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Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

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Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#131

Post by sylens »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #79
dangus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, I find our AWS super team to be a mix of 40% helpful, 40% “things we say are going over their head,” 20% attempting to upsell and expand our dependence. It’s nice that we have humans but I don’t think it’s a reason to choose it or not. GCP’s architecture seems clearly better to me especially if you are looking to be global. Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of…

> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare. What are these struggles? The product I work on uses AWS and we have ~5 accounts (I hear they used to be more TBF) but nowadays all the infrastructure is on one of them and the other are for some niche stuff (tech support?). I could see how going overboard with many accounts co…

I like AWS, but Organizations was something that was retrofit onto the account model versus being part of the original design. GCP had second mover advantage in this area.

The way to automate provisioning of new AWS accounts requires you to engage with Control Tower in some way, like the author did with Account Factory for Terraform.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#133

Post by secondcoming »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #80
dangus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, I find our AWS super team to be a mix of 40% helpful, 40% “things we say are going over their head,” 20% attempting to upsell and expand our dependence. It’s nice that we have humans but I don’t think it’s a reason to choose it or not. GCP’s architecture seems clearly better to me especially if you are looking to be global. Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of…

There's a very large gap between "seems" and reality. GCP is a huge PITA. It's not even stable to use, as the console is constantly unresponsive and buggy, the UX is insane, finding documentation is like being trapped in hell. Know how you find all the permissions a single user in GCP has? You have to make 9+ API calls, then filter/merge all the results. They finally added a web tool to try and "discover" the permiss…

GCP's UI sure is dog slow. I once filled in that 'How would you rate...' prompt that sometimes appears about Instance Group management via the UI and it seems they later addressed the issue.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#135

Post by hare2eternity »

piokoch wrote: post #103

I've just look out of curiosity on Appsmith, as the author endorsed this tool as some admin panel builder. I had to double check the name, as right now this is, surprise, surprise, AI powered application builder... I used to use Replit for educational purposes, to be able to create simple programs in any language and share them with others (teachers, students). That was really useful. Now Replit is a frontend to some…

Just about anyone who aspires to raise capital in the current market is making themselves out to be AI. Give it a couple of years and we'll be onto the next craze. By that time I should have migrated my application off the blockchain into the metaverse.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#136

Post by nicoburns »

mettamage wrote: post #105

As a non infra guy I'll say this. I'm curious about Linear. At my own company I vibecoded my own project management app against the JIRA API because I can't stand our version of JIRA. It's too many clicks, too many things to remember and it's unintuitive.

If you have the power to do so, get rid of JIRA immediately. There are like 10 competitors that are all dramatically better.

I would personally recommend https://www.shortcut.com which is very well designed, and also made some really sensible improvements over the time that we used it.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#137

Post by secondcoming »

karolist wrote: post #77
x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. k8s is primarily resume driven development in most software shops. Hardly any product or service really needs its complexity.

To replace Kubernetes, you inevitably have to reinvent Kubernetes. By the time you build in canaries, blue/green deployments, and rolling updates with precise availability controls, you've just built a bespoke version of k8s. I'll take the industry standard over a homegrown orchestration tool any day.

We've used ECS back when we were on AWS, and now GCE.

We didn't have to invent any homegrown orchestration tool. Our infra is hundreds of VMs across 4 regions.

Can you give an example of what you needed to do?

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#138

Post by blitzar »

sylens wrote: post #131
SkiFire13 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare. What are these struggles? The product I work on uses AWS and we have ~5 accounts (I hear they used to be more TBF) but nowadays all the infrastructure is on one of them and the other are for some niche stuff (tech support?). I could see how going overboard with many accounts co…

I like AWS, but Organizations was something that was retrofit onto the account model versus being part of the original design. GCP had second mover advantage in this area. The way to automate provisioning of new AWS accounts requires you to engage with Control Tower in some way, like the author did with Account Factory for Terraform.

AWS makes the account model feel retrofit versus being part of the original design and 5 years later someone retrofit the organisations onto that before they they added 90% of the products into any square round hole they could find.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#139

Post by rco8786 »

econner wrote: post #3

It's weird that one of the reasons that you endorse AWS is that you had regular meetings with your account manager but then you regret premium support which is the whole reason you had regular meetings with your account manager.

The regret was about the cost of the premium support

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#140

Post by rco8786 »

I think we're making a mistake by shoving all of this into the cloud rather than building tooling around local agents (worktrees, containers, as mentioned as "difficult" in the post). I think as an industry we just reach for cloud like our predecessors reached for IBM, without critical thought about what's actually the right tool for the job.

If you can manage docker containers in a cloud, you can manage them on your local. Plus you get direct access to your own containers, local filesystems and persistence, locally running processes, quick access for making environmental tweaks or manual changes in tandem with your agents, etc. Not to mention the cost savings.

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