I guess Matsumoto should have charged for Ruby. I'm sure Mike Perham and Derek Kraan would have been glad to pay for that and that the Ruby community would be in a strong and healthy shape.
People need to eat man, doing something for free is a luxury not many possess. We can see how messed up the financial situation is for a lot of Open Source devs and their lives would be better if they were charging money instead of subsisting off grants and donations.
I don't even necessarily disagree with your point that without being free those things wouldn't have taken off but we need to find a way to strike a balance in the developer community.
Sidekiq having a free version and an enterprise version walks an okay middle line imo.
I personally try to spend money or use ad supported anything that is open-source just to help someone else eat. It really hit home for me about five years ago when the author of a WoW addon[0] couldn't develop anymore because of his financial and life situation.
So many communities across the web rely on people putting in their spare hours for free just to enjoy things. Whether it's spreadsheets in Eve, Addons and Weak Auras in WoW, forum analysis posts, or whatever goes on in the depths of pvpoke, so much free labor underpins massive parts of the world today.
I would love something that I could donate x money to per month and then based on usage, have it dole out to all the content providers with perhaps a minimum per month. It just seems daunting to do that as a) not a crypto scheme and b.) across all the various creator landscapes.
Well Sidekiq is free to use. It's only the pro version that he charges and the free version code is open source.
I don't see the problem in having that kind of business model, it still allows the community to thrive and offers entreprises a way to have premium support.
Plus it allows him to invest more time in maintaining the free version.
I have no problem paying for the Pro version, but one if its marketing pitches is "enhanced reliability", which is a wild marketing spin on "the free version will lose jobs in fairly common scenarios".
In sidekiq without super_fetch (a paid feature), any jobs in progress when a worker crashes are lost forever. If a worker merely encounters an exception the job will be put back on the queue and retried but a crash means the job is lost.
Again, no problem paying for Pro, but I would prefer a little more transparency on how big a gap that is.
I wish this was prominently documented. Most people new to Sidekiq have no idea that the job will be lost forever if you simply hard kill the worker. I have seen a couple of instances where the team had Sidekiq Pro, but they had not enabled reliable fetch because they were unaware of this problem
The free version acts exactly like Resque, the previous market leader in Ruby background jobs. If it was good enough reliability for GitHub and Shopify to use for years, it was good enough for Sidekiq OSS too.
Here's Resque literally using `lpop` which is destructive and will lose jobs.
> If it was good enough reliability for GitHub and Shopify to use for years, it was good enough for Sidekiq OSS too.
Great point, and thanks for chiming in. I wonder if containerization has made this more painful (due to cgroups and OOMs). The comments here are basically some people saying it's never been a problem for them and some people saying they encounter it a lot (in containerized environments) and have had to add mitigations.
Either way, my observation is a lot of people not paying for Sidekiq Pro should. I hope you can agree with that.
When we used Sidekiq in production, not only did I never see crashes that lost us jobs, but there are also ways to protect yourself from that. I highly recommend writing your jobs to be idempotent.
Idempotence doesn't solve this problem. The jobs are all idempotent. The problem is that jobs will never be retried if a crash occurs.
This doesn't happen at a high rate, but it happens more than zero times per week for us. We pay for Sidekiq Pro and have superfetch enabled so we are protected. If we didn't do so we'd need to create some additional infra to detect jobs that were never properly run and re-run them.
I'm still confused about what you're saying though. You're saying that the language of "enhanced reliability" doesn't reflect losing 2 jobs over about 50*7 million (from your other comment)?
And that if you didn't pay for the service, you'd have to add some checks to make up for this?
Crashes are under your control though. They’re not caused by sidekiq. And you could always add your own crash recovery logic, as you say. To me that makes it a reasonable candidate for a pro feature.
It’s hard to get this right though. No matter where the line gets drawn, free users will complain that they don’t get everything for free.
How are crashes under your control? Again they aren't talking about uncaught exceptions, but crashes. So maybe the server gets unplugged, the network disconnects, etc.
To me 'crash' means any unexpected termination, whether it's caused by an uncaught exception, OOM, or hardware/network issues.
I guess you can say that hardware issues on your host aren't under your control, but it's under your control to find a host that doesn't have these issues. And not even a full-on ACID database is going to be 100% reliable if you yank the power cord at the wrong moment.
I hope my tone doesn't come across as rude or too argumentative, but I think your understanding is a bit inaccurate.
> it's under your control to find a host that doesn't have these issues
All hosts will have these issues, the only question is how often. If you need 100% consistency, then you can't use the free Sidekiq. Personally, I've never needed Sidekiq pro (as these kinds of crashes are extremely rare). But this will depend on your scale and use case.
> And not even a full-on ACID database is going to be 100% reliable if you yank the power cord at the wrong moment
This is only true if there's bugs in the DB, or some underlying disk corruption happens. The whole point of an ACID database is that they're atomic, durable, and consistent, even in the worst case scenario. If a power failure corrupted my SQL database I would feel very betrayed by the database.
It wouldn’t be corrupted, but in-flight transactions could fail to commit, just like queued jobs can be lost with sidekiq. The failure modes are similar.
I take your point that at a certain scale, hardware failure is inevitable, but if you’re running that many servers, you can afford sidekiq’s enterprise plan. It’s not something that will realistically happen if you’re just running like 20 instances on AWS. It’s perfectly reasonable to charge extra for something only large organizations with huge infrastructure budgets need.
