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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

#191

Post by nijave »

friendly_deer wrote: post #178
nijave wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using an IaC tool like Terraform or Pulumi, you can just setup/tear down test resources on demand (for integration/acceptance tests). Under normal usage, hopefully you can get away with mocks/stubs/fakes. Some development frameworks make this a lot easier than others Using real resources is usually fine for smaller applications but can be very problematic as your application grows. With that in mind, it's g…

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Yeah ideally we always use real resources to mirror prod closely, but I see your point that that won’t always be possible as the app grows.

Another balance is to just use real resources in CI with some concurrency control to make sure a single build runs at once. Locally, you continue to use mocks/stubs/fakes

You still get assurance from testing but reduce the amount of places you run the "expensive" (time, resource, $) tests

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

#192

Post by Gigachad »

auggierose wrote: post #69
ABraidotti wrote: post #24

> It costs how much?! The author's not wrong. Cost comes with lack of accountability in my experience. In turn, my devsecops dept (~20 people) has kept costs down by holding monthly AWS accountability meetings. "Who owns this and why does it exist?" is the leading question. > The all-you-can-eat buffet problem Valid point. But I've gotten far in my career by specializing in AWS. It's not going anywhere soon. It's the…

> GCP? Come on. What's wrong with GCP?

Lots of people have had their servers randomly deleted one day because a google script thought they were a bot. And then of course, there is no one to call at google to have it resolved.

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

#193

Post by holografix »

Octabrain wrote: post #17

> - Terraform to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week - Terraform to create the IAM policies: 4 weeks Perhaps it's because I am very familiar with the aforementioned tool and cloud but 5 weeks for writing those resources gives me the impresion of: 1. Lack of experience on AWS. 2. Lack of experience with Terraform. 3. Both. I don't want to sound arrogant by any means but a Terraf…

The more I use Terraform and GCP the less I want to bother with Terraform.

TF is not Infra as Code it’s infra as configuration files and it’s a mess.

I haven’t used Pulumi but that’s kind of what I really want. Give me Python and better abstractions to gcloud cli.

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

#194

Post by holografix »

sebazzz wrote: post #181
727564797069706 wrote: post #61

ITT: people who spent many hours learning proprietary (often unnecessarily complex) cloud platforms trying to convince others (and themselves) that it was the best use of their limited time alive. Stockholm syndrome à la Big Cloud. It's okay to be interested in elaborate cloud architecture things and learn them because of that, but don't sell it as one-size-fits-all thing that every little company needs. Most compani…

Exactly. Of course GCP/Azure/AWS have great development kits, of course they make it easy to get a Docker application running for the first time within 1 minute. That is the sales model. However, to be cost effective, you need to adapt your application to be more cloud native using their propietary SDKs. Azure Functions/Lambdna, CosmosDB, Blob Storage/S3, etc. The application gets cheaper, but you've now also bought…

Have you tried Cloud Run? It’s just kNative underneath so if you want to take it somewhere else you can.

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

#195

Post by holografix »

coredog64 wrote: post #134
Aeolun wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

App Runner is total crap compared to Cloud Run. Actually I don’t think the other 2 clouds have anything as nice and easy as Cloud Run

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

#196

Post by Spivak »

nine_k wrote: post #189
ericd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there are a few other physical servers with load balanced redundant VMs, and it fails over seamlessly. HAProxy makes this pretty easy to handle. But we almost never had any hardware issues, servers are pretty reliable.

Sounds pretty much like a... cloud? :-D Actually I think that private cloud-like architecture (a bunch of physical servers with e.g. Dokku running on them) can be a good solution in some circumstances.

Yes, this isn't as much of a gotcha as you make it seem. On prem is literally running your own cloud. The architecture that all the big cloud providers use of racks and racks of servers running hypervisors deploying VMs using a shared storage tier and SDN is the same thing you build when you're on-prem. You are now just the implementor.

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

#197

Post by Aeolun »

bleeding wrote: post #185
Aeolun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But don’t try to create a REST API Gateway with more than 200 resources, or CloudFormation will randomly start failing. Or try to add more than 100 rules to your ALB, because it’ll be impossible. My biggest issue with AWS is that the limits are so arbitrary, and seem to solely exist due to terrible design decisions. If my local express server, or nginx can deal with 100 endpoints, how is it possible for this multi bi…

The 200 resources thing has been a really frustrating problem for us too. We've started migrating ours to separate API Gateways at a "service" level and then mapping paths to different APIs using the Custom Domain API Mappings.

> We've started migrating ours to separate API Gateways at a "service" level and then mapping paths to different APIs using the Custom Domain API Mappings.

Yeah, that was suggested to us too, but it felt like a dirty hack to me. What is the point of having an API gateway if you can’t have the single one (our microservices hook themselves up to that single gateway).

Our solution involves a custom CDK resource that keeps re-creating API gateways until it gets a root resource ID starting in the lower range of the alphabet, ensuring it’ll always be found by CloudFormation.

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

#198

Post by Aeolun »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #154
Aeolun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But don’t try to create a REST API Gateway with more than 200 resources, or CloudFormation will randomly start failing. Or try to add more than 100 rules to your ALB, because it’ll be impossible. My biggest issue with AWS is that the limits are so arbitrary, and seem to solely exist due to terrible design decisions. If my local express server, or nginx can deal with 100 endpoints, how is it possible for this multi bi…

Interesting, I haven't had the experience with CloudFormation. At that scale, however, I tend to group my Lambdas as microservices not per endpoint. It helps with cold start time as well. So for example, if I have a page" resource, I don't make that 5+ endpoints, I make it a wildcard / prefix match and do the routing inside of the service lambda. Maybe you legitimately have 100+ different microservices, in which case…

I mean, there are certainly ways to work around the silly limitations. I just feel like I shouldn’t have to.

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

#199

Post by Aeolun »

sofixa wrote: post #124
Aeolun wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With Fargate or Google Cloud Run, it really isn't. Assuming zero knowledge it's probably easier to learn how to build a docker container and call a binary to send it to the service than it is to setup ssh and rsync and a server to host your website.

I don’t think you can build a docker container without already understanding concepts that you need to run rsync. So it seems like an extra step?

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

#200

Post by perryizgr8 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #30

> 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…

Your monthly spend is less than two dollars across GCP, AWS and Azure? If that's true, then of course it makes sense at your scale to stick with them.
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