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Cloud, Why So Difficult?

winglang.io

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Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#151

Post by JoelMcCracken »

beckford wrote: post #150

Was in agreement until I drilled down to the following statement on the Wing GitHub page and in the docs ( https://docs.winglang.io/faq/why-a-language#very-cool-but-wh... ): “In existing languages, where there is no way to distinguish between multiple execution phases, it is impossible to naturally represent this idea that an object has methods that can only be executed from within a specific execution phase.” This i…

Great point. This also reminds me of discussion I saw somewhere else about programming languages with execution capabilities support for security, the author saying that no languages supported it, and a commenter saying that this was basically the same as an effects system.

I'm personally a professional Haskell programmer and quite like it, but I think we are circling a core notion: There are many problems with having programming languages where any code can do literally anything at all, and being able to restrict it is extremely powerful.

Constraints liberate, liberties constrain. You can always loosen strictures, but once loosened, they are extremely hard to reintroduce.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#152

Post by esperent »

nightpool wrote: post #88
justin_oaks wrote: post #15

The complexity of the cloud exists because the cloud vendors allows a user to do advanced things if the user understands how. Using AWS, GCP, and Azure as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) means that there's no easy mode. If you want easy (or easier) mode, you'll have to use a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The major cloud vendors might have problems with quirky designs and poor documentation, but beyond that is nece…

"You want a high-availability website allows user-uploaded files and does asynchronous task processing? You're probably going to have to get familiar with servers, load balancers, queues, and object storage, at a minimum." Really? I disagree. I could probably build that with Rails and Heroku in an afternoon, after creating a single S3 bucket and an access key for presigned POST. AWS has "necessary complexity" in the…

Now scale it to twenty million concurrent users.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#153

Post by shaiber »

beckford wrote: post #150

Was in agreement until I drilled down to the following statement on the Wing GitHub page and in the docs ( https://docs.winglang.io/faq/why-a-language#very-cool-but-wh... ): “In existing languages, where there is no way to distinguish between multiple execution phases, it is impossible to naturally represent this idea that an object has methods that can only be executed from within a specific execution phase.” This i…

Thanks, we'll rephrase to say that it is impossible in most languages, not all. BTW, the company that is behind the project is called Monada (https://monada.co), so we've heard of monads :) Would be happy to hear what else you think about the language

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#154

Post by omginternets »

scarface_74 wrote: post #149
omginternets wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux was started by one man, and the qualification as “framework” is immaterial to your point.

And was it actually used or became popular before it was adopted by and had contributions from major companies?

Actually, yes! And you are conveniently ignoring the other examples that don't fit your world view.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#155

Post by nightpool »

esperent wrote: post #152
nightpool wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You want a high-availability website allows user-uploaded files and does asynchronous task processing? You're probably going to have to get familiar with servers, load balancers, queues, and object storage, at a minimum." Really? I disagree. I could probably build that with Rails and Heroku in an afternoon, after creating a single S3 bucket and an access key for presigned POST. AWS has "necessary complexity" in the…

Now scale it to twenty million concurrent users.

Are you kidding me? Amazon, on their biggest day of the entire year (Prime Day), reached peak traffic of approximately 290m requests per minute through CloudFront. I would bet that loading a single Amazon page uses much less than a minute and serves more than 10 requests per page load.

If you're not going to be as big as the entirety of Amazon you don't need to serve 20 million concurrent users. Ever.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#156

Post by esperent »

nightpool wrote: post #155
esperent wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now scale it to twenty million concurrent users.

Are you kidding me? Amazon, on their biggest day of the entire year (Prime Day), reached peak traffic of approximately 290m requests per minute through CloudFront. I would bet that loading a single Amazon page uses much less than a minute and serves more than 10 requests per page load. If you're not going to be as big as the entirety of Amazon you don't need to serve 20 million concurrent users. Ever.

Ok, pick whatever smaller number makes you happy then. My point is just as valid with 100k concurrent users.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#157

Post by audleman »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #91
infogulch wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard this described as the "200% problem": when you introduce a new layer to solve your annoyance with learning the layer below it, new users likely have to do 200% of the learning because now they have to learn your new layer and the layer below it because your layer is leaky. I first heard this from a great recent talk by the creator of Chef, Adam Jacob -- What if Infrastructure as Code never existed [1]. This a…

Unless.. you do a really good job, like heroku, vercel etc. Also why is AWS so complicated? That’s where the money is: enterprises!

Heroku is great until you need to do something non-standard in your deployment, like compile node and configure a python virtualenv in the same deploy. Then you have to learn their Buildpack framework and that is a nightmare. It's a hugely complicated abstraction layer that, like one of the parent comments says, requires me to learn 200%. I have to learn all the steps to install/configure nodejs, then python, then how they decided to slap together a layer on top of it that made assumptions like you would only be doing one of these things.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#158

Post by dilyevsky »

tpetry wrote: post #101
efitz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recurring anti-pattern I have seen over and over is the app that is built and runs on a developer desktop, then becomes business critical and needs to scale and evolve, and eventually fails catastrophically. Maybe the SQL database design or storage system isn’t capable of handling the new I/O requirements. Maybe the creator quits and nobody else knows how it works. Whatever. On-prem is like that. Yes, you have all…

The cloud has the same problem but in a different color. One employee created and managed everything in AWS and then quits. You have the same problem that nobody really knows how to continue from that point. Why was it built that way? Why are the IAM rules like that? etc.

Exactly. It actually makes this problem worse bc cloud apis lower the skill level requirement to the point that people who don’t know what they’re doing can create a lot of unmanageable headache in very short time span
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