The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own.
If it makes things difficult, you shouldn't be using it.
It is overhyped and it sucks for most use case.
Cloud, Why So Difficult?
11–20 of 158 posts
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#12I'm sorry, what's the advantage to the cloud again?
This just reminds me why I just run (my personal) web apps on the server in my basement: it's actually simpler.
I really think the worst part of programming is dealing with the development environment.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#13Website is unreadable on mobile
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#14All big tech platforms make their riches mostly this same way over the last ~40 year: solve 80-90% of the problem in a super simple, slick manner that is priced competitively. Then as customers build out the unique parts that match their needs (the last 10-20%), bleed them dry with features that are more expensive and establish lock-in.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#15The complexity of the cloud exists because the cloud vendors allows a user to do advanced things if the user understands how. Using AWS, GCP, and Azure as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) means that there's no easy mode.
If you want easy (or easier) mode, you'll have to use a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
The major cloud vendors might have problems with quirky designs and poor documentation, but beyond that is necessary complexity.
You want a high-availability website allows user-uploaded files and does asynchronous task processing? You're probably going to have to get familiar with servers, load balancers, queues, and object storage, at a minimum.
You want it all to be secure? You're going to have to configure network rules/firewalls and set up lots of access policies.
There's no free lunch.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#16I'm sorry, what's the advantage to the cloud again? This just reminds me why I just run (my personal) web apps on the server in my basement: it's actually simpler. I really think the worst part of programming is dealing with the development environment.
> I'm sorry, what's the advantage to the cloud again?
For-most-purposes-infinite on-demand resources, provided in a format where you don't have to pay for when you aren't using it. And yes, we all know that this does mean you pay a premium for it when you need it, and (good) cloud folks understand that you have to design for that reality.
If you don't need that advantage, that's fine, but it's silly to act like it doesn't exist. Find the point where the delta in variable costs outweighs additional capex and steer your solution to that point, make peace with inefficient spending, or get out. You don't have to be weird about either extreme position.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#17>To be honest, give me the developer experience of the 90s. I want to make a change, and I want to be able to test this change either interactively or through a unit test within milliseconds, and I want to do this while sitting in an airplane with no WiFi, okay? (we didn't have WiFi in the 90s). I'm going to make an impossible request and ask that any readers ignore everything else they know about "crypto", but...thi…
> But the model of a single well specified execution + storage protocol might be worth porting over to non-financialized cloud application development.
To a first approximation, it exists, and it's called Cloudflare Workers (and KV).
If I had to bet money, mine would be on the bet that Workers represents an early example of what will be in-the-main development in a decade.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#18I'm sorry, what's the advantage to the cloud again? This just reminds me why I just run (my personal) web apps on the server in my basement: it's actually simpler. I really think the worst part of programming is dealing with the development environment.
Assuming you're being serious, the advantage of the cloud is scalability, avoiding managing hardware, reliable power, and reliable network.
You want to run your web app off your basement server? Go ahead, but if you have a blog post that hits the front page of HN, there's no way to scale up. If your home server has hardware failure then you're out of luck until you can get new hardware. Your home has a power outage or ISP outage? Your site is down.
If you can tolerate those things, great! I wish my employers and their customers would tolerate it.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#19Website is unreadable on mobile
I was going to comment “website, why so difficult (on mobile)” before I saw your comment
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#20If you want easy and simple, use Render, fly.io, etc. Those cover 90% of the cases K8s be damned.
Similar for Deno deploy and Cloudflare Workers. In the end, the layers you get on AWS are not the same for all providers. It varies a lot from platform to platform in terms of "cloud".
I'm working on a relatively complex cloud solution centered round AWS Lambda, SQS/SNS and DynamoDB with many different lambda endpoints and isolated databases. It works, but it's incredibly hard to test. The fortunate thing is there's a system in place to stand up an environment at the PR level, but even that take almost an hour to test/build/deploy/test/deploy for the PR and every commit after the PR is made. Local runs are sorely lacking. And I can only imagine the number of environments with similar issues.
I've been playing with Cloudflare Pages/Workers and CockroachLabs (CockroachDB Cloud) on a personal/side project and it's quite a bit different. Still in the getting groundwork done and experimenting phase, but wanting to avoid the complexity of the work project while still providing enough scale to not have to worry too much about falling over under load.
Not every application needs to scale to hundreds of millions of users, and it all comes at a cost that may not be worth the price of entry. The platform at work is at well over 1.6 million in terms of the story/bug/feature numbers at this point... it's a big, complex system. But working in/on it feels a few steps more complex than it could/should be. It'll absolutely scale horizontally and is unlikely to fall over under load in any way... but is it really worth it with the relatively slow turn around, in what could have still used dynamo, but the service layers in a more traditional monolith with simply more instances running?
I have to say, I'm somewhat mixed on it all.