Machine-Gunning Your Pets: When to give up eBay Builds

There is so much to consider when building infrastructure. There’s no way around that. In the pursuit of making things easier for ourselves, engineers have come up with so many good tools, methods, and patterns that provide excellent results and make things easy on us. So why is it so hard to actually stand them up sometimes? Why is there so much hand-wringing and tail chasing to actually go out and do the thing that you set out to do? We keep going to eBay and buying some used iron to make our problem go away, right now, and end up wishing the landscape looked as pretty as our neighbours. The answer is just to build something that you can maintain as long as the infrastructure will exist.

eBay builds are pets. We pick out just the right parts that will make a pile of different parts into a coheisive whole. That’s okay when you’re building your custom hot rod, or your environmnet that is able to stroked, petted and calmed day after day. Its fun and rewarding to watch your baby grow up and succeed in life. But when you need to go in another direction, or realise that you can’t feed baby every day, you need someone, or something, to do that for you. You’re trading your dollars for time back, at the job or in life, and once you start that, its hard to raise another sever from nothing again. You don’t want to go through the intracicies of the newest version of something, when you spent years doing it the old way. You just want your LAMP to run (if you’re running that anymore), and want AWS or Azure to be your babysitter so you can go skydiving again. The easiest time to rip off the bandaid is when you machine gun all your pets, run your Kubernetes cattle farm of just commiting templates and watching as that spits out whole availability zones of servers, and look with jealous eyes as some kid gets to have all the fun in the world with his first rack mounted server.

Just like you did.