Why Twitter will fail shortly | Hacker News Reader

Why Twitter will fail shortly

zdnet.com

18 pointsCrankyBear10 comments

> Let's look at Twitter's technology, shall we?

> Twitter runs on CentOS 7. This free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone comes to the end of its life at the end of June next year.

> Twitter also relies on its own homebrew software. Programs such as Apache Heron for stream processing and twemproxy for cache scaling are essential for Twitter to run at scale.

> Twitter has contracts with "Google Cloud, AWS, and on-premise data centers. At this level of public spend, there are multi-year contracts in place guaranteeing certain spend levels; an awful lot of this is amortized over multiple years."

Honestly, this is like table stakes for any software company at this point. It's hard to read the fearmongering with a straight face. If their biggest internal problem truly is finding a new Linux distro to run before 2023, I'd say they're in great shape.

They are not running off a single server, it's a bit more complicated than that, and you need a proper organization to be able to run a service at this scale.

The problem is that the head of that organization is someone who absolutely can't be told anything, especially not things he doesn't want to hear.

It's definitely more complicated than that, I've migrated containers over to new OSes and I'm familiar with how tough it can be getting all your tests to pass again. That being said, it's a solvable problem. It's hard to say how many services Twitter runs internally, but by the sounds of this article their internal tooling sounds pretty lean and mean. A team of 5-10 tenured engineers would probably have no problem switching off of RHEL before the year is over (much less by June).

As much as I want to watch Twitter collapse under the weight of it's own incompetence, it seems highly unlikely that Elon Musk is going to allow Twitter to go offline. If Twitter really was so fragile that it couldn't be scaled by throwing more money at the problem, then I guess I get why all the previous engineers were fired.

He didn't become the richest person in the world by listening to people. Why should he now because you don't like his politics? You don't think he knows about complexity and running an organization? We're going to take some journalist shill's "analysis" over Elon's? You think he got this far by surrounding himself with idiots?

Hypothetically, what could he say/do that would make you go "oh he's incompetent and he'll run twitter into the ground"?

I don't have a vested interest in the platform, but incompetent leaders haven't stopped Twitter from reaching large-scale success in the past.

He did got this far by listening to the right people. And by being born rich, meeting the right people at the right time, being subsidized by the government, and delivering unique products with a great story and the help of the right people.

Unfortunately as you can see he ended up buying his own brand, his cult of personality, and the sycophants that come with it. It's a tragic tale as old as humanity. He is off playing politics and polishing his ego while Volkswagen and the rest of the auto industry is eating his lunch.

You think it was Elon's decision to run Cent OS 7? Obviously this was done well in advance before he got there. Also migrating even lots of servers doesn't mean it is complex, if they are running things in containers or in k8s then the underlying OS is almost irrelevant and can be replaced rather quickly.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols has been at ZDNet too long. While he used to be readable and even pro-Linux, he has soaked in the ZDNet mindset from being there too long.

Most of the points he makes in this article are RedHat-centric, as if RedHat is so different from any other Linux that other Linux sysadmins can't understand it. Those statements derive directly from the above-mentioned ZDNet mindset.

ZDNet was notorious for calling Linux 'the upstart operating system' and denigrating it long after many (most!) major companies had taken it on rather than continue buying Microsoft's offerings.

That ZDNet mindset became obvious especially when Microsoft's ads were always on ZDNet's front page.

At this point I think it's pretty clear that after being forced to acquire Twitter for a hugely inflated price, Mr Musk is likely trying to drive it into the ground for some convoluted fiscal plan his lawyers came up with to soften the blow to his net worth.

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