Cloud, Why So Difficult? • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#51

Post by throwbadubadu » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:01 AM UTC

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…

Only partly agree, definitely not all complexity there is necessary.. part is vendor lockin and another one is their own grown complexity due to rewiring/wrapping their own stuff for reuse in different forms.. and grown complexity that maybe made sense at some point, but grew too much - as almost everywhere.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#52

Post by scarface74 » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:08 AM UTC

wackget wrote: post #34

"Cloud is too difficult, you have to learn tons of stuff to use it!" "BTW here's the new product I'm selling which requires you to learn a new cloud-oriented programming language and has its own CLI and has diagrams like [this]( https://docs.winglang.io/assets/images/arch-f803472c761aa198... ) on its introduction page!" The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming...

And why would I base my entire application on a framework by a tiny developer?

And honestly, ChatGPT is so well trained on AWS CLIs, Terraform, CloudFormation, the SDKs for Python and Node, I can throw most of my problems at it and it does well.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#53

Post by Thaxll » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:10 AM UTC

I don't understand what that solution brings when you have Terraform? Also linking your code with you infra code, who thought this was a good idea?

Last question how actually the simluator works, is it one of those case where it try to emulate some high level concept but then your prod code break because the simulator was 40% accurate?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#54

Post by 88913527 » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:17 AM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #43

wackget wrote: post #34

"Cloud is too difficult, you have to learn tons of stuff to use it!" "BTW here's the new product I'm selling which requires you to learn a new cloud-oriented programming language and has its own CLI and has diagrams like [this]( https://docs.winglang.io/assets/images/arch-f803472c761aa198... ) on its introduction page!" The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming...

While I don't disagree entirely, I feel like you're misrepresenting what they're offering. Their language is an attempt at simplifying orchestration and application code. The diagram you're showing only proves that point - that's an AWS diagram, and the code on the same page is what creates it: bring cloud; let queue = new cloud.Queue(timeout: 2m); let bucket = new cloud.Bucket(); let counter = new cloud.Counter(init…

Any reason I can't import an NPM package that has 90% the same interface?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#55

Post by voidnap » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

efitz wrote: post #29

magikstm wrote: post #11

The 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 generat…

> Yes it’s possible to buy your own building, and your own DS3/OC3. And HVAC. And electrical.

> And do it again in a different place for geographic redundancy.

With all due respect this is a trivial and misleading point of view.

Most people who do cloud don't need or employ redundancy across machines; much less so in different regions. But they do have devops teams or programmers who are required to learn bespoke cloud dashboards and AWS products. Even though most of the time they could just ssh into a box and run nodejs in screen and be 99% of the way there. Cloud providers convinced everyone that it's really hard to run a computer program. And companies set money on fire because spending signals growth, especially to investors.

Literally everything you said is the opposite of how I've seen people use "cloud" in the real world. I don't know what universe you're living in where things are as wonderful as you proclaim but I wish I was in it because mine is a nightmare.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#56

Post by scarface74 » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:24 AM UTC

TexanFeller wrote: post #32

BozeWolf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> until you realize you have to build a datacenter yourself Have you never heard of a colo? Rent 1-2 racks in one of those. And you probably won't need more than 1-2 racks because that's what Stack Overflow runs on.

And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?

It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself.

And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.

When I was at the 60 person company where I got my start in “cloud”, I could experiment with different types of databases, scaling, and other technologies just by throwing something together and deleting the entire stack.

I worked for a company that aggregated publicly available health care provider data (ie no PII) for major health care providers. They used our APIs for their own websites and mobile apps.

When we got a new customer (ie large health care provider), our systems automatically scaled.

When a little worldwide pandemic happened in 2020 and our traffic spiked by 100%+, guess how long it took us to provision new servers.

Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.

I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.

Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#57

Post by scarface74 » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:30 AM UTC

timw4mail wrote: post #41

justin_oaks wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

> Assuming you're being serious, the advantage of the cloud is scalability, avoiding managing hardware, reliable power, and reliable network. Or in reality, it's weird transient failures you can't debug, and unexpected bills for some asanine reason. And scalability sure seems like something to avoid until you actually need it (as in the demand on the site is large enough, not that your performance is so bad you can't…

My first job out of college was a hybrid computer operator /programmer for a company that ran a state lottery. This was the mid 90s.

They had a complete backup site with redundant servers, modems (for point of sales systems) and a redundant staff because the cost of being down was so high.

We never had to use the backup site the entire three years I was there.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#58

Post by electroly » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:33 AM UTC

efitz wrote: post #47

efitz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generat…

Downvoted? Really?

(I did not downvote you.)

The person you're replying to is definitely overly flippant, but you've taken a sort of Gish gallop approach where you think if you list enough individual things that have to be done, that'll be overwhelming evidence that it's impossibly difficult. But the things you've listed aren't as hard as you want them to be on reasonable small business scales.

We are a company with 4 IT employees including myself, and two of us alone (both full-time programmers) handled our hybrid cloud migration. We rented a rack in a colocation facility. I learned how to design racks in a couple days and did the rack design myself. We bought servers from Dell and network equipment from Meraki. The colo facility found us an inexpensive contractor who racked and stacked everything to my design, and remote hands does any ongoing hardware maintenance. The other guy had an old, outdated CCNA and he designed the network. We got a fiber connection to AWS up and running for a hybrid cloud approach. All of this was very doable for a part-time two-man team with other job responsibilities and we're saving a ton of money for database and workstation hosting--big, expensive, totally static workloads. Perfect for on-prem. The ongoing savings vs. pure AWS exceeds my own salary.

It was clear from the outset that we could accomplish this. I wouldn't have signed us up for a boondoggle. Certainly, there are more demanding configurations where the complexity would be too high, but people act like on-prem is literally impossible without a team of dedicated staff in every case. It's not. It can be doable.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#59

Post by zmmmmm » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC

The annoying thing about using cloud infra is finding that all your skills and knowledge have to be relearned N times over for N different cloud vendors for a huge array of their services, mostly to do basic things that you already know how to do anyway in traditional environments.

The fact they all offer similar but subtly different versions of every type of product and that cross platform tools like Terraform etc have some ability to paper over these only makes it worse. (Your google cloud bucket is just like your S3 bucket right? Until it's not). When I rant about platform independence people think I have a philosophical objection to lockin, but its really much more basic than that. I just don't have time to learn thousands of vendor specific APIs, bugs, constraints etc on top of the perfectly good built up knowledge I have from 25 years of working with software systems already. I am busy using all that time and brainspace trying to keep up with the fundamental knowledge that is actually important.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#60

Post by efitz » Sat, May 27, 2023, 1:39 AM UTC

voidnap wrote: post #55

efitz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generat…

> Yes it’s possible to buy your own building, and your own DS3/OC3. And HVAC. And electrical. > And do it again in a different place for geographic redundancy. With all due respect this is a trivial and misleading point of view. Most people who do cloud don't need or employ redundancy across machines; much less so in different regions. But they do have devops teams or programmers who are required to learn bespoke clo…

> Literally everything you said is the opposite of how I've seen people use "cloud" in the real world.

I’ve been working in SaaS since 2008 and in cloud providers since 2012. And the use case I see over and over is people who don’t think they need or want geographical redundancy, until they do, and then they want it yesterday. Typically they are running fine for months or years and then there is an outage - maybe an AZ or a network partition - and then all of a sudden they’re scrambling for failover. Cloud often (usually?) has higher availability than the infra they migrated off of, and they grow addicted to it while not wanting to pay the dev cost for true high availability.