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The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

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Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#31

Post by 8K832d7tNmiQ »

indymike wrote: post #15
mrkramer wrote: post #10

Microsoft summarized it nice [1] : Advantages of public clouds: Lower costs No maintenance Near-unlimited scalability High reliability Advantages of a private cloud: More flexibility More control More scalability (compared to pure on-prem solution) [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-are-private-...

Hmm... So Azure for unlimited scalability... But private clouds have more scalability?

probably meant that you can just request hundreds of servers in other part of the world in one single setup compared to manually building your server there.

Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#32

Post by [deleted] »

bob1029 wrote: post #6

This shared responsibility principle that underlies cloud marketing speak sounds a lot like the self-driving mess we find ourselves in today - I.e. the responsibility boundary between parties exists in a fog of war and results in more exceptions than if one or the other were totally responsible. We have been a customer of Amazon AWS for ~6 years now, and we still really only use ~3 of their products: EC2, Route53 and…

[deleted]

Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#33

Post by didericis »

arendtio wrote: post #26

I wonder who tells the story that cloud computing has something to do with reducing complexity. In my world, cloud computing is a bout scalability and making things as complex as they need to be to be scalable. This rarely means that complexity is being reduced.

The simplicity of having one cloud based product rather than several native products built for different systems is an argument I’ve heard a lot.

Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#34

Post by singron »

maria_weber23 wrote: post #19
bob1029 wrote: post #6

This shared responsibility principle that underlies cloud marketing speak sounds a lot like the self-driving mess we find ourselves in today - I.e. the responsibility boundary between parties exists in a fog of war and results in more exceptions than if one or the other were totally responsible. We have been a customer of Amazon AWS for ~6 years now, and we still really only use ~3 of their products: EC2, Route53 and…

I second that. It's not only that you make yourself completely intertwined with a Cloud by using more than fundamental services. The costs of lambda or even DDB are IMMENSE. These only pay off for services that have a high return per request. I.e. if you get a lot of value out of lambda calls, sure, use them. But for anything high-frequency that earns you little to nothing on its own, forget about it. Generally all y…

Do you have examples of Google Cloud arbitrarily changing prices and terminating products?

Sure they terminate consumer products, and there was a Maps price hike, but I'm not aware of anything that's part of Cloud.

Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#35

Post by ratww »

didericis wrote: post #33
arendtio wrote: post #26

I wonder who tells the story that cloud computing has something to do with reducing complexity. In my world, cloud computing is a bout scalability and making things as complex as they need to be to be scalable. This rarely means that complexity is being reduced.

The simplicity of having one cloud based product rather than several native products built for different systems is an argument I’ve heard a lot.

This is an advantage of the web platform, not exactly related to cloud. You can get this advantage with an on-premises web product, or with old school hosting.

Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#36

Post by ehnto »

I don't understand what people are building in order to need half of this decoupled and managed elsewhere anyway. It wasn't all that challenging to self manage it five years ago, what's changed?

My guess is that the average small to medium project has drank the enterprise coolaid, and they are suffering the configuration and complexity nightmares that surround managing cloud infrastructure before they really needed to.

As the article is pointing out, you don't forgo managing these things by doing it in the cloud, you just manage it inside a constantly changing Web UI instead of something likely familiar to your developers.

Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#38

Post by mrkramer »

8K832d7tNmiQ wrote: post #31
indymike wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... So Azure for unlimited scalability... But private clouds have more scalability?

probably meant that you can just request hundreds of servers in other part of the world in one single setup compared to manually building your server there.

"More scalability — private clouds often offer more scalability compared to on-premises infrastructure."

I think they meant private cloud (renting 3rd party servers and using/maintaining your private cloud) vs on-prem (buying servers and building your own data centers).

Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#39

Post by ratww »

skohan wrote: post #30

I have to say, at my current company we are using Serverless, and it really does feel like it reduces complexity. No runtime/framework to set up, no uptime monitoring or management required on the application layer, and scaling is essentially solved for us. I mean you do pay for what you get, but it does feel like one of those technologies which really lowers the barrier to entry in terms of being able to release a p…

I used to be very excited about serverless, and I still have high hopes for it.

But for me it ended up replacing the complexity of runtime and frameworks with the complexity of configuring auxiliary srevices like Gateway API, Amazon VPC, etc. We needed to move the complexity to some tool that configured the services around Lambda, like Terraform or Cloud Formation, or at best to a framework like Claudia or Serverless.com. Configuring it by hand looks fine in tutorials, but is madness: it's still complex, and makes it all way too fragile.

There are however some products that make the experience better by simplifying configuration, like Vercel and Netlify.

Re: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud

#40

Post by 0xEFF »

maria_weber23 wrote: post #19
bob1029 wrote: post #6

This shared responsibility principle that underlies cloud marketing speak sounds a lot like the self-driving mess we find ourselves in today - I.e. the responsibility boundary between parties exists in a fog of war and results in more exceptions than if one or the other were totally responsible. We have been a customer of Amazon AWS for ~6 years now, and we still really only use ~3 of their products: EC2, Route53 and…

I second that. It's not only that you make yourself completely intertwined with a Cloud by using more than fundamental services. The costs of lambda or even DDB are IMMENSE. These only pay off for services that have a high return per request. I.e. if you get a lot of value out of lambda calls, sure, use them. But for anything high-frequency that earns you little to nothing on its own, forget about it. Generally all y…

Google Cloud has quite good support and professional services.

I’ve worked with them for 3 years and can’t think of any services that have been killed.

They are very customer focused. From my perspective as a partner cloud services are more built for customer use cases than Google internal use cases. GKE and Anthos for example.

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