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Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

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Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#131

Post by morsecodist »

> Picking AWS over Google Cloud

I know this is an unpopular opinion but I think google cloud is amazing compared to AWS. I use google cloud run and it works like a dream. I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud. The services all have sensible names, there are fewer more important services compared to the mess of AWS services, and the UI is more intuitive. The only downside I have found is the lack of community resulting in fewer tutorials, difficulty finding experienced hires, and fewer third party tools. I recommend trying it. I'd love to get the user base to an even dozen.

The reasoning the author cites is that AWS has more responsive customer service and maybe I am missing out but it would never even occur to me to speak to someone from a cloud provider. They mention having "regular cadence meetings with our AWS account manager" and I am not sure what could be discussed. I must be doing simper stuff.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#132

Post by tw04 »

callalex wrote: post #129
steveBK123 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you commit to more deeply Amazon flavored parts of AWS like Aurora, aren't you now fairly committed to hoping your scale never exceeds the cost-benefit tradeoff?

If you’re paying list price at scale you are doing it very wrong.

Sure, but if you're paying anywhere near list price for your on-prem hardware at scale you're also doing it wrong. I've never seen a scenario where Amazon discounts exceed what you would get from a hardware or software vendor at the same scale.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#133

Post by Noumenon72 »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #84
hintymad wrote: post #73

> EKS My contrarian view is that EC2 + ASG is so pleasant to use. It’s just conceptually simple: I launch an image into an ASG, and configure my autoscale policies. There are very few things to worry about. On the other hand, using k8s has always been a big deal. We built a whole team to manage k8s. We introduce dozens of concepts of k8s or spend person-years on “platform engineering” to hide k8s concepts. We publish…

I tend to agree that for most things on AWS, EC2 + ASG is superior. It's very polished. EKS is very bare bones. I would probably go so far as to just run Kubernetes on EC2 if I had to go that route. But in general k8s provides incredibly solid abstractions for building portable, rigorously available services. Nothing quite compares. It's felt very stable over the past few years. Sure, EC2 is incredibly stable, but I…

At first I thought your "in general" statement was contradicting your preference for EC2 + ASG. I guess AWS is such a large part of my world that "in general" includes AWS instead of meaning everything but AWS.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#134

Post by doctor_eval »

marcosdumay wrote: post #111
endisneigh wrote: post #60

Great post. I do wonder - what are the simplest K8s alternatives? Many say in the database world, "use Postgres", or "use sqlite." Similarly there are those databases that are robust that no one has heard of, but are very limited like FoundationDB. Or things that are specialized and generally respected like Clickhouse. What are the equivalents of above for Kubernetes?

Kubernetes aren't like that. It's just that, you should start with a handful of backed-up pet servers. Then manually automate their deployment when you need it. And only then go for a tool that abstracts the automated deployment when you need it. But I fear the simplest option on the Kubernetes area is Kubernetes.

I don’t know that this is good advice.

I shunned k8s for a long time because of the complexity, but the managed options are so much easier to use and deploy than pet servers that I can’t justify it any more. For anything other than truly trivial cases, IMO kubernetes or (or similar, like nomad) is easier than any alternative.

The stack I use is hosted Postgres and VKS from Vultr. It’s been rock solid for me, and the entire infrastructure can be stored in code.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#135

Post by jacurtis »

cyounkins wrote: post #122

I've climbed the mountain of learning the basics of kubernetes / EKS, and I'm thinking we're going to switch to ECS. Kubernetes is way too complicated for our needs. It wants to be in control and is hard to direct with eg CloudFormation. Load balancers are provisioned from the add-on, making it hard to reference them outside kubernetes. Logging on EKS Fargate to Cloudwatch appears broken, despite following the docs.…

I've been running ECS for about 5 years now. It has come a long way from a "lightweight" orchestration tool into something thats actually pretty impressive. The recent new changes to the GUI are also helpful for people that don't have a ton of experience with orchestration.

We have moved off of it though, you can eventually need more features than it provides. Of course that journey always ends up in Kubernetes land, so you eventually will find your way back there.

