Couple with "you should not be using Kubernetes, probably" and "you should be writing a monolith, probably".
Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
51–60 of 210 posts
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#52> And often it is so alluring that actual requirements and costs fly out the window. Need to scale... infintely? Just use Lambda Functions.
I don’t know why the author singles out Lambda. For many use cases their ongoing maintenance is close to zero.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#53I can see how this makes sense for a startup etc that has passed some threshold of operational complexity. As an “indie hacker” there is no way I’d be able to move out of the cloud without my costs going up by an order of magnitude.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#54I 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…
> but it seems to me that knowing the basics of AWS (or some cloud provider) has become part of the standard developer's toolkit.
This seems to be flirting with the idea that Amazon has become a required component of hosting an application on the internet.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#55> - Terraform to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week - Terraform to create the IAM policies: 4 weeks Perhaps it's because I am very familiar with the aforementioned tool and cloud but 5 weeks for writing those resources gives me the impresion of: 1. Lack of experience on AWS. 2. Lack of experience with Terraform. 3. Both. I don't want to sound arrogant by any means but a Terraf…
Based on my own personal experience, 4 weeks for IAM does seem high, especially since it took 1 week for all the other stuff.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#56This 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.
> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud
It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks for monitoring/backups.
Allowing developers and related to have hardware/software at a whim is a massive advantage.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#57- Time it took to learn the skills to write a scalable service that can handle 100K events per second: 3 years
- Time it took to write that API on localhost: 4 days
- Time it took to learn Terraform and some AWS services, to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week
- Time it took to learn AWS IAM policies to create the IAM policies in Terraform: 4 weeks
Author conveniently left out a few bits of information. Once you learn IAM and Terraform, I'm doubtful it takes you another 4 weeks to setup the policies for a new project.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#58I 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…
Though there's lots of different ways to use AWS, so the experience your team brings may be a sort of complicated venn diagram. Even within a simple product, like deploying serverless, there's SAM vs serverless framework, vs scripted AWS cli. Using stacks or not. Using another layer on top or not like Terraform or CDK, and so on. Then the actual pattern of using it, Lambda layers, heavy or light patterns for securing things, using versions/aliases or not, and so on.
It wouldn't be unusual for a tech lead to pick some approach that ends up being new for the rest of the team. So some ecosystem with fewer choices would probably be faster.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#59> - Terraform to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week - Terraform to create the IAM policies: 4 weeks Perhaps it's because I am very familiar with the aforementioned tool and cloud but 5 weeks for writing those resources gives me the impresion of: 1. Lack of experience on AWS. 2. Lack of experience with Terraform. 3. Both. I don't want to sound arrogant by any means but a Terraf…
I got handed a Terraform project for a GCP-based service. Simple dev, staging, prod environment. Secrets managed by secret manager, SQL Run without a public IP address for prod (but accessible via SSH for admins).
I more or less gave up after a month of beating my head on the brick wall. We hired an expert. Took him another month to get it all more or less sorted. There were still aspects that we wanted that we could not get Terraform/GCP to do.
In the end, we dropped Terraform and went back to modifying the GCP manually.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#60> 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 int…
The beauty of container based serverless is that you have portability. If your hobby project takes off and you want to run it on DO up to a certain ramp, you can still move your container workload into DO.
Google Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps, and AWS AppRunner (less so because it doesn't scale to zero) are really great tools for hobby devs and small shops.