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Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

karlsutt.com

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Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#61

Post by 727564797069706 »

ITT: people who spent many hours learning proprietary (often unnecessarily complex) cloud platforms trying to convince others (and themselves) that it was the best use of their limited time alive.

Stockholm syndrome à la Big Cloud.

It's okay to be interested in elaborate cloud architecture things and learn them because of that, but don't sell it as one-size-fits-all thing that every little company needs.

Most companies don't need that complexity, but of course, Big Cloud with their billions needs to convince you otherwise.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#63

Post by osigurdson »

I think AWS is shooting themselves in the foot with their ridiculous EKS offering. The fact that it is necessary to first download a 3rd party tool (eksctl) to get anything working is insane. Then, getting basic things working like connecting a load balancer involves importing all kinds of random policies and configuration (which does who knows what) from random github repositories is perhaps even more ridiculous. The same thing in GCP takes nearly zero effort.

I can understand why AWS would try to steer people away from Kubernetes since it has a commoditizing effect. However, it could end up steering people away from AWS entirely.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#64

Post by fullstackchris »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #48
CharlieDigital wrote: post #30

> 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…

> it lets you avoid up to about $50/month of digitalocean bills.

Wish I'd know about this AWS free tier, because that sounds a lot like my monthly digital ocean bill :')

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#65

Post by dijit »

sofixa wrote: post #56
dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

100% Agree.

I don't like the idea that the only way to get developers moving is to use cloud, but I agree that it's a solid replacement for really bad ops.

What I've seen in many places is an abstraction over bare metal, some are better than others, openstack, Kubernetes on-prem, vmware etc; are all solutions that have differing amounts of adoption. Ubisoft had a lot of stuff in this area, as does Google. Ubisofts was pretty terrible though.

If you need a physical machine to be deployed, you've hit a certain level of scale and your load is much more known: and even though it can take a few weeks, what you get back is quite competitive.

But if you're waiting for hardware to get anything moving in the first place then that's obviously bad.

What I've taken to doing is prototyping on Google Cloud and then planning to migrate things to on-prem once everything is reaching maturity.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#66

Post by dcoperator1 »

sofixa wrote: post #56
dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

The price for colocating in a Tier 2 datacenter close enough for me to walk to was $75/amp. Which is about the same cost as AWS.

You're really paying somewhere between the savings of putting a datacenter in Nowhere, Oregon and the cost to convince someone to live there.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#67

Post by kqr »

sofixa wrote: post #56
dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

If you have a little spare capacity, developers can still get hardware/software on a whim, at just a (comparatively) small one-time expense. Spare capacity is much cheaper than people make it out to be.

The upside is that it's much cheaper once you're at the scale where you no longer need to variableise your compute costs, but can tank the up-front fixed costs and do proper capacity planning.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#68

Post by beardedetim »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #60
pclmulqdq wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The beauty of container based serverless is that you have portability.

I think this is the major take away I am having from this hype cycle of the Cloud: that if we just build containers/functions, we can sort everything else out however the credit card allows.

I'm on the fence about if it should be DO or EKS or GKE or whatever. That's for Credit Card Man and me to decide. As an engineer, I just want to build a docker container and call it a day.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#69

Post by auggierose »

ABraidotti wrote: post #24

> It costs how much?! The author's not wrong. Cost comes with lack of accountability in my experience. In turn, my devsecops dept (~20 people) has kept costs down by holding monthly AWS accountability meetings. "Who owns this and why does it exist?" is the leading question. > The all-you-can-eat buffet problem Valid point. But I've gotten far in my career by specializing in AWS. It's not going anywhere soon. It's the…

> GCP? Come on.

What's wrong with GCP?

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#70

Post by cliftonk »

I generally agree that no one that isnt a professional devops person (or has spent months tuning IAM and route53 policies) should be using AWS. That said, GCP is so much easier to use and easily usable by a novice because it has a lot of good defaults.

Compute and egress costs can be prohibitive at scale, but features like storage + bigquery (OLAP SQL db where u only pay for queries) are basically free for low-to-moderate volume workloads.

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