Logging to Cloudwatch from kubernetes is good for one thing... audit logs. Cloudwatch in general is a shit product compared to even open source alternatives. For logging you really need to look at Fluentd or Kibana or DataDog or something along those lines. Trying to use Cloudwatch for logs is only going to end in sadness and pain.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#136

Post by krmboya »

LispSporks22 wrote: post #74

I feel like this is overkill for a startup. Why not dump your application server and dependencies into rented data center (or EC2 if you must) and setup a coarse DR? Maybe start with a monolith in PHP or Rails. None of that word salad sounds like startup to me, but then again everyone loves to refer to themselves as a startup (must be a recruiting tool?), so perhaps muh dude is spot on.

Key term here: 'cloud native'. Which is supposedly the future

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#137

Post by krmboya »

charred_patina wrote: post #125
LispSporks22 wrote: post #74

I feel like this is overkill for a startup. Why not dump your application server and dependencies into rented data center (or EC2 if you must) and setup a coarse DR? Maybe start with a monolith in PHP or Rails. None of that word salad sounds like startup to me, but then again everyone loves to refer to themselves as a startup (must be a recruiting tool?), so perhaps muh dude is spot on.

I don't want to be negative, but this post reads like a list of things that I want to avoid in my career. I did a brief stint in cloud stuff at a FAANG and I don't care to go back to it. Right now I'm engineer No. 1 at a current startup just doing DDD with a Django monolith. I'm still pretty Jr. and I'm wondering if there's a way to scale without needing to get into all of the things the author of this article mentio…

I bet you can get pretty far with just ec2 and autoscaling, or comparable tech in other cloud platforms. With a managed database service.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#138

Post by kevinqi »

charred_patina wrote: post #125
LispSporks22 wrote: post #74

I feel like this is overkill for a startup. Why not dump your application server and dependencies into rented data center (or EC2 if you must) and setup a coarse DR? Maybe start with a monolith in PHP or Rails. None of that word salad sounds like startup to me, but then again everyone loves to refer to themselves as a startup (must be a recruiting tool?), so perhaps muh dude is spot on.

I don't want to be negative, but this post reads like a list of things that I want to avoid in my career. I did a brief stint in cloud stuff at a FAANG and I don't care to go back to it. Right now I'm engineer No. 1 at a current startup just doing DDD with a Django monolith. I'm still pretty Jr. and I'm wondering if there's a way to scale without needing to get into all of the things the author of this article mentio…

I work at a startup and most of the stuff in the article covers things we use and solve real world problems.

If you're looking for successful businesses, indie hackers like levelsio show you how far you can get with very simple architectures. But that's solo dev work - once you have a team and are dealing with larger-scale data, things like infrastructure as code, orchestration, and observability become important. Kubernetes may or may not be essential depending on what you're building; it seems good for AI companies, though.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#139

Post by layoric »

nextos wrote: post #128
nyc_data_geek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some orgs are looking at moving back to on prem because they're figuring this out. For a while it was vogue to go from capex to opex costs, and C suite people were incentivized to do that via comp structures, hence "digital transformation" ie: migration to public cloud infrastructure. Now, those same orgs are realizing that renting computers actually costs more than owning them, when you're utilizing them to a signif…

Same experience here. As a small organization, the quotes we got from cloud providers have always been prohibitively expensive compared to running things locally, even when we accounted for geographical redundancy, generous labor costs, etc. Plus, we get to keep know how and avoid lock-in, which are extremely important things in the long term. Besides, running things locally can be refreshingly simple if you are just…

> Plus, we get to keep know how and avoid lock-in, which are extremely important things in the long term.

So much this. The "keep know how" has been so greatly avoided over the past 10 years, I hope people with these skills start getting paid more as more companies realize the cost difference.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#140

Post by charred_patina »

krmboya wrote: post #137
charred_patina wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be negative, but this post reads like a list of things that I want to avoid in my career. I did a brief stint in cloud stuff at a FAANG and I don't care to go back to it. Right now I'm engineer No. 1 at a current startup just doing DDD with a Django monolith. I'm still pretty Jr. and I'm wondering if there's a way to scale without needing to get into all of the things the author of this article mentio…

I bet you can get pretty far with just ec2 and autoscaling, or comparable tech in other cloud platforms. With a managed database service.

That I'd be comfortable with.
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