// At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
// PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
// insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
// worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
// that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
// If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
// places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
// too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
// that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
// should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
// or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
// Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
// of course, uses all three, and more.
// Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
// your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
// birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
// at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
// responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
// Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
// I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
// me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
// other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
// difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
// was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
// so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
// Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
// them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
//
// PSD is not my favourite file format.
- Data is replicated cross region, but your compute all lives in the same AZ, so if (when) an AZ goes down you have to wait for a new instance to be created elsewhere. AWS says the time for this is undefined, IIRC we've seen it be around 15-20 minutes before the DB is back online.
- If you have lots of long running transactions or queries, serverless can have trouble finding a scaling point and won't scale up/down. You can set it to force scaling after 5 attempts, but this results in dropped connections and 1-2 minutes of downtime every time.
- Scaling up actually takes 45s-1:30 for new capacity to be available. If your load is spiky enough that that's too slow, you're stuck with overprovisioning anyways.
- Tools like VividCortex don't work for serverless if you rely on those. Teams here that use serverless have shifted to DataDog APM for this purpose.
- Loading data from S3 doesn't work. This wasn't really a usecase we had but it's something to be aware of.
That said, for gradual load or DB downtime tolerant services it's great! Also very nice for dev environments as the scaling down to 0 can result in some very real cost savings.