talk on the politics of introducing beam services at jvm shops.

politics.org

how to replace the jvm and win

• the business side of things is completely terrible
• executives at big companies can totally ruin your company, and not care, when they acquire you
• just went ahead and rewrote it, whee
• identify the target
• don’t let people know what you’re doing at first or try to convince people beforehand
  • 1. show, don’t tell
  • 2. forgiveness, not permission
• people get locked into the JVM mindset
• 100% political problem
• call everything a proof of concept, even if it’s aimed at production
• once it works, be very careful
  • demo to the most powerful person you can get a meeting with
  • air cover: trade something that works for political protection, in big companies working software is currency
  • two lines of people:
    • people who want to take credit for your work
    • people who want to take you down because your work threatens their jobs
  • who is going to benefit? find them and create alliances with them
  • want it to look like a fait accompli
• once your thing is in production, you need to take care of:
  • operations: you have to train your org or deskill running it; they used terraform
    • scripting setup
    • stress test
    • monitoring and alerts and oncall
    • runbooks
  • recruiting:
    • internal recruiting: sell OTP via the remote shell and tracing and inspection
    • don’t require OTP experience; rules out too many people
    • hire everywhere but the bay area
    • scale your team, make yourself redundant
• second JVM system you replace is easier

Real-life example of replacing JVM with BEAM: JVM strugles and the BEAM