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Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
101–110 of 210 posts
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#102> - 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…
Same, I do it routinely and maybe the first time I ever did it, it took me a week but after that it was fast. But I may be being generous. The only thing that could make that tough is if you put the Lambdas in a VPC. That can get tricky because you have to plan out subnets and whatnot but still not a week. The AWS documentation is also extremely good with regards to what properties are on each resource. I can't speak…
> The only thing that could make that tough is if you put the Lambdas in a VPC. That can get tricky because you have to plan out subnets and whatnot but still not a week.
Yeah, it’s about 20 minutes if you use the VPC and Lambda modules from https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules. I could see a week if you had to learn all of this first with little prior experience but that’s true of everything. A newbie running a Linux colo server isn’t going to get all of the security & reliability issues right in less time, either.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#103> 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 as easily means sacrificing your development loop.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#104I work for AWS and I get paid decent money to work with companies and help them become “cloud native”. My specialty is “application modernization” and I avoid “lift and shift” projects like the plague. Even though I realize that doing lift and shifts first is the right answer sometimes. I think I can confidently state that I know AWS pretty well. That being said, in my personal life if someone ever came to me and sai…
What advantage do you see companies getting from using AWS's proprietary products over standard open source equivalents?8
I’m not the sales guy. I’m not here to do sales talking points.
I’m going to speak from an on the ground hands on keyboard implementation person.
AWS offers plenty of hosted versions of open source solutions and API compatible services like DocumentDB with Mongo compatibility.
If I’m working with a customer that prefers the open source solution and there is an equivalent on AWS, I’m going to suggest that. My goal is never to introduce too much new technology to an organization unless there is a compelling need.
I’ve recommended everything from a straight lift and shift, to hybrid, to full on all in on AWS depending on the use case. I’m not dogmatic and I’ve never been told “get the customer all in on our services so we can lock them in”. I’ve implemented pure AWS CI/CD solutions, integrated with Azure DevOps, done lift and shifts with Jenkins, etc.
I’m judged completely by outcomes and whether the customer is satisfied.
But I’ve been railing against worrying about “lock-in” wat before coming to AWS. I’ve been part of numerous large scale migrations and implementations. If you’re at any scale, you’re always both technically and organizationally “locked in” to your infrastructure choices and migrating involves, dealing with CxOs, PMO, retraining, security, regressions, etc. It’s usually much easier to just have a conversation with your account manager.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#105Earlier 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…
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?
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#106> 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…
An API on localhost may not be useful, but an API running on a single VPS or dedicated server could take you very far.
We had a 'microservice' running on a server that had a bunch of other random things on it, it ran for 4-5 years until the server got decommissioned.
Nobody knew what all ran on that server, worse yet nobody knew that particular service ran on it. The person who wrote it was long gone.
It took a day to troubleshoot, a day to figure out what actually happened, and 5 days to get the server backup and running.
A couple months later, someone shut the server down again. It only took three days to fix it the second time.
In order to ensure this would never happen again, there were about 15 meetings, 20 people were involved, and then service was re-written and hosted on Azure (with the rest of some of our stuff). It's probably failed about 100 times since then, in about a hundred different ways.
This thing was maybe 500 lines of php.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#107> 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…
if you're spending less than 2$ per month how much traffic -> how much money can you make?
Sure, I also have plenty of static websites hosted for free by vercel / netlify / heroku / yourpick and even free functions.
As soon as you start hitting traffic, functions start to cost a lot vs your own vps.
My ideal setup right now is free static hosting from the marketing budget of friendly saas, free cloudflare on top and then APIs hosted on small vps (I have plenty of stuff on digitalocean but if I were to start from scratch I'd go fully with hetzner).
I avoid the big 3 as much as I can and I laugh for hours when I see the bills of clients using them.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#108One 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 $30 a month to leave running, it's easy to forget about it. You get enough of those across a cor…
Why would they pull back from the cloud, instead of just implementing some basic infra ownership and cost auditing processes?
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#109> If you're an indie hacker, a boostrapper, a startup, an agency or a consultancy, or just a small team building a product, chances are you are not going to need the cost and complexity that comes with modern cloud platforms. Hard disagree. - On cost: there is almost nothing better for the indie hacker, bootstrapper, or startup than cloud services. I run apps on all three platforms (Google, AWS, and Azure) and my mon…
if you're spending less than 2$ per month how much traffic -> how much money can you make? Sure, I also have plenty of static websites hosted for free by vercel / netlify / heroku / yourpick and even free functions. As soon as you start hitting traffic, functions start to cost a lot vs your own vps. My ideal setup right now is free static hosting from the marketing budget of friendly saas, free cloudflare on top and…
Google Cloud Run pricing is:
- 2 million requests/mo free
- First 180,000 vCPU seconds free
- First 360,000 GiB seconds free
Then:
- $0.000024 /vCPU seconds
- $0.0000025 /GiB seconds
- $0.40 per million requests
This will get you pretty far for $2/mo. Within the free tier itself, assuming you can process each request in 250ms on a 1 vCPU container, you get 720,000 requests before you start paying for compute usage. Each $1.00 is another ~38,000 vCPU seconds (@1 GiB second) or ~152,000 requests @ 250ms per request.
Roughly speaking, $2/mo. is 1 million requests @ 250ms each request consuming 1 GiB seconds on a 1 vCPU container.
(There's some nominal cost for egress and storage of container images).
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#110This 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 >…
> "use heroku until you have 100k users"
nowadays, i'd say use fly.io or render till you have 200k users.