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Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

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Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#131

Post by valenterry »

arcbyte wrote: post #85
valenterry wrote: post #20

So what, the suggestion is to go with Heroku instead? I think fargate + docker is super easy to setup, run and maintain. Maybe Heroku makes it a little bit easier, but that's about it. Once you leave the Heroku ecosystem you'll have lost all the time you saved. I'm not convinced.

I spent a few evenings going the ECS route and the complexity and cost of just a single api available to the internet and a database kept ballooning to way more than what I wanted to pay for and deal with. Fargate, image repo, NAT gateway, I don't even remember all the nonsense at this point but it was ridiculous. I took a look at a few alternatives and DigitalOcean's App service was night and day easier, faster, and…

Interesting, have never tried out DigitalOcean. Maybe I should.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#132

Post by taylodl »

I've been able to get a lot done with API Gateway, Lambda, S3, RDS, SQS, Lex, and ElasticSearch. I work for a Fortune 200 company who's risk averse and views "the cloud" with suspicion. My team's ability to get so much done is starting to change that perception.

Sure, if you're in a startup and you're doing most of the infrastructure and operational work yourself then working on-premise is often advantageous. If, like me, you're working for a Fortune 200 company and it takes multiple ServiceNow tickets to get on-prem hardware, a lead time of several months to get it through procurement and subsequently racked and stacked, and working with infrastructure solution engineers throughout the process - trust me, AWS is a much better choice and will enable your team to get stuff done.

If you are working for a startup then beware, as you grow avoid the temptation to build a data center - go to the public cloud. I would argue since that's where you're going to be hosted anyway - assuming your successful growth - then you should really consider just starting out there in the first place.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#133

Post by scarface74 »

taylodl wrote: post #132

I've been able to get a lot done with API Gateway, Lambda, S3, RDS, SQS, Lex, and ElasticSearch. I work for a Fortune 200 company who's risk averse and views "the cloud" with suspicion. My team's ability to get so much done is starting to change that perception. Sure, if you're in a startup and you're doing most of the infrastructure and operational work yourself then working on-premise is often advantageous. If, lik…

> if like me, you're working for a Fortune 200 company and it takes multiple ServiceNow tickets to get on-prem hardware

“I didn’t get into the cloud to avoid administering servers . I wanted to avoid server administrators”

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#134

Post by coredog64 »

Aeolun wrote: post #43
chadash wrote: post #12

I don't know. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems to me that knowing the basics of AWS (or some cloud provider) has become part of the standard developer's toolkit. With AWS specifically, there's so much documentation out there about getting started that I think you can have something up in a day or two on something like ECS or lambda (using something like the Serverless framework). And then when you need the more co…

The problem with even lambda or ECS though is that it’s all much more complex than a simple rsync to your desired server.

https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/

That takes a Dockerfile, manages networking, secrets and CI/CD deployment. I have a few quibbles with what it does, but it generally works and is being maintained/updated.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#135

Post by hotpotamus »

chadash wrote: post #122
hotpotamus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it seems to me that knowing the basics of AWS (or some cloud provider) has become part of the standard developer's toolkit. This seems to be flirting with the idea that Amazon has become a required component of hosting an application on the internet.

Required? No, I'm not saying that. But yes, it's become the industry standard. If you don't know some AWS basics and you are a generalist web developer, you'd probably do well to learn them in order to make yourself a more marketable engineer. There are plenty of good alternatives, but AWS is the 800-pound gorilla. You have to know at least a little bit about it in order to know why not to use it. It's like saying yo…

I suppose my problem is that the enormous complexity paired with the utility billing feels like I'm trying to drink from a pool of water surrounded by enormous lurking predators (the 800-pound gorilla analogy seems apt). I think everyone has at least a story of a forgotten instance that billed them a bit more, but with "infinitely scalable" compute come infinitely scalable bills. There are instances of developers creating infinite loops in cloud functions that result in 6 figure AWS bills. Of course then the advice is to plead your case and hope for a credit, but I wouldn't expect everlasting benevolence from Bezos's machine.

I have other issues and could probably expound on them at length, but work to do and all that. I don't disagree with you that it's an important tool for engineers today (I've certainly got an account or two), but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#136

Post by buffalobuffalo »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #19

This 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 >…

As a software engineer who doesn't really like devops and has been in this position multiple times, I'm a huge fan of buying à la carte services from different providers that specialize in managing a specific type of service (often since they are the developer/maintainer of said service). As long as you make sure they are all in the same datacenter, you still get great performance. And typically minimal configuration woes.

