The HFT Guy

See, a lot of people say things similar to this.

But let's think logically: with Go, you have a single binary file, that will run on basically any distribution of Linux, with no external dependencies.

With Docker, you need a lot more than that, and in the case of a Go binary, you have no benefit.

I'd suggest reading through https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-update/ for an idea of "Docker in production". Sure, we aren't all running HFT systems, but the issues he documents aren't really specific to HFT - they're more related to having a piece of software you can rely on to work.

Can containers in the generic sense be a useful tool for certain tasks? Sure.

Is Docker the "omg lets put bread around this meat and call it a sandwich" epic moment? No.

The rise in mindshare of Docker is IMO not coincidentally linked to the rise of the bad kind of DevOps: where management fires ops, and gets developers to run their infrastructure.

"I don't need to understand how <insert common Linux infrastructure software> works, I can just run 2 docker commands and it will download me a working image from the internet. What do you mean who created the image and can I trust it? This is the Internet, of course anything I download is trustworthy."

I believe the way you put it describes this part in the DMCA takedown notice the best way possible. Bringing up European laws on intellectual property and mixing it with US "copyright" is comical to me, especially after reading this [0] article on French law recently:

> France doesn’t have copyright. Sorry for US readers, your “copyright” is nonsense that doesn’t apply here, though the word “copyright” can be seen misused verbatim once in a while.

I believe this interpretation of "copyright" is all similar around Europe. US copyright law is all about "right to make copies", be it software or music/video and it just doesn't make any sense on the other side of the globe.

In the country where I live I can purchase a music or video file and legally make unlimited copies for my personal use. It is also legal to download it from any other source as long as I can prove that I paid for it some time ago in the past. Torrents are illegal as the protocol forces me to share the file, and sharing part is illegal. Downloading is fine xD.

[0] https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/15/french-judge-rules-gpl-license-to-be-inapplicable-in-french-copyright-court/

> performing sweeping changes across an entire codebase in lockstep

This thinking right here, sounds like a reason why Google retires a lot more services at much higher frequency compared to other companies?

In https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-the-case-of-verizon-and-yahoo-groups/, the HFT guy brought up the "5 years upgrade pain" as the reason why a service would be retired, at the time when the pain from upkeeping outweights the gain from revenue.

By regularly making backward incompatible API change, as afforded by the monorepo, while also having engineers moving freely between projects, the upgrade pain cycle becomes way shorter for Google services.

By the way, this line of thought also leaks into public facing source code, with guava being the poster child of breaking backward compatibility, althought it has learned its lesson starting with version 21.

The HFT Guy has a good blog and did some posts on this. Basically Google Cloud is much cheaper than AWS so you should look at that. There are also other alternatives including IBM SoftLayer which I've never looked at before.

"Run an entire tech company in the cloud, or run only a single [big] project requiring more than 10 servers? Google Compute Engine

Run less than 10 servers, for as little cost as possible? Digital Ocean

Run only beefy servers ( > 100GB RAM) or have special hardware requirements? IBM SoftLayer or OVH"

https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/08/choosing-a-cloud-provider-amazon-aws-ec2-vs-google-compute-engine-vs-microsoft-azure-vs-ibm-softlayer-vs-linode-vs-digitalocean-vs-ovh-vs-hertzner/

https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-than-aws/

> Also, they don't have a sales force like Amazon. A bunch of non-engineer humans who do nothing but convince other people to buy their product.

Here's the catch, the "bunch of non-engineer humans" as you called them are not stupid though. All around these people are watching the landscape and market. They are aware that GCP has a superior pricing structure and can be up to 50% cheaper[1]. Therefore my theory is that GCP can continue to offer lower prices, greater governance, superior performance, and solid support, and their (sales+engineering) force can be in-bound driven instead of out-bound like AWS.

[1] - https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-than-aws/

Google Cloud if you're looking for something similar. It's just so much better and cheaper. I think a lot of the resistance here towards that kind of move is just because people are inherently lazy and they aren't paying the bill themselves.

(I'm guessing a relatively large part is also selfish attachment to the market leader because of employment reasons. I hate wasting money, both for myself and for my employer, so I don't really understand this kind of thinking - but I do understand how it could flourish in a venture capital-rich time/locale.)

I also recommend reading:

https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-should-never-use-amazon/