Whateversimple cloud service you use, it's likely using AWS underneath anyway. Like Netlify for example, I think it's all based on AWS.
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
#12I 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 complex functionality, you are already in the AWS ecosystem.
If you are a startup trying to get a product to market, AWS is typically going to be a very small cost unless you are doing something very compute intensive (in which case something like Heroku, which the author recommends, certainly won't be cheaper anyway). The high bills only come later, if ever, after you've decided to create 20 databases and 50 apps for your 70 person startup.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#13I actually totally disagree. With the various development frameworks/CLIs, AWS has the ecosystem benefits that can make hosting on it a breeze, and leave more time to focus on delivering value to the customer.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#14this "thought leadership" in our industry is a disease
There’s been an seo template since slashdot ages of find a prevailing wisdom, write a naive clickbaity post, profit. Sometimes I think authors are earnestly wrong, sometimes I think they are just fake. Sadly, it’s still profitable. I thought that one day I’d interview someone who wrote a post like that and figure out for real. But I’ve been waiting decades so it probably won’t happen. “Everything you know is wrong.”…
It's probably been a lot, lot longer than that. This is an evolution of "think again!" articles from long ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if in some cave somewhere there's a message on the wall like "Think Oogie is best stone tool maker? Think again!"
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#15C’mon guys, this week it was my turn to post the AWS bad article
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#16Small companies and startups can get pretty far with 1 dedicated server and good backups...
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#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 Terraform project for something like that, documented, with its CI and applying changes via CD, would take me 4 days being generous.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#18Whateversimple cloud service you use, it's likely using AWS underneath anyway. Like Netlify for example, I think it's all based on AWS.
I really like Vercel's approach of mixing cloud providers behind the scenes. They deliver features (like edge functions) using one cloud, basic hosting using another one, etc. It's all invisible to you as the customer and painlessly abstracted.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#19This 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 > Custom Hardware in custom built data centers.
Each makes sense at each scale. I find it to be more of a right tool for the job consideration than one being better than the other.
With modern cloud tooling your infra can also look more or less logically the same once you grow past the heroku level.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#20So what, the suggestion is to go with Heroku instead?
I think fargate + docker is super easy to setup, run and maintain. Maybe Heroku makes it a little bit easier, but that's about it. Once you leave the Heroku ecosystem you'll have lost all the time you saved.
I'm not convinced.