I’m imagining a developer in the 90s/00s reading this list and being baffled by the complexity/terminology
My last web development project was in the FTP upload era. Reading this, I'm kinda glad I'm not in web dev.
Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
301–310 of 644 posts
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#302> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…
Some orgs are looking at moving back to on prem because they're figuring this out. For a while it was vogue to go from capex to opex costs, and C suite people were incentivized to do that via comp structures, hence "digital transformation" ie: migration to public cloud infrastructure. Now, those same orgs are realizing that renting computers actually costs more than owning them, when you're utilizing them to a signif…
It's not an either/or. Many business both own and rent things.
If price is the only factor, your business model (or executives' decision-making) is questionable. Buy only the cheapest shit, spend your time building your own office chair rather than talking to a customer, you aren't making a premium product, and that means you're not differentiated.
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#303Utter insanity. So much cost and complexity, and for what? Startups don’t think about costs or runway anymore, all they care about is “modern infrastructure”. The argument for RDS seems to be “we can’t automate backups”. What on earth?
Is spending time to make it reliable worth it vs working on your actual product? Databases are THE most critical things your company has.
All that infra doesn’t integrate itself. Everywhere I’ve worked that had this kind of stack employed at least one if not a team of DevOps people to maintain it all, full time, the year round. Automating a database backup and testing it works takes half a day unless you’re doing something weird
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a stereotype from 2010s and disconnected from reality today.
Nope. None of my below 30 colleagues know SQL. They use ORM in REPL or visual tools.
LINQPad is awesome and EF Core is just this good so I can see why some would just choose not to deal with SQL.
With that said, this still sounds like a strange situation - most colleagues, acquaintances and people I consulted know they way around SQL and dropping down to 'dbset.FromSql($"SELECT {...' is very commonplace out of the need to use sprocs, views or have tighter control over the query.
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#305> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…
Data isn't cheap never was. Paying the licensing fees on top make it more expensive. It really depends on the circunstance a managed database usually has exended support from the compaany providing it. You have to weigh a team's expertise to manage a solution on your own and ensure you spent ample time making it resilient. Other half is the cost of upgrading hardware sometimes it is better to just outright pay a cloud provider if you business does not have enough income to outright buy hardware.There is always an upfront cost.
Small databases or test environment databases you can also leverage kubernetes to host an operator for that tiny DB. When it comes to serious data and it needs a beeline recovery strategy RDS.
Really it should be a mix self hosted for things you aren't afraid to break. Hosted for the things you put at high risk.
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#306> Code is of course powerful, but I’ve found the restrictive nature of Terraform’s HCL to be a benefit with reduced complexity.
No way. We used Terraform before and the code just got unreadable. Simple things like looping can get so complex. Abstraction via modules is really tedious and decreases visibility. CDKTF allowed us to reduce complexity drastically while keeping all the abstracted parts really visible. Best choice we ever made!
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some orgs are looking at moving back to on prem because they're figuring this out. For a while it was vogue to go from capex to opex costs, and C suite people were incentivized to do that via comp structures, hence "digital transformation" ie: migration to public cloud infrastructure. Now, those same orgs are realizing that renting computers actually costs more than owning them, when you're utilizing them to a signif…
Funny story time. I was once part of an acquisition from a much larger corporate entity. The new parent company was in the middle of a huge cloud migration, and as part of our integration into their org, we were required to migrate our services to the cloud. Our calculations said it would cost 3x as much to run our infra on the cloud. We pushed back, and were greenlit on creating a hybrid architecture that allowed us…
My funny story is built on the idea that AWS is Hotel California for your data.
A customer had an interest in merging the data from an older account into a new one, just to simplify matters. Enterprise data. Going back years. Not even leaving the region.
The AWS rep in the meeting kinda pauses, says: "We'll get back to you on the cost to do that."
The sticker shock was enough that the customer simply inherited the old account, rather than making things tidy.
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree, GCP is far easier to work with and get things up and running for how my brain works compared to AWS. Also, GCP name stuff in a way that tells me what it does, AWS name things like a teenage boy trying to be cool.
That's completely opposite to my experience. Do you have any examples of AWS naming that you think is "teenage boy trying to be cool"? I am genuinely curious.
BigQuery - Athena
Pub/Sub - Kinesis
Cloud CDN - CloudFront
Cloud Domains - Route 53
...
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#309After working with infrastructure for 20 years, I fully endorse this post.
Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is spending time to make it reliable worth it vs working on your actual product? Databases are THE most critical things your company has.
All that infra doesn’t integrate itself. Everywhere I’ve worked that had this kind of stack employed at least one if not a team of DevOps people to maintain it all, full time, the year round. Automating a database backup and testing it works takes half a day unless you’re doing something weird
Setting up a multi-az db with automatic failover, incremental backups and PiTR, automated runbooks and monitoring all that doesn't take half a day, not even with RDS.