31–40 of 210 posts
This is the only line that actually matters. Are there better and cheaper options for your organization? Almost certainly, but no one ever got fired for picking AWS.
> API that works on localhost: 4 days Lol. This may be true but if kind of pointless as an api on localist isn’t very useful unless you’re automating your home. Of course it’s easier to hack something out on localhost than to design for actual users. I think it makes more sense to build incrementally with the end in mind. So writing those terraform scripts will take less time if you initially write them to deploy to…
Either way, Lambdas are hard to debug locally, often I just deploy them to test (since deploying is easy). Or I write my code such that it bootstraps differently when launched locally vs Lambda. Either way, unless it is a very complex app that has lots of external dependencies, 4 days is a bit much.
If that's starting to be not enough, then consider yourself lucky, and start scaling.
"Premature scaling is a root of all evil" (and a good source of profit for Amazon, but I am repeating myself).
> - 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…
But if someone gave me the same use case as the author. I wouldn’t suggest any of those tools. What’s the business case for introducing the complexity of AWS for someone who is just trying to get an MVP out the door who doesn’t know cloud?
I’ve been in the industry for 25+ years and only first logged into the AWS console in mid 2018. I had a job at AWS two years later. That gives me a completely different perspective
- Yes, if you don’t have AWS, Azure or GCP experience it can be hard. Harder than it should be. But this is why I try to make things simple. Run node / express in lambda. Use managed services. Use CDK so the IaC abstraction is easier. Definitely not 4 weeks for the IAM policies.
- You get tons of credits as a VC backed startup (in all providers) so cost is not that much of an initial issue
- Yes you need to pay attention on the expenses, setup budgets and budget alarms, and run cost optimizers often
I’m building a PBBG and have it on AWS. Built the site in .NET with SignalR, MartenDB/PostgreSQL. Needed to host it.
2 evenings to write a cloudformation script which builds a VPC. Public and private subnets. RDS. A tiny instance to act as a nat gateway (for servers in private subnet). A small server with HAProxy for load balancer. A tiny server for redis. 2 web servers. Plus some sh scripts to build the project. Zip. Ssh jump to the server and deploy. Total cost is like $42/m.
Used a tiny instance for nat gateway cos aws nat gateway costs $32+ingress. Used tiny instance for redis as it’s only used for signalr connections across servers and services. Tiny instance for HAProxy cos aws application load balancer is $15/m. I could consolidate 3 of the servers into 1 but I choose not to.
You can build flexible things on AWS. The problem with AWS is it’s very easy to just spin up random stuff and not care about cost and blow out a budget quickly.
Their CloudFront service is pretty awesome.
You just put it between your server and your users and BOOM all your static content gets delivered lightning fast via Amazons world wide CDN.
And it costs like $10 per month millions of requests.
this "thought leadership" in our industry is a disease
>Let's face it, choosing AWS is the cloud computing version of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". There is perceived safety in choosing a popular offering — it's what everybody else does. This is the only line that actually matters. Are there better and cheaper options for your organization? Almost certainly, but no one ever got fired for picking AWS.
It’s also nowhere near as bad as Concur/Oracle/IBM. Though that’s a fairly low bar.
Start on Heroku, maybe with your own RDS. This removes so many decisions and ongoing overhead and lets you focus on building the thing that actually delivers value.