Live data from Hacker News

Cloud costs are in a bubble

the-investing-desk.com

101–103 of 103 posts

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#101
post #11

I have always kind of disliked both cloud and containers. Primarily, they just add more complexity and overhead into the computing landscape. I've thought this to be bad both in material resources and energy consumption, but humans have a high time preference, and therefore they choose to spend both materials and resources to get a little more time back. This is much the same reason that hipster languages and framewo…

> Primarily, they just add more complexity and overhead into the computing landscape.

No, they don't 'just add more complexity and overhead'. They are tools. Properly utilized, they are great.

There's a reason why you are (probably!) not running a power station and home and have, instead, hooked to a power utility company. They have the expertise and can amortize the costs among many customers.

Similarly, containers actually brought efficiency – they replaced many(obviously, not all) of the use-cases that usually required virtual machines. They also simplified some very difficult deployments.

The problem arises when you are doing things for the wrong reasons. For example, using 'microservices' just so you can try to avoid teams from having to talk to one another and end up shipping your org chart.

I do agree with a more generalized statement: more often than not, monoliths are what you need.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#102
post #11

I have always kind of disliked both cloud and containers. Primarily, they just add more complexity and overhead into the computing landscape. I've thought this to be bad both in material resources and energy consumption, but humans have a high time preference, and therefore they choose to spend both materials and resources to get a little more time back. This is much the same reason that hipster languages and framewo…

I worked in a small team that brought containers into a co-lo / bare metal / centos / rpm / puppet shop. There was extra shit for developers to learn but I don't think it was waste. Not just because "everything is containers" nowadays, but because until they tried to build a container with their code actually working in it, most of them had little idea about how their shit worked. One example from the field: a VM got rebuilt and the app installed from scratch, but it wouldn't work. I hopped into the box and farted around with logs, strace, ldd, rpm commands and eventually realised that they introduced a dependence on a package that used to be installed on the system but was no longer there. It kept working on all existing machines but failed in a "build VM from scratch and run Puppet". Not only did that mistake make it out to production, but at that time few of the developers would have had a clue how to fix it. After the containerization of our services, this was absolutely not the case. (And honestly, we just conceptually replaced RPMs with containers, standardized all of our servers to the same build and forced developers to be aware of how their code actually worked).

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It slows down, along with the rest of the economy during recessions, because it, like everything else, is driven by the same market forces. Tech has been the darling of late exactly because it hasn't followed the general economy. In 2008, when virtually every other industry was about to sound death knells, developers were making bank producing apps. Similar story through the pandemic, when people were locked out of…

[I work at Firebase, but opinions are my own] I am happy to report that Firebase is actually used by companies of all sizes and types, including Fortune 1000. I appreciate the concern though :).

Fortune 1000 and fart apps aren't mutually exclusive, to be fair. Look at how many fart apps Google themselves create and then throw away soon after[1]. It is one thing to toss anything you can come up with into the wind to see what sticks during the gold rush, but that doesn't last forever.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com

Post reply on HN