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Cloud, Why So Difficult?

winglang.io

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Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#121

Post by toiletduck »

lemarchr wrote: post #69

I don't understand why there's so much negativity here. From my cursory perusal of the docs this looks like a simplified, vendor agnostic re-imaging of something like CDK, with cool tooling including visualisations and out-of-the-box support for local dev. Where's the beef? You think cloud is too expensive or unnecessary? Fair enough, this tool is not for you. You think cloud infra is necessarily complex because you…

> simplified, vendor agnostic

I just don't see this being true. Being "cloud agnostic" likely means it's an incredibly leaky abstraction where at the first sign of trouble, you're going to have to understand winglang + the specific provider API. Any IaC product requires you intimiately understand what it's actually doing if you care about security and performance. Just because it's a managed service doesn't mean you get to ignore all it's implementation detail, right?

All the cloud providers give you a function as a service, or a nosql database, or a file bucket: ignoring all the nuance as an agnostic is at a minimum leaving optimisation on the table and more likely dangerous and expensive, surely?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#122

Post by shaiber »

toiletduck wrote: post #121
lemarchr wrote: post #69

I don't understand why there's so much negativity here. From my cursory perusal of the docs this looks like a simplified, vendor agnostic re-imaging of something like CDK, with cool tooling including visualisations and out-of-the-box support for local dev. Where's the beef? You think cloud is too expensive or unnecessary? Fair enough, this tool is not for you. You think cloud infra is necessarily complex because you…

> simplified, vendor agnostic I just don't see this being true. Being "cloud agnostic" likely means it's an incredibly leaky abstraction where at the first sign of trouble, you're going to have to understand winglang + the specific provider API. Any IaC product requires you intimiately understand what it's actually doing if you care about security and performance. Just because it's a managed service doesn't mean you…

Hey, I understand where you're coming from, but I still think there is room abstraction when done right. I wrote about it here: https://docs.winglang.io/faq/why-cloud-abstraction

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#123

Post by shaiber »

Thaxll wrote: post #53

I don't understand what that solution brings when you have Terraform? Also linking your code with you infra code, who thought this was a good idea? Last question how actually the simluator works, is it one of those case where it try to emulate some high level concept but then your prod code break because the simulator was 40% accurate?

I wrote about comparison to Terraform here: https://docs.winglang.io/faq/differences-from-other-solution...

About the simulator, it is a functional simulator to be able to test and interact with the business logic of the application. There are other solutions, like LocalStack to simulate the non functional parts too.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#124

Post by namaria »

showdeddd wrote: post #30

Cloud is not difficult, they just charge too much per API request.

Putting a network in the middle of your system, and making everything go through API requests (or RPC shudders) is almost never a good idea. If you have planet scale systems and the budget to hire enough bright engineers and still turn record breaking profits, sure. If not, you're just draining value from your bottom line to the vendor's

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#125

Post by swader999 »

Nihilartikel wrote: post #67

This thought hits home for me: > When I started programming, I used Borland C++. It used to take about 100ms to compile and run a program on an IBM PC AT machine (TURBO ON). An average iteration cycle in the cloud takes minutes. Minutes! Sometimes dozens of minutes! I'm a fast-feedback fan myself, and my weapons of choice in refuge from a dark decade of c++ are the Python notebook and Clojure REPL. With that as it is…

Yeah I miss the days when I used to run a web site for a niche crowd of about ten thousand users on my bedroom pc. Now I'm pushing buttons on heroku and getting grief for dyno overages.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#126

Post by peteradio »

Spivak wrote: post #85
cosmotic wrote: post #27

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…

This seems seriously naive.. its not mustache twirling evil, it is business and its a big part of it to build moats and prevent yourself from unintentionally filling it in. Businesses absolutely will maintain worse functionality if improving it can aid a competitor.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#127

Post by magikstm »

re-thc wrote: post #72
justin_oaks wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. This is a simplistic view that doesn't discuss any of the trade-offs inherent in the choice between running your own hardware and using a cloud service. Yes, it's a higher price, but it allows you to stop paying for it when you stop needing it. You can scale up rapidly. You don't have to deal with buying, main…

> You don't have to deal with buying, maintaining, or replacing hardware. You can rent servers much the same once you at least have a bit of scale. It's never colocation or cloud. There are lots of in-betweens.

Exactly.

Cloud is often viewed as if these don't exist: - Dedicated servers - Managed hosting - VPS - etc.

Most small to medium-sized enterprise could opt for such options instead of the cloud.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#128

Post by magikstm »

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…

Without a cloud it would take longer.

But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?

Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.

I've quite often seen the need for 5-10 meetings or 2-3 written documents to get approval for 10 new VMs for developers or new servers for backups.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#129

Post by midasuni »

efitz wrote: post #29
magikstm wrote: post #11

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…

Build your application to run on a few boxes with a slow (say 5 second) failover. They can have a single power supply running somewhere in the back of an office. If the power goes, oh well - one of the other nodes will carry on.

Of course you’re right a VPC or a CoLo would be better. However that’s not what most people think of “cloud”

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#130

Post by sdenton4 »

re-thc wrote: post #75
scarface74 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why would I base my entire application on a framework by a tiny developer? And honestly, ChatGPT is so well trained on AWS CLIs, Terraform, CloudFormation, the SDKs for Python and Node, I can throw most of my problems at it and it does well.

> And why would I base my entire application on a framework by a tiny developer? If we work like this we'd have no frameworks. Everything started from 0.

Frontends are pretty much always awful... They work until they don't and then you're invested and screwed.

I've become a much bigger fan of well-designed libraries. Do one thing and do it well, and preview a simple API for doing it.

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