I would say that queued jobs being lost is different from an in-flight transaction being auto-rolled-back, but it's not a super important distinction. Like others have said, I think Sidekiq really nailed the free vs premium features and its success is evidence of that.
Jobs may crash due to VM issues or OOM problems. The more common cause of "orphans" is when the VM restarts and jobs can't finish during the shutdown period.
We process around 50M sidekiq jobs a day across a few hundred workers on a heavily autoscaled infrastructure.
Over the past week there were 2 jobs that would have been lost if not for superfetch.
It's not a ton, but it's not zero. And when it comes to data durability the difference between zero and not zero is usually all that matters.
Edit for additional color: One of the most common crashes we'll see is OutOfMemory. We run in a containerized environment and if a rogue job uses too much memory (or a deploy drastically changes our memory footprint) the container will be killed. In that scenario, the job is not placed back into the queue. SuperFetch is able to recover them, albeit with really lose guarantees around "when".
This isn't about 2 in 350,000,000 jobs failing. It's about 2 jobs disappearing entirely.
It's not reliability we're talking about, it's about durability. For reference, S3 has eleven 9s of durability.
Every major queuing system solves this problem. RabbitMQ uses unacknowledged messages which are pinned to a tcp connection, so when that connection drops before acknowledging them they get picked up by another worker. SQS uses visibility timeouts, where if the message hasn't been successfully processed within a time frame it's made available to other workers. Sidekiq free edition chooses not to solve it. And that's a fine stance for a free product, but just one I wish was made clearer.
If you want to focus on durability then I think your complaint makes even less sense. Somehow I doubt S3 is primarily backed by Redis.
I think it's fair to assume that something backed by Redis is not durable by default because that's not what Redis is known for, whereas the other options you listed are known for their resiliency and durability. I wouldn't view Sidekiq as a similar product to RabbitMQ and SQS.
it’s not uncommon to lose jobs in sidekiq if you heavily rely on it and have a lot of jobs running. If using the free version for mission critical jobs, I usually run that task as a cron job to ensure that it will re-try if the job is lost.
I have in the past monitored how many jobs were lost and, although a small percentage, it was still recurring thing.
In containerized environments it may happen more often due to OOM kills or if you leverage autoscalers and have long running sidekiq jobs that have a runtime that exceeds your configured grace period for shutting down a container during a downscale and the process is eventually terminated without prejudice.
OOM kills are particularly pernicious as they can get into a vicious cycle of retry-killed-retry loops. The individual job causing the OOM isn't that important (we will identify it, log it and noop it), it's the blast radius effect on other sidekiq threads (we use up to 20 threads on some of our workers), so you want to be able to recover and re-run any jobs that are innocent victims of a misbehaving job.
This is a very bad take. From an OSS perspective languages can attract large communities of contributors and corporate sponsors because of their broad appeal and utility. Specialized libraries will have more trouble doing both and may need alternate models to sustain themselves. From a business perspective, Mike offers not only a free version but the paid enterprise version comes with support from Mike and his team, which is something you can't get from a language owner unless you outright hire them or they run a consultancy.
Anyone who has a free thing, sell something that produces an expendable invoice or receipt. Makes it easy to use company funds to pay for company work. “Buy me a coffee” buttons don’t really cut it.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." or whatever the quote is.
There are tons of businesses selling products that are ideas brought to life from scratching their own itch or simply a desire to make something and put it out there.
Personally, I am one of those people who started a business based on an idea with no validation before launching it.
I built it in its entirety, then went to places and people who I expected would want it and low-and-behold, I am making a living doing it.
> There are tons of businesses selling products that are ideas brought to life from scratching their own itch or simply a desire to make something and put it out there.
I'd bet money that the number of businesses which fail because they boil down to "a solution in search of a problem" is vastly larger than the number of businesses that succeeded despite performing "no validation".
That said, "making something" and "starting a business" are two different things. I would challenge you to point out where in the post he argues against making something, especially for the reasons you mention.
> I am one of those people who started a business based on an idea with no validation before launching it. I built it in its entirety, then went to places and people who I expected would want it and low-and-behold, I am making a living doing it.
Consider the possibility that you're in the minority there, and that you succeeded despite performing no validation.
> Sorry, this is bogus.
So if it doesn't apply to you personally, or in all cases, then you dismiss it as "bogus", full stop? Are you in the habit of doing this often?
Also, for future reference, it's "lo-and-behold", not "low-and-behold". [1]
> That said, "making something" and "starting a business" are two different things. I would challenge you to point out where in the post he argues against making something, especially for the reasons you mention.
The author states up directly, "Don’t make a website or an app. Don’t build a system".
Starting a business doesn't have to follow any real "formula". It can be a step in the beginning, middle, or end of a process. Yes, you should have the ingredients for a cake before you bake it, but you don't need to find someone who will eat your cake before you bake one or offer it for sale and you sure as shit don't need to "find real people whose problem you can solve. You listen deeply to find their dream scenario."
> Consider the possibility that you're in the minority there, and that you succeeded despite performing no validation, rather than because of it.
While I never claimed it was due to not performing validation, we can clarify that yes, it is not due to this, it is despite not doing it. Validation itself can be found in successful sales or other means, it does not need to be done pre-market and there are many examples of this, aside from the horses quote I provided.
And yes, I, in the same way the author declares it, declare it as bogus because these rules do not need to be followed in the way the author claims.
The post is riddled with questionable content, IMO, made to hit the wannapreneur market.
I don't dare tell someone how to start a business. It's their business, it's their journey, they should do it how they want.
