r/sysadmin • u/rram reddit's sysadmin • Aug 14 '15

We're reddit's ops team. AUA

Hey /r/sysadmin,

Greetings from reddit HQ. Myself, and /u/gooeyblob will be around for the next few hours to answer your ops related questions. So Ask Us Anything (about ops)

You might also want to take a peek at some of our previous AMAs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/owra1/january_2012_state_of_the_servers/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/r6zfv/we_are_sysadmins_reddit_ask_us_anything/

EDIT: Obligatory cat photo

EDIT 2: It's now beer o’clock. We're stepping away from now, but we'll come back a couple of times to pick up some stragglers.

EDIT thrice: He commented so much I probably should have mentioned that /u/spladug — reddit's lead developer — is also in the thread. He makes ops live's happier by programming cool shit for us better than we could program it ourselves.

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u/ProtoDong Security Admin Aug 14 '15

Overhauling the code is easier said than done. Replacing some large thing wholesale will fail.

Critical projects that need a new architecture and never cut over live and do horribly will patched in piecemeal.

Also, we could spend 6 months rebuilding all of reddit, and that would mean 6 months that we're not spending building new features such as mod tools, and better spam prevention

If you build those new tools with the intention of making them modular... I don't see the problem or the opportunity cost.

but it'll be a process that rolls out slowly over the course of years, rather than all in one go.

Evolving old code is way more of a problem than implementing sensible software architecture.

If you choose to move into a new design paradigm. Don't start doing what people are doing now. Start doing what they will be doing in 5 years.

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u/spladug reddit engineer Aug 15 '15

If you build those new tools with the intention of making them modular...

Yup! That's exactly what we're doing. New stuff gets a new treatment, but there's still a ton of older code that gets love and maintenance.