("service mesh") - Ability for an entire ecosystem of tools to inspect the versions of your application services that are deployed, because it's exposed as an API. - A standard ecosystem of plug-ins for operators (autoscale, autoscale to EC2 spot instances, capacity planning, "best practices" of running a MySQL cluster, etc.) None of these should ever be mixed with the application. (Unless you are Kelsey Hightower: https://github.com/kelseyhightower/hello-universe )

> There is no such thing, because Nodes (and even entire datacenters) can fail.

Gross over-simplification that I'd also call a strawman. In the face of lack of electricity, of course no computer language matters at all. What's your point?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com