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Cloud, Why So Difficult?

winglang.io

111–120 of 158 posts

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#111
post #64

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…

> On-prem is like that. Yes, you have all the skills to originally stand it up. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and you make a bunch of resource trade-offs, usually by not implementing stuff that you’ll never need (until you do).

But what you described sounds like a packaging / software distribution issue.

Like, someone writes a one off Python script or program to do a thing and a year later it doesn't work because the host machine is using a newer version of Python and the dependencies need to be reinstalled to the new site-packages and they didn't document if they used the package manager or a virtualenv and a pip requirements file or setup.py or whatever.

The "it works on my machine" thing isn't really a "cloud" thing? It doesn't really solve the issue of having a weird bespoke service that nobody understands. Even if it's so abstracted from a normal computer that it has some esoteric requirement like an OCI image to run software, if the Dockerfile/Containerfile or whatever that generates the image doesn't exist/work/make sense then you have the same problem.

> As I said though, the unique value of cloud is letting you focus on a business specific problem instead of reinventing wheels that have already been invented many times over.

Reinventing the wheel like with docker ansible terraform kubernetes nomad aws?

Recently I was asked to help a company receive out of office replies to their web service that sent mail from Amazon SES. The client was sending mail from app.foo.org (with MX SPF for amazon) and wanted to receive them to foo.org (MX and SPF for outlook). Setting Reply-To or some other headers to foo.org worked in testing but not in practice. I maneuvered the amazon product menagerie and set up SES to get notifications on out of office replies and that also worked in testing but not in fact. Even then it would not store a list or provide details in the dashboard about replies without further using lambda or SQS or something. Every deficiency in an amazon product is "solved" by another amazon product. You're swallowing a horse to swallow a fly. In the end I just added AWS to the foo.org SPF records along with outlook's and set the From header accordingly; way simpler, didn't need to any more AWS products, and knowledge of DNS is more portable than knowledge of AWS. AWS is in the business of inventing wheels and trying to get you stay in their wheel ecosystem.

Not to contradict everything you're saying like you're wrong or something. I wonder what the circus is like for those of you who run it. Everything you say reads like high-level manager/sales engineer marketing talk from someone who spends all day in meetings. Not to say I'm an authority and that your voice is illegitimate; I'm just a resentful out of touch NEET waiting for the world to change to the point that I have nothing left to offer it.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cl…

Well then I'm a little confused. You wrote this earlier which contradicted my post:

> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.

You don't need to be a company "where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise" in order for managing your own infrastructure to be a competitive advantage. Managing (some of) your own infrastructure can be a competitive advantage even managing infrastructure is not your core competency or even your goal. It is a competitive advantage of the TOC is lower. It sometimes is.

But if you're now saying you agree with my statement, then I guess well we're in agreement.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#113

I currently run a micro-saas product on a $4 a month namecheap server using the LAMP stack. It runs fast for all 34 companies, or 400+ employees, using it. I've looked into moving it to Google cloud or AWS and it just seems daunting. Honestly, I use ftp, cpanel, and phpmyadmin. Is there a way to get this product into the 'cloud' in case it grows, easily?

You'll never match the price, but if you use some small rds and ec2 instances you wont be paying much. Less if you use lambda and api gateway.

Moving lamp stacks is a piece of cake. If you don't want to do it you could find a freelancer pretty easily.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#114
post #34

"Cloud is too difficult, you have to learn tons of stuff to use it!" "BTW here's the new product I'm selling which requires you to learn a new cloud-oriented programming language and has its own CLI and has diagrams like [this]( https://docs.winglang.io/assets/images/arch-f803472c761aa198... ) on its introduction page!" The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming...

While I don't disagree entirely, I feel like you're misrepresenting what they're offering. Their language is an attempt at simplifying orchestration and application code. The diagram you're showing only proves that point - that's an AWS diagram, and the code on the same page is what creates it: bring cloud; let queue = new cloud.Queue(timeout: 2m); let bucket = new cloud.Bucket(); let counter = new cloud.Counter(init…

All of that is indirection away from users.

Just configure *nix “user” like they’re containers, or queues, or buckets.

How many DSLs do we need for the single domain of managing electron state?

I don’t mean to say other abstractions are unnecessary, I mean for that realm of platform/sre/ops/sysadmin metrics, telemetry, observability. Really though why isn’t it just fork() all the way down and code thread counts reacts to eBPF? Jettison Docker, k8s. Just release “user” profiles that are dotfiles, namespaces, cgroups rules, and a git repo to clone.