For example:

datacenter - aws: us-east-2

Dockerized Webservers/task servers: Render or Engineyard

Postgres & Kafka: aiven or 84codes

Redis: Redis labs

Unified logging Elastic or Grafana

I still end up using some underlying AWS services like S3 and lambda, but it's a lot less work than managing an entire AWS ecosystem with security groups/VPC/networking etc.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#137

Post by CharlieDigital »

friendly_deer wrote: post #126
CharlieDigital wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. E…

The thing that holds me back from Google cloud run Is that it is difficult to replicate that exact environment locally for testing and dev. If you’re working with stateless apps then that’s fine, But what is the typical local workflow of developing against a database, task Queue, etc.?

Which database?

If you're going all-in on Google Cloud and using Firestore, then use the emulators [0]. The emulators includes Pub/Sub. For Cloud Task Queues, use an unofficial emulator [1]

If you're not going all-in on Google Cloud and say you want to use Postgres, then use a `docker-compose.yaml` file and pull in a Postgres container instance or run a local Postgres if you want. Then pick a free Postgres compatible cloud service for the actual runtime (e.g. Supabase free tier). Same goes for MySQL.

For AWS, I'd use LocalStack [2]

[0] https://github.com/CharlieDigital/dn6-firebase

[1] https://github.com/aertje/cloud-tasks-emulator

[2] https://localstack.cloud/

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#138

Post by dijit »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #87
dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really agree with you, what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud. There's also something to be said for buying a VPS or a Colo machine, making sure it's backed up and dealing with the 9's that you get from that machine on it's own. I am routinely surprised by how far a single node machine will get you.

> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud. Why is it surprising? Building and maintaining custom data centers is a big, slow business initiative. It takes months to years of forecasting to get the data center buildout to match the business needs, as opposed to the extreme flexibility of using a cloud provider. > There's also something to be said…

> as opposed to the extreme flexibility of using a cloud provider.

I don't really buy this honestly.

What you buy with cloud providers is quality tooling, not flexibility.

If you're bin-packing with Kubernetes properly then capacity is capacity and it doesn't matter if the marketing department are using it or the developers are. You just buy a bunch of servers and when you see the load approaching 70% you buy more. It's a 2 person job.

Is it harder? Yes. Definitely.

Is it a panacea? No. Not at all.

Is it universally cheaper? Also no. Definitely not.

I feel like whenever I talk about the Cloud as an expensive thing that people get emotionally defensive.

I'm not here to take your toys away.

Services like cloud are just tools and tools always have pros and cons.

If you can't reasonably discuss the con's without resorting to "I need to hire more staff" or "its a lot better than $strawman" then we're just cargo culting.

> it’s not really a good option for any business that needs consistent operations and uptime.

Most business cases for computers can just eat the downtime honestly. Your URL redirector doesn't need 5 9's. There's a grading scale of complexity and uptime, on one side you have a single hosted server that has profoundly strong uptime (especially with the redundancies in normal servers); then you start adding complexity to get HA, and weirdly: the complexity lowers the reliability.

If you keep following the line of redundancies and HA complexity, eventually you can get to a point where the service is even more reliable than a single node. Which is what everyone assumes they will get straight away, but usually it's a lot of work to get there.

> the trivial cost savings

This will differ a lot.

I made two games, one was hybrid-cloud and one was bare metal only; the cost savings were not trivial. If we had 100% clouded the hybrid deployment we would easily have paid 10x in the hosting costs which would have been enough money to pay for 250 contractors at a premium rate.

That said: the toys were definitely shiny.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#139

Post by scarface74 »

Aeolun wrote: post #43
chadash wrote: post #12

I don't know. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems to me that knowing the basics of AWS (or some cloud provider) has become part of the standard developer's toolkit. With AWS specifically, there's so much documentation out there about getting started that I think you can have something up in a day or two on something like ECS or lambda (using something like the Serverless framework). And then when you need the more co…

The problem with even lambda or ECS though is that it’s all much more complex than a simple rsync to your desired server.

I went from not knowing Docker to having a production capable ECS/Fargate microservice spun up within less than a week.

I based it on this CFT

https://github.com/1Strategy/fargate-cloudformation-example/...

And this walk through for C#. I had a similar walkthrough for building a container for a Node service.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/hosting-asp-net-core-ap...

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#140

Post by scarface74 »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #47
cj wrote: post #5

This is just another way of saying “you shouldn’t use AWS if you don’t know how to use it” Yes, there’s a steep learning curve. But once you’re passed that (or if you gained that knowledge in a prior role) AWS can easily hands down be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest infrastructure platform to use. …if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know the ins and outs of AWS, then yes, you probably shouldn’t use it for…

Different strokes for different folks. (Or at least, use cases.) We’ve found at work that if you already have the talent, the hyper scale cloud platforms are amongst the most expensive ways to manage infrastructure if you go all in. For example $0.40/secret/mo is _expensive_ compared to the cost of an HA vault (not necessarily Hashicorp) setup. If you have 1,000 secrets but you only need to access any given secret on…

You probably don’t need secrets manager. Just use SSM Parameter Store secret string type. It’s free.
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