[erlang-questions] Logs and stdout [OFFTOPIC]

[Alexander Petrovsky]

Thanks a lot for feedback, it's very interesting to look at things through
different eyes.

>From myself I would add about pipes:
- http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/stdio_buffering/
- https://brandonwamboldt.ca/how-linux-pipes-work-under-the-hood-1518/

2016-11-29 9:12 GMT+03:00 Geoff Cant <nem@REDACTED>:

> <fireside-chat-mode>
> "12 Factor” (aka https://12factor.net) is a set of conventions to make
> linux applications easier to run in containers and to allow those
> containers to be managed and orchestrated uniformly. These conventions were
> established by one of Heroku’s co-founders, Adam Wiggins (hi Adam!), and
> are mostly still good ways to adapt linux applications to running on a
> Platform as a Service (Heroku/CloudFoundry/Deis/
> Flynn/Mesosphere/Kubernetes/…). 12 Factor is a little dated now - it’s
> last update was in 2012, but the ideas are still mostly relevant.
>
>
> In the case of logging, the reasoning behind the stdout convention is that
> is was a relatively easy to implement (for the app developer),
> language/framework independent approach to getting a real-time ish stream
> of logs out of any application. The platform the application runs on can
> then handle log forwarding and distribution uniformly. This would have been
> hard to impossible to do if every application was allowed to choose its own
> method for emitting log events (syslog vs stdout vs files vs snmp traps vs
> probably lots of other things). Logs as files, in particular, would have to
> be a complicated convention (where do you write them, how many files do you
> write, how are they rotated, do they get truncated to avoid running out of
> space, what constitutes a complete message in a file if you’re trying to
> stream them, ...), and this complexity would have been development costs
> paid in every single application for the PaaS.
>
> The corollary of this is that if you’re not running your application on a
> PaaS, then you’re not going to get much benefit from writing logs to stdout.
>
>
> Aside: I worked on Heroku’s log pipeline systems for a while, and like to
> see this factor revisited. ‘\n' framed opaque-byte messages on stdout is a
> protocol due for improvement: you can’t write neatly formatted multi-line
> messages and have them pass through the log pipeline very easily (change
> the framing), it’s an async one-way protocol (there’s no facility for
> reliable transmission of messages, so you can’t use it for audit logs), it
> is sub-optimal transmission format for sending metrics (metrics can be
> aggregated during transport, and logs can’t). So let’s hope there are some
> updates to 12 factor in 2017. I have quibbles about configuration passed as
> environment variables too, but unix doesn’t offer a lot of good choices
> here.
> </fireside-chat-mode>
>
> -Geoff
> ps: yeah - use lager. It’ll work both on a PaaS and your own box.
>
> > On 28 Nov, 2016, at 18:05, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 25/11/16 11:34 PM, Alexander Petrovsky wrote:
> >> - Hey, boy, did you know about 12 app factor (*oh my god*)?
> >
> > "12-factor app" was not handed down on Mt Sinai;
> > Jibril did not dictate it to the Prophet;
> > Joseph Smith Jr never found it on the golden plates.
> > Heck, even Raël never heard about it from the elohim.
> >
> > "12-factor app" is OPINION.
> >
> > Using lager, the vast bulk of your code doesn't know and
> > doesn't care where the logs are going.  It *can* go to
> > stdout if that's what you want.
> >
> > On the other hand, if you need log rotation and such,
> > and you only write to stdout, then you have to depend
> > on something outside your application to do it.
> >
> > stdout is where information is sent to die.  (:-)
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > erlang-questions mailing list
> > erlang-questions@REDACTED
> > http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>



-- 
Петровский Александр / Alexander Petrovsky,

Skype: askjuise
Phone: +7 914 8 820 815
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20161129/810ec6b1/attachment.htm>