AWS is very good and cheap once you know how to use it and what parts. The alternatives most likely run on top of AWS anyhow. I use terranix https://terranix.org/ instead of straight terraform. I can compile, package, deploy everything just with nix.
Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
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Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#42These shock jock articles are boring.
Step 1: Write an incendiary title Step 2: Make definitive statements meant to be applied broadly but actually targeted at a specific situation that the author is experiencing, or comes from the author's own problems with something. Step 3: Make sure to cast doubt and insecurity, making somebody else feel like they made the wrong choice, even when everything is working perfectly Step 4: Street cred improved!
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#43I don't know. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems to me that knowing the basics of AWS (or some cloud provider) has become part of the standard developer's toolkit. With AWS specifically, there's so much documentation out there about getting started that I think you can have something up in a day or two on something like ECS or lambda (using something like the Serverless framework). And then when you need the more co…
The problem with even lambda or ECS though is that it’s all much more complex than a simple rsync to your desired server.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#44> API that works on localhost: 4 days Lol. This may be true but if kind of pointless as an api on localist isn’t very useful unless you’re automating your home. Of course it’s easier to hack something out on localhost than to design for actual users. I think it makes more sense to build incrementally with the end in mind. So writing those terraform scripts will take less time if you initially write them to deploy to…
An API on localhost may not be useful, but an API running on a single VPS or dedicated server could take you very far.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#45This article is written in kind of a controversial way but it seems like the throughline of the argument is something like "use heroku until you have 100k users". This seems very reasonable to me. I thought it was going to be a pitch for on prem, which is also fine for certain scales. I think generally the scaling steps from startup to megacorp go: Heroku/Dokku > Public Cloud >Dedicated servers in someone else's DC >…
I really agree with you, what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud.
There's also something to be said for buying a VPS or a Colo machine, making sure it's backed up and dealing with the 9's that you get from that machine on it's own. I am routinely surprised by how far a single node machine will get you.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#46This might be true if you’ve never used AWS before. But if you know AWS it doesn’t take anywhere near that long. I’m building a PBBG and have it on AWS. Built the site in .NET with SignalR, MartenDB/PostgreSQL. Needed to host it. 2 evenings to write a cloudformation script which builds a VPC. Public and private subnets. RDS. A tiny instance to act as a nat gateway (for servers in private subnet). A small server with…
> Used a tiny instance for nat gateway cos aws nat gateway costs $32+ingress
AWS NAT gateway is certainly pricey. And doesn't even support NAT traversal which means P2P/STUN stuff is out (this is in contrast to GCP which does support it).
C'mon AWS you can do better!
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#47This is just another way of saying “you shouldn’t use AWS if you don’t know how to use it” Yes, there’s a steep learning curve. But once you’re passed that (or if you gained that knowledge in a prior role) AWS can easily hands down be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest infrastructure platform to use. …if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know the ins and outs of AWS, then yes, you probably shouldn’t use it for…
Different strokes for different folks. (Or at least, use cases.)
We’ve found at work that if you already have the talent, the hyper scale cloud platforms are amongst the most expensive ways to manage infrastructure if you go all in.
For example $0.40/secret/mo is _expensive_ compared to the cost of an HA vault (not necessarily Hashicorp) setup. If you have 1,000 secrets but you only need to access any given secret once a day, that’s a lot of expense against just setting up your own. And then you can take it with you.
Beyond that, we’ve had a LOT more reliable performance from our current VPS provider than we ever got from EC2.
That’s not to say AWS is exactly without competition. We use S3 extensively because nothing compares for our usage.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#48> If you're an indie hacker, a boostrapper, a startup, an agency or a consultancy, or just a small team building a product, chances are you are not going to need the cost and complexity that comes with modern cloud platforms. Hard disagree. - On cost: there is almost nothing better for the indie hacker, bootstrapper, or startup than cloud services. I run apps on all three platforms (Google, AWS, and Azure) and my mon…
The AWS free tier lets you do a lot, and if you use it well, it lets you avoid up to about $50/month of digitalocean bills.
If you're never planning on scaling past a hobby project, the free tier is a great place to stay. If your hobby project "goes viral," though, it might cost you a few thousand dollars, but hopefully that helps you get a lot more money to turn your hobby into a business.
If you have commercial intent, however, $50/month goes from an expensive hobby (3 streaming services) to a very cheap business. At that point, the fact that you don't have to pay for scale on DO VMs and other platforms actually makes a lot more sense. You can sleep at night knowing that you will still have a business even under a load spike, and $50 of digital Ocean buys you roughly the compute power of $1000+ of AWS managed services.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#49> API that works on localhost: 4 days Lol. This may be true but if kind of pointless as an api on localist isn’t very useful unless you’re automating your home. Of course it’s easier to hack something out on localhost than to design for actual users. I think it makes more sense to build incrementally with the end in mind. So writing those terraform scripts will take less time if you initially write them to deploy to…
API gateway is simply how you expose Lambdas to an HTTP interface in AWS. It was the easiest way until they recently unveiled a way to expose the Lambda directly. You can also use ALBs (Application Load Balancers) and CloudFront to expose Lambdas to HTTP. Either way, Lambdas are hard to debug locally, often I just deploy them to test (since deploying is easy). Or I write my code such that it bootstraps differently wh…
But don’t try to create a REST API Gateway with more than 200 resources, or CloudFormation will randomly start failing.
Or try to add more than 100 rules to your ALB, because it’ll be impossible.
My biggest issue with AWS is that the limits are so arbitrary, and seem to solely exist due to terrible design decisions.
If my local express server, or nginx can deal with 100 endpoints, how is it possible for this multi billion dollar infinitely scalable service to not do the same…
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#50This article is written in kind of a controversial way but it seems like the throughline of the argument is something like "use heroku until you have 100k users". This seems very reasonable to me. I thought it was going to be a pitch for on prem, which is also fine for certain scales. I think generally the scaling steps from startup to megacorp go: Heroku/Dokku > Public Cloud >Dedicated servers in someone else's DC >…
I really agree with you, what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud. There's also something to be said for buying a VPS or a Colo machine, making sure it's backed up and dealing with the 9's that you get from that machine on it's own. I am routinely surprised by how far a single node machine will get you.
> how far a single node machine will get you.
This. I took the wrong lesson from the DDoS attacks on Linode in late 2015 (particularly the one on Christmas Day), and the intermittent issues I encountered with DigitalOcean and Vultr in 2016 while both providers were still fairly young. A single dedicated server from a mature provider (ideally not during its hyper-growth phase) is pretty reliable.