If you either use or don't use AWS based on a HN blog post, you deserve whatever happens to you.
This is the correct answer
Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
141–150 of 210 posts
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#142I'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
What's stopping them, after they "embrace the Cloud," from making it take multiple ServiceNow tickets and several months to change an IAM policy? This has been my experience in very large corps that do use AWS. Typically it's also made a violation of policy to use a team-specific cloud account.
P.S. After having helped a mid-sized company migrate some core functions from DC to cloud, I agree with your startup advice.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got handed a Terraform project for a GCP-based service. Simple dev, staging, prod environment. Secrets managed by secret manager, SQL Run without a public IP address for prod (but accessible via SSH for admins). I more or less gave up after a month of beating my head on the brick wall. We hired an expert. Took him another month to get it all more or less sorted. There were still aspects that we wanted that we could…
We have been using CDK on AWS and it is really nice because you can do complex things through Typescript.
Been a couple of years since I used AWS and I remember when CDK was just coming out. My big question at the time was whether or not the CDK would alert you to errors at compile time and save a bunch of whaling and gnashing of teeth that comes with Terraform.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#144Earlier 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…
Cloud also offers flexibility in buying equipment "just in time" and returning it when projects are cancelled. You don't need 6-18 month lead time to acquire and install hardware which then gets wasted if the project gets cancelled or rescoped. Having massive capex projects converted to opex is very appealing for a lot of businesses
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks fo…
The price for colocating in a Tier 2 datacenter close enough for me to walk to was $75/amp. Which is about the same cost as AWS. You're really paying somewhere between the savings of putting a datacenter in Nowhere, Oregon and the cost to convince someone to live there.
I'd agree that unless you can really profit from having very specific hardware, you're better off renting dedicated servers than colocating servers you own. Have somebody else worry about having people on call to switch out failed hard drives.
Comparing either to AWS will inevitably lead to a much more complex discussion about spot instances, traffic costs, ancillary services etc.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#146I'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 What's stopping them, after they "embrace the Cloud," from making it take multiple ServiceNow tickets and several months to change an IAM policy? This has been my experience in very large corps that do use AWS. Typically it's also made a violation of policy to use a team-specific cloud account. P.S…
You are correct, nothing stops us from taking our terrible on-prem practice and applying them to the cloud except for one thing - it will be more obvious that we screwed the pooch because they let some renegades in before they were able to nail everything down. Now they can't hide behind their gobbledygook BS when they try to apply their existing practices to the cloud. My team is respected so much that we're able to push back on their nonsense in public meetings with the suits. Simply put, I'm enjoying First Mover advantage. Also, doesn't hurt that before joining this team I was on the Enterprise Architecture team and I literally wrote our Cloud Policy! I think that was well-played, even if I say so myself! :)
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#147This 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…
That can work well but you have to be careful/mindful of egress charges and latency (if the server supports co-locating in the same cloud or even managing directly in your account, it can alleviate those issues)
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a little spare capacity, developers can still get hardware/software on a whim, at just a (comparatively) small one-time expense. Spare capacity is much cheaper than people make it out to be. The upside is that it's much cheaper once you're at the scale where you no longer need to variableise your compute costs, but can tank the up-front fixed costs and do proper capacity planning.
> If you have a little spare capacity, developers can still get hardware/software on a whim, at just a (comparatively) small one-time expense. Spare capacity is much cheaper than people make it out to be. Those people are speaking from greater experience - there are many things which seem easy but aren’t once you’re over a certain scale, and at large organizations you often have things like conflicting policies or co…
I think you and I are saying basically the same thing, only putting emphasis on different aspects due to our various historic experiences.
Look at your demand pattern (variable or stable, predictable or unpredictable) and what cost structures your finances can support (variable or fixed, up-front or as-you-go), pick a solution based on that, not what's cool.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#149Earlier 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 It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks fo…
If you open a ticket with a real remote hands you should get a response back in minutes; typically someone will be on-site in your cage in under an hour. You also don’t “deploy a server” to reduce load you plan ahead every few months and deploy thousands at a time. Even then- if you have a good relationship with a really good systems integrator, they can ship and rack machines in a matter of days, not weeks.
I’m increasingly convinced that the large scale companies that don’t do bare-metal because they never learned how, and all the people advising them have never done bare metal or have done it poorly, so it’s like the blind leading the blind.. But they are leaving a 50-90% cost savings, better control over reliability, latency, data residency, etc on the table by doing so.
Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
#150> If you're an indie hacker, a boostrapper, a startup, an agency or a consultancy, or just a small team building a product, chances are you are not going to need the cost and complexity that comes with modern cloud platforms. Hard disagree. - On cost: there is almost nothing better for the indie hacker, bootstrapper, or startup than cloud services. I run apps on all three platforms (Google, AWS, and Azure) and my mon…
Yeah I can’t agree with you at all. Without setting up your own NAT Gateway on EC2 on a t2.micro instance (or something cheap like that), it runs you about $30. This isn’t even accounting for database costs, usage costs, development costs, etc.
So right away that “I can’t believe they even charge my CC for $0.02” is real suspect. Do you have a completely empty AWS account?
We haven’t even spoken about dev experience yet.