Utilizing an infinite amount of computing resources is probably always going to be an inherently difficult thing. It's a task made more difficult by all he snake oil salesman promising perfect easy solutions. The only workable solution is to find out what works for everyone else and, even if it doesn't fit your needs perfectly, figure out how to make it work for you. Never underestimate the power of strength in numbers. If the entire industry is utilizing a technology or paradigm you can either get on board or get left behind.
Cloud, Why So Difficult?
21–30 of 158 posts
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#22The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. If it makes things difficult, you shouldn't be using it. It is overhyped and it sucks for most use case.
> The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own.
This is a simplistic view that doesn't discuss any of the trade-offs inherent in the choice between running your own hardware and using a cloud service.
Yes, it's a higher price, but it allows you to stop paying for it when you stop needing it. You can scale up rapidly. You don't have to deal with buying, maintaining, or replacing hardware.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#23Website is unreadable on mobile
I was going to comment “website, why so difficult (on mobile)” before I saw your comment
Sorry about that, please use this link: https://docs.winglang.io/blog/2022/11/23/manifesto
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#24I'm sorry, what's the advantage to the cloud again? This just reminds me why I just run (my personal) web apps on the server in my basement: it's actually simpler. I really think the worst part of programming is dealing with the development environment.
Assuming you're being serious, the advantage of the cloud is scalability, avoiding managing hardware, reliable power, and reliable network. You want to run your web app off your basement server? Go ahead, but if you have a blog post that hits the front page of HN, there's no way to scale up. If your home server has hardware failure then you're out of luck until you can get new hardware. Your home has a power outage o…
Everything agree with, until:
> but if you have a blog post that hits the front page of HN.
HN traffic is so small that unless you are using Raspberry Pi Pico, it is fine.
Your 5-year old Android phone probably can handle HN traffic just fine. (HN traffic is in a range of single-digit kilo qps).
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#25The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. If it makes things difficult, you shouldn't be using it. It is overhyped and it sucks for most use case.
until you realize you have to build a datacenter yourself. Or order purestorage appliances for 3 datacenters you have your hardware in. And then realize dc 1 does not physically have enough space to add more storage servers. But you need that third site. There is no convenient 4th “spare” site. Let alone 100 across the world.
Or that your business has to replace a router on one of the dcs and then you have to do all the work to ensure nothing goes down yourself. You cant blame anyone if it goes bad.
Then you realize how much work that is. The cloud is really convenient.
Source: Always worked “in the cloud”. Current client is on premise(s) for solid reasons. A very unusual case though. Fun. Inconvenient. Makes you respect the big clouds even more.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#26I agree so much with the article about cloud being to complicated and fast feedback being import. I wish them the best of luck.
PaaS solutions and not IaaS is also a solution for many.
No code / low cose beeing a solution for someone else.
It's not to many days since my solution was on HN. Windmill.dev is really something special.
And by mine i do not mean that i has any affiliation with windmill, just that it solves my problem. quick iterations including ui building.
But it's not a low code plaform either. I would call it a code platform for developers
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#27The 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…
How many totally-different-yet-common sets of requirements are there for user uploads or task processing do you think there are that necessitate the ultimate flexibility and complexity? I suspect vendor lock-in is a more likely cause of the complexity.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming you're being serious, the advantage of the cloud is scalability, avoiding managing hardware, reliable power, and reliable network. You want to run your web app off your basement server? Go ahead, but if you have a blog post that hits the front page of HN, there's no way to scale up. If your home server has hardware failure then you're out of luck until you can get new hardware. Your home has a power outage o…
Everything agree with, until: > but if you have a blog post that hits the front page of HN. HN traffic is so small that unless you are using Raspberry Pi Pico, it is fine. Your 5-year old Android phone probably can handle HN traffic just fine. (HN traffic is in a range of single-digit kilo qps).
Well, if you're serving reasonable amounts of text and not including a javascript kitchen sink. I mean yes, you probably should be serving library off an edge network, but I've seen stranger.
Then that goes out the window the moment you have any media on that Pi... ISP upload speed in the US is balls.
Oh, did I mention that most ISPs in the US don't allow hosting websites? So are you putting that Pi in a datacenter?
And, I forgot to mention, what happens with you piss off some bored troll and get DDOSed?
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#29The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. If it makes things difficult, you shouldn't be using it. It is overhyped and it sucks for most use case.
With all due respect this is a trivial and misleading point of view. Of course if you have the staff you could do all the things they do in the cloud, on-premises. If you had the staff. And the skills. And the money. And you wanted to spend your finite devops resources deploying and monitoring a data center.
Yes it’s possible to buy your own building, and your own DS3/OC3. And HVAC. And electrical. And backup generators for the HVAC. And the personnel to design and specify the racks and the hardware in them (all of the different configs you need). And to assemble and connect the equipment. And to maintain it when something breaks. And the network engineers to design your network and deploy and maintain it.
And do it again in a different place for geographic redundancy.
And, if you have any money and personnel left, then you can think about a virtualization infrastructure (because of course who would be stupid enough to buy VMware when you could build your own open source equivalent around HVM or whatever.
And now you’ve got like a tiny fraction of what the cloud can offer. And I guarantee you that the TCO is way higher than you expected and that your uptime is a 9 or two short of what a cloud provider would give you.
I’d you are running a single cloud-scale workload (Google Search or Dropbox or Outlook.com) then you probably can do better financially with your own optimized data center. But you almost certainly can’t beat cloud for heterogeneous workloads.
And the biggest benefit of all is savings in opportunity cost as your tech people can focus on your own unique business problems and leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting to others.
Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?
#30Cloud is not difficult, they just charge too much per API request.