Justin Garrison, a cloud infrastructure engineer, writes about AWS, Kubernetes, Mastodon, Amazon work culture, and Linux.
HN commenters cite his posts on Fargate not using Firecracker and running a Mastodon instance from static files, and on Amazon return-to-office.
Is is just me, this post and this [1] one are just people complaining about RTO? If you were hired during COVID lockdown with the promise of your career buing built on remote only, fine but lay yourself off and move on. Else it's not entirely justifiable to be mad at AWS for RTO policies. From an outside perspective AWS looks very healthy and ouputing great innovation.
[1]. https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/
Parts of ActivityPub will work with static files: https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-instance/
You need something to deal with follows (cryptographically verify that the follow attempts actually originate from the servers they claim to) and submitting posts to your followers (push based, not pull based in practice) but all the metadata and user lookup stuff can be done with JSON files in the right place.
ActivityPub—along with its lesser known counterpart LitePub that focuses on transience and privacy—makes creating a minimum viable “account for social media” approximately as easy as serving a few static JSON files from your domain[0], though there are nice minimal servers with more features[1], too.
[0] https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-instance/
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~tsileo/microblog.pub
It does happen occasionally. For example Justin Garrison wrote what I would consider a fairly scathing review of Amazon's HR practices related to laying people off, while he was still at Amazon: https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/
He left recently, but he wrote this blog while still being employed there, as mentioned at the bottom of the post.
That's a very limiting definition of 'death' and it may as well have applied for "Linux Desktop", yet Linux as a Desktop choice is increasingly popular, just not at a growth rate that would satisfy Silicon Valley: https://www.justingarrison.com/blog/year-of-linux-desktop/
As for 1: you don't have metrics for that. As for 2: you don't have metrics for that.
Counterpoint: https://justingarrison.com/blog/2024-02-08-fargate-is-not-firecracker/
And also, you’ll notice that Fargate takes minutes to launch while Lambda takes a second or less. You’re waiting on AWS to launch a EC2 with your config and pull your containers into it.
(that article matches things I heard from Amazon when I asked why my stuff is slow)