Tuesday, November 14, 2017

OpenShift is getting worse

As you may know RedHat provides its own public cloud infrastructure - OpenShift - for years. It was a great service, available with paid and free plans. Many companies and developers used it both for production and testing.

Unfortunately, the situation has changed since OpenShift 2 has been replaced with OpenShift 3.

First, they decided to decrease number of instances (pods, in new Openshift 3 terminology) available in the free plan from 3 to 1. I admit, this is fair. The previous limit was incredibly generous, and allowed you to run a scalable (in its minimal form, yet fully functional) cluster with a load balancer for free. That was great, but could not last forever.

Second, they restricted the uptime of the single pod to a small value, which is not sufficient for uninterrupted operation.

Third, although this is a personal one, they made the web console less convenient and intutitive. Ok, I understand they wanted to make it more flexible, but somewhat streamlined workflow similar to version 2 would be a plus as an option.

Last, but not the least. As the system became more complicated, it's now less stable and reliable. Pods can easily stuck in any state (while starting or terminating), and as a result, your site becomes inaccessible for quite a long time, because the problems can not be resolved from the console and the support does not respond quickly. And even worse: they can deliberately switch off entire clusters for "maintenance" for several days in a row.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Hey, Google, I'm not a robot! Yet


Google was my favourite search engine for many years. Unfortunately, I have a ridiculous problem with Google from time to time. Instead of the searching interface I see now Google's captcha, asking a confirmation that I'm not a robot.

I do understand that Google receives a lot of requests from the world and from my IP specifically. My ISP is large enough to cover a half of my city, but there are cookies after all.

Most annoying thing is that the captcha seems buggy: it shows me pictures of storefronts, mountains, rivers, traffic signs, and numbers again and again, despite the fact that I mark relevant fragments every time. I really can distinguish things ;-). Nevertheless, Google's AI still thinks my clicks are somehow robotized. Or maybe Google tries to classify internet images to be indexed by forcing visitors to help? ;-) Or - no - my IP is in Russia - doesn't this mean that I'm a hacker by define? But a hacker is not a robot, anyway. I don't get it.

Well, I'm moving to other search engines. What a pity. What a shame.

P.S. After a further investigation I can say that your search request does matter. If I try something simple as a test, for example, "book" - it works, but if I enter more specific query - it fails with endless captchas. Of course, my queries are real world queries (nothing criminal, of course) and they are often banned.