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Cloud, Why So Difficult?

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Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#101

Post by tpetry »

efitz wrote: post #64
electroly wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I did not downvote you.) The person you're replying to is definitely overly flippant, but you've taken a sort of Gish gallop approach where you think if you list enough individual things that have to be done, that'll be overwhelming evidence that it's impossibly difficult. But the things you've listed aren't as hard as you want them to be on reasonable small business scales. We are a company with 4 IT employees incl…

A recurring anti-pattern I have seen over and over is the app that is built and runs on a developer desktop, then becomes business critical and needs to scale and evolve, and eventually fails catastrophically. Maybe the SQL database design or storage system isn’t capable of handling the new I/O requirements. Maybe the creator quits and nobody else knows how it works. Whatever. On-prem is like that. Yes, you have all…

The cloud has the same problem but in a different color. One employee created and managed everything in AWS and then quits. You have the same problem that nobody really knows how to continue from that point. Why was it built that way? Why are the IAM rules like that? etc.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#102

Post by CoolCold »

scarface74 wrote: post #56
TexanFeller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until you realize you have to build a datacenter yourself Have you never heard of a colo? Rent 1-2 racks in one of those. And you probably won't need more than 1-2 racks because that's what Stack Overflow runs on.

And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)? It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself. And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators. When I was at the 60 perso…

> And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.

I bet it's true for many. I approximate it from what I see in backend/frontend teams - they don't even deal with eachother, not even system administrators.

Luckily [in the current project] devs don't have access to production and very limited to dev environment in terms of ssh/db endpoints.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#103

Post by 0xedd »

omginternets wrote: post #78
scarface74 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying their work is bad. But every abstraction is leaky and it’s a lot easier to find someone who knows how to use the native SDKs for AWS/Azure/GCP than someone who knows an obscure framework that doesn’t cover everything.

Your original comment went a fair bit beyond that assessment.

No. Adults aren't made of sugar. Meaning was clear and professional using layman terms.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#104

Post by 0xedd »

justin_oaks wrote: post #15

The 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 nece…

All of these are basic requirements. Yet they're available for use only after AWS specific proficiency. Why do I need an AWS setting to permit DB access when the DB had that feature already? I don't need the extra layer of complexity AWS puts on most things.

Tangent - Their docs are abysmal. Written like a novel which I'm meant to cross reference to their SDK.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#105

Post by CogitoCogito »

scarface_74 wrote: post #82
re-thc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)? And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it. > Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself. Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows! > I compare that to the old day…

> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped? “unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.” > So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad? How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read…

> How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.

Your examples here are just examples of situations where you basically need a cloud solution by definition. If these are your requirements, then yes obviously you should use cloud for it. That said, your points are a bit confusing. It's not an either-or. For situations like you're describing, you use cloud. For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

You seem to have a (literally) extremist position where it's all cloud or nothing. It's not.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#106

Post by [deleted] »

CoolCold wrote: post #102
scarface74 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)? It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself. And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators. When I was at the 60 perso…

> And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators. I bet it's true for many. I approximate it from what I see in backend/frontend teams - they don't even deal with eachother, not even system administrators. Luckily [in the current project] devs don't have access to production and very limited to dev envi…

[deleted]

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#107

Post by scarface_74 »

CoolCold wrote: post #102
scarface74 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)? It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself. And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators. When I was at the 60 perso…

> And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators. I bet it's true for many. I approximate it from what I see in backend/frontend teams - they don't even deal with eachother, not even system administrators. Luckily [in the current project] devs don't have access to production and very limited to dev envi…

At my n-2 job (2017-mid 2018), I was the dev lead when management decided to “move to the cloud”. They hired a bunch of “consultants” who were old school operations people who only knew how to do lift and shifts.

I didn’t know cloud from a whole in the wall. But the internal IT department treated AWS just like they did their Colo. I thought AWS was just a bunch of VMs and I treated it as such for a green field implementation.

I studied for the AWS Solution Architect certification just so I would know what I didn’t know and to be able to come up with some intelligent ideas for phase 2.

I ended up leaving that job and working for a startup. The CTO knew I had only theoretical knowledge of AWS. But I had good system design instincts and he liked my ideas. I was hired as a senior developer. But that rapidly morphed into a cloud architect role. I took advantage of AWS and all of its locked in goodness including moving everything to either Lambda and Fargate (serverless Docker).

I had admin rights to everything until I voluntarily gave myself the same constraints to production that everyone else had when we hired a couple of operation guys.

We scaled without any issues as the company grew and Covid happened - we worked in the healthcare industry.

Now I work for AWS. But I’ve done my share of managing servers since the mid 90s as part of my job. That’s a life I don’t ever want to go back to.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#108

Post by [deleted] »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #105
scarface_74 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped? “unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.” > So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad? How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read…

> How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack. Your examples here are just examples…

[deleted]

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#109

Post by scarface_74 »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #105
scarface_74 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped? “unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.” > So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad? How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read…

> How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack. Your examples here are just examples…

> For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

I literally just gave examples where a colo or on prem makes complete sense - anytime that managing infrastructure is a competitive advantage.

If you have a static workload and your company has the competencies to manage infrastructure, go for on prem.

I’m the last person to recommend someone move to any cloud provider just to treat it like a colo.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#110

Post by fulafel »

justin_oaks wrote: post #15

The 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 nece…

Are you saying that there is already only little incidental complexity and friction, and it's mostly essential to the problem domain?

What evidence or convincing arguments are there for your position?

For me it seems clear that this is not the case, the needless friction in eg CDK dev experience seems ridiculous.

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