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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

#171

Post by Nextgrid »

nine_k wrote: post #105
ericd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, we were easily saving a developer salary per month vs AWS using colo’d hardware even as a very small company. And god help you if you’re trying to run something bandwidth intensive on AWS.

What happens if your server's hardware seriously breaks?

You use the spare that's next to it, failing that, in a desperate situation, go to any computer store, buy the biggest gaming PC you can find, load it up with RAM and use that. It'll work, your customers won't know nor care.

In practice, I wouldn't recommend colocation until you are at the scale and budget where you can maintain your own spares. Better outsource it to a dedicated host like OVH/Hetzner/etc that has tons of servers and can immediately replace the hardware.

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

#172

Post by acdha »

kqr wrote: post #148
acdha wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Those people are speaking from greater experience - there are many things which seem easy but aren’t once you’re over a certain scale, and at large organizations you often have things like conflicting policies or co…

I think you and I are saying basically the same thing, only putting emphasis on different aspects due to our various historic experiences. Look at your demand pattern (variable or stable, predictable or unpredictable) and what cost structures your finances can support (variable or fixed, up-front or as-you-go), pick a solution based on that, not what's cool.

Also adding your barriers to entry: staff, facilities, process, etc. It doesn’t help you saving on servers over a cloud provider if your procurement process means you have people sitting idle for 6 months.

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

#173

Post by Nextgrid »

nine_k wrote: post #114
727564797069706 wrote: post #61

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 compani…

At small scale, you can lower your complexity using cloud. You don't need k8s for a small operation, just spin a couple of VMs and set them up via a few lines of Ansible. OTOH you can pick a managed datsbase: you just get a connection string to a Postgres with failover and backup already taken care of. Same with queue services, email services, etc. They have really simple APIs. You only need platform-specific knowled…

> You don't need k8s for a small operation, just spin a couple of VMs and set them up via a few lines of Ansible.

You can replace "couple VMs" with a dedicated Hetzner/OVH/Kimsufi server, it'll be the same except you won't get ripped off on egress bandwidth and performance.

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

#174

Post by acedTrex »

Octabrain wrote: post #17

> - 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…

Terraform is a nice tool but its a VERY slow development cycle. just due to the nature of the cloud

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

#175

Post by prepend »

dogleash wrote: post #103
prepend wrote: post #7

> 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…

>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. When did developing software on your own machine stop meaning "design for actual users"? You should have a strong and reliable deployment for production, yes. But not being able run a baby instance locally just…

Designing for me as a single user is different from designing for other users. Other users can’t hit my localhost.

The article talked about how much time it takes to get working so it seems like the author took shortcuts to get it working locally.

I agree that it’s a good practice to dev so deploying locally works as well as deploying remotely (or to lots of environments). But this is different than developing only for localhost.

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

#176

Post by throwawaymaths »

dijit wrote: post #165
throwawaymaths wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. I guess I just worked for one CFO that obsessed about it, so for me n=1

Well, n=2 for me, but that's not to say you're wrong. I reached the conclusion that it's basically a self-perpetuating myth because I asked my CFO's directly about it because it comes up often. Curious though: where are you based? My CFO's were German and... German (but the second was working in Sweden with Swedish financial rules) Maybe it is actually different depending on location or there's some other factor at p…

USA. So we have weird tax rules. Also I dunno the CFO could have been drinking the sales teams coolaid (we were also trying to sell enterprise to move to the cloud). And there was a lot of drinking (and hookers and probably blow) at that company

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

#177

Post by friendly_deer »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #137
friendly_deer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that holds me back from Google cloud run Is that it is difficult to replicate that exact environment locally for testing and dev. If you’re working with stateless apps then that’s fine, But what is the typical local workflow of developing against a database, task Queue, etc.?

Which database? If you're going all-in on Google Cloud and using Firestore, then use the emulators [0]. The emulators includes Pub/Sub. For Cloud Task Queues, use an unofficial emulator [1] If you're not going all-in on Google Cloud and say you want to use Postgres, then use a `docker-compose.yaml` file and pull in a Postgres container instance or run a local Postgres if you want. Then pick a free Postgres compatible…

Thank you for the reply. That makes sense… I guess something about me just likes the purity of running the exact same container on my local machine as would be in prod, but yeah I agree that at some scale that doesn't work.

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

#178

Post by friendly_deer »

nijave wrote: post #156
friendly_deer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that holds me back from Google cloud run Is that it is difficult to replicate that exact environment locally for testing and dev. If you’re working with stateless apps then that’s fine, But what is the typical local workflow of developing against a database, task Queue, etc.?

If you're using an IaC tool like Terraform or Pulumi, you can just setup/tear down test resources on demand (for integration/acceptance tests). Under normal usage, hopefully you can get away with mocks/stubs/fakes. Some development frameworks make this a lot easier than others Using real resources is usually fine for smaller applications but can be very problematic as your application grows. With that in mind, it's g…

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Yeah ideally we always use real resources to mirror prod closely, but I see your point that that won’t always be possible as the app grows.

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

#179

Post by sputknick »

dalyons wrote: post #108
sputknick wrote: post #29

One thing I have been wrong about for about 2 years is predicting companies would pull back from using the cloud. What I see in corporate AWS accounts is a lot of waste. I thought once companies started tightening spending they would look at their cloud spending and shut a bunch of it down. When an EC2 instance only costs $30 a month to leave running, it's easy to forget about it. You get enough of those across a cor…

Why would they pull back from the cloud, instead of just implementing some basic infra ownership and cost auditing processes?

Good point, I explained that poorly (sorry, was half paying attention to a conference call). I meant "pull back" as in reduce their number of instances, which would reduce their monthly spend.

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

#180

Post by sebazzz »

vsareto wrote: post #164
chadash wrote: post #12

I 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 basics give you enough to be dangerous, but cloud stuff has become complex enough to require dedicated people to do it well. I'd prefer to hire someone dedicated to that and just let them work part time when the environment is simple over a developer with just the basics who's going to try to architect and run everything.

> I'd prefer to hire someone dedicated to that and just let them work part time when the environment is simple over a developer with just the basics who's going to try to architect and run everything.

And me thinking we got to the cloud to get rid of the BOFH.

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