We mostly operate out of the Singapore region on AWS. At the time we started our journey with Kubernetes, EKS was not av

The scale of this tragedy may be, counterintuitively, another factor complicating collective mourning. M. Katherine Shear, MD, a psychiatrist and founder and director of the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University, says the tragedy of 9/11 occurred in one day in select locations and while massive in scope, was something people could at least attempt to wrap their heads around. With Covid-19, “it’s hard to conceive of all those people,” she says, “I even have trouble. When you talk about the World Trade Center, there’s a way in which I think of all those people dying at once. You talk about the pandemic, it has been eight or nine months now since we started seeing these increased death rates, and that feels so, so spread out, and it feels so individual somehow.”,Denckla adds, “One of the things that separates this from prior national events where we faced large numbers of death is it’s not over. This is ongoing. Oftentimes in commemorating the dead, it’s in hindsight that we engage in this process of collective remembering and collective mourning and the collective storytelling and all of the narrative and human grieving processes.”,Setting up a basic cluster is perhaps not as difficult. We were able to get up our first cluster running within a week. Most issues happen when you start deploying your workloads. From tuning cluster autoscaler to provisioning resources at the right time to configuring the network correctly for the right performance, you have to do research and configure it all yourself. Defaults don’t work most of the time (or at least they didn’t work for us back then) for production.,In a way that is unique to modern history, the coronavirus has prevented people from coming together to mourn. Public funerals and large public memorials of any kind are still frequently prohibited or made difficult by shutdown measures. As a result, “We’re not seeing the funerals, we’re not seeing the caskets,” Kessler says.,“When you look back at all the other losses we’ve encountered there’s been visuals,” says David Kessler, a grief expert who runs grief.com, a website that offers resources for people suffering from various forms of grief, and is author of the book Finding Meaning. He adds, “When you look at 9/11 or the AIDS epidemic, we’ve had visuals.”,Even when using a managed Kubernetes service, invest early in infrastructure-as-code setup to make disaster recovery and upgrade process relatively less painful in the future and be able to recover fast in face of disasters.,But just because we’re having trouble articulating our feelings collectively or coming to grips with the scale of all that has happened, it doesn’t mean we’re not grieving, although we’re not necessarily grieving the dead.,“Mourning and grief occur in groups,” says Christy A. Denckla, PhD, an assistant professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a clinical psychologist who specializes in grief and trauma. “Traditionally people gather in some way physically to mourn and grieve and collectively support one another. That’s of course impossible in Covid. So some of the very natural or typical ways that people might gather to commemorate loss and grief are impossible now.”,Twenty thousand chairs, each representing 1,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States are lined up on the Ellipse for the first National Covid-19 Remembrance October 04, 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images,In Albert Camus’ classic and recently much-quoted novel The Plague, the main character Dr. Bernard Rieux struggles with this question as he tries to comprehend the estimated 100 million people who have died from plagues throughout history. “But what are a hundred million deaths?” he wonders. “When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” Recalling the plague at Constantinople that, according to the ancient historian Procopius, caused 10,000 deaths in a single day, Rieux still can’t visualize this smaller but still enormous mass casualty. “Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass. But naturally that was impossible to put into practice; moreover, what man knows ten thousand faces?”,You can make an attempt to push towards GitOps if you will. If you can’t do that, reducing manual steps to a bare minimum is a great start. We use a combination of eksctl, terraform and our cluster configuration manifests (including manifests for platform services) to set up what we call the “Grofers Kubernetes Platform”. To make the setup and deployment process simpler and repeatable, we have built an automated pipeline to set up new clusters and deploy changes to existing ones.,Our learning is that operating Kubernetes is complex. There are a lot of moving parts. And learning how to operate Kubernetes is most likely not core to your business. Offload as much as possible to cloud service providers (EKS, GKE, AKS). There is no value in doing this yourself.,Washington, D.C. artist, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, 61, of Bethesda, works on Tuesday October 20, 2020 to set up a public art project honoring people who have died in the pandemic. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images,After we started migrating, we observed a lot of performance and functional issues in our cluster due to incorrect configuration. One of the effects of that was adding a lot of buffers in resource requests and limits to eliminate resource constraints as a possibility for performance degradation.,Every year we are tempted to look at just the bare specs of iPhone cameras. As there’s now competing smartphones throwing around terms like 108 megapixels and 100-times zoom, you would be tempted to make a judgment based purely on numbers. We’d caution against that.