Better yet just boot to something better that mimics CLI for the lulz but isn’t so fucking fickle

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#115
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many totally-different-yet-common sets of requirements are there for user uploads or task processing do you think there are that necessitate the ultimate flexibility and complexity? I suspect vendor lock-in is a more likely cause of the complexity.

> I suspect vendor lock-in is a more likely cause of the complexity. I think people give large organizations credit for being mustache twirlingly evil when the collective consciousness that makes up AWS is simply not smart enough to be this evil. If AWS had the coordination to do this the product would be better. It's much more likely that the complexity is the result of a huge number of teams working independently a…

AWS and Amazon for that matter didn't just happen. There absolutely is a lot of enterprise architecture and strategy built into them with the goal of capturing markets and extracting rent. Corporations exist for the exact reason that this is possible.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#116

The difficulty with cloud is Joel's rule: "All non-trivial abstractions are leaky" they just abstract complexity and eventually the abstraction breaks and you actually need to know some amount of linux, networking, security, or distributed system engineering to fix it. The easiest way to not get bitten by this is to avoid the abstractions and keep it simple as long as possible. Most apps can probably do fine with a s…

What I don't get in this discussions is, why not just target containers and after that do the least amount you need to have you container online somewhere? At most you'd need to do Kubernetes if it gets complex enough but by then you have manifests that would work on any cluster anyway, doesn't matter which cloud you use. Am I being too naive?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#117
post #113

I currently run a micro-saas product on a $4 a month namecheap server using the LAMP stack. It runs fast for all 34 companies, or 400+ employees, using it. I've looked into moving it to Google cloud or AWS and it just seems daunting. Honestly, I use ftp, cpanel, and phpmyadmin. Is there a way to get this product into the 'cloud' in case it grows, easily?

You'll never match the price, but if you use some small rds and ec2 instances you wont be paying much. Less if you use lambda and api gateway. Moving lamp stacks is a piece of cake. If you don't want to do it you could find a freelancer pretty easily.

>Less if you use lambda and api gateway.

There's the slippery slope into vendor lock-in via combinatorial explosion of complexity

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#118
post #101
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah complexity doesn't go away, you just move it around. The trick is not standing up stuff, that's pretty straight forward with cloud or metal. The real talent lies in understanding that you need to pump the entropy somewhere so you should be aware of the trade-offs and make things that are well organized, explicit and have contingency plans for the future.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#119
post #29

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.

With all due respect this is a trivial and misleading point of view. Of course if you have the staff you could do all the things they do in the cloud, on-premises. If you had the staff. And the skills. And the money. And you wanted to spend your finite devops resources deploying and monitoring a data center. Yes it’s possible to buy your own building, and your own DS3/OC3. And HVAC. And electrical. And backup generat…

If you actually need so many 9's in the availability that it makes sense to invest in well tested robust failovers and resulting distributed-system application complexity (which most people don't test, they end up just paying for redundancy but getting maybe even reduced availability), you are in a very small minority and you will be highly skeptical of outsourcing this to a cloud vendor since their HA also goes tits up regularly. Witness how often cloud vendors have unexpected outages and read the post mortems.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#120
I am finding "cloud" to be a pleasant experience at the moment.

We are building a B2B service in Azure using Az Functions & Az SQL Database as the primary components. That's about it. We figured out you can "abuse" Az Functions to serve all manner of MVC-style web app (in addition to API-style apps) by using simple PHP-style templating code. Sprinkle in AAD authentication and B2B collaboration and you have a really powerful, secure/MFA auth solution without much suffering. Things like role enforcement is as simple as taking a dep on ClaimsPrincipal in the various functions.

The compliance offerings are really nice too. Turns out if you use the compliant services without involving a bunch of complicated 3rd party bullshit, you wind up with something that is also approximately compliant. For those of us in finance, this is a really important factor. 10 person startups don't have much bandwidth for auditing in-house stacks every year. If you do everything "the Azure way", it is feasible for you to grant your partners (or their auditors) access to your tenant for inspection and expect that they could find their own way around. If you do it "my way" you better be prepared to get pulled into every goddamn meeting.

I am starting to wonder if not all clouds are made equal anymore. We also have some footprint in AWS (we used to be 100% AWS), but it's really only for domain registration and S3 buckets these days. GCP doesn't even fly on my radar. I've only ever see one of our partners using it.

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