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Cloud, Why So Difficult?

winglang.io

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Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#61

Post by sacnoradhq »

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…

The "free lunch" was sold in a form of the hybrid cloud orchestrator. These pretended to make all clouds look the same, but were more shallow layers of abstraction that didn't add much value.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#62

Post by bdcravens »

88913527 wrote: post #54
bdcravens wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Of course not. There are some powerful options like CDK and others.

An additional goal seems to be to create a simplified language that doesn't have the surface area and dependency issues another language might have. While I understand the reasoning, I've been in tech long enough to know that usually doesn't work, and just creates another real world example of XKCD 927 (https://xkcd.com/927/)

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#63

Post by omginternets »

scarface74 wrote: post #52
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.

Don’t? But maybe also don’t gratuitously trash someone’s work?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#64

Post by efitz »

electroly wrote: post #58
efitz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incl…

A recurring anti-pattern I have seen over and over is the app that is built and runs on a developer desktop, then becomes business critical and needs to scale and evolve, and eventually fails catastrophically. Maybe the SQL database design or storage system isn’t capable of handling the new I/O requirements. Maybe the creator quits and nobody else knows how it works. Whatever.

On-prem is like that. Yes, you have all the skills to originally stand it up. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and you make a bunch of resource trade-offs, usually by not implementing stuff that you’ll never need (until you do).

That was the point I was trying to make.

As I said though, the unique value of cloud is letting you focus on a business specific problem instead of reinventing wheels that have already been invented many times over.

As other a have pointed out, other benefits are scale-on-demand, pay only for what you use, and agility - if you have a great idea you don’t have to do a PO and wait months for a server.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#65

Post by siliconc0w »

The difficulty with cloud is Joel's rule: "All non-trivial abstractions are leaky" they just abstract complexity and eventually the abstraction breaks and you actually need to know some amount of linux, networking, security, or distributed system engineering to fix it.

The easiest way to not get bitten by this is to avoid the abstractions and keep it simple as long as possible. Most apps can probably do fine with a single beefy box and a local sqlite database - this can likely scale vertically indefinitely with moore's law and still probably have less downtime than if you relied on all the fancy cloud technology.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#66

Post by electroly »

efitz wrote: post #64
electroly wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 incl…

A recurring anti-pattern I have seen over and over is the app that is built and runs on a developer desktop, then becomes business critical and needs to scale and evolve, and eventually fails catastrophically. Maybe the SQL database design or storage system isn’t capable of handling the new I/O requirements. Maybe the creator quits and nobody else knows how it works. Whatever. On-prem is like that. Yes, you have all…

How many more years do you suppose we need to run on-prem before you can accept that we understand our needs? It's been 10+. We've been running on-prem for a lot longer than we've been running in AWS. Again, there's this sort of paternalistic suggestion that people can't possibly understand how to run on-prem. But we've always been on-prem. We've always maintained a SQL Server cluster. AWS is the new thing.

AWS vs. on-prem is always a tradeoff. You have to look at the costs and benefits for your particular situation to decide which is best. We decided to go with both, because AWS has benefits for our dynamic workloads and on-prem has savings for our static workloads.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#67

Post by Nihilartikel »

This thought hits home for me:

> When I started programming, I used Borland C++. It used to take about 100ms to compile and run a program on an IBM PC AT machine (TURBO ON). An average iteration cycle in the cloud takes minutes. Minutes! Sometimes dozens of minutes!

I'm a fast-feedback fan myself, and my weapons of choice in refuge from a dark decade of c++ are the Python notebook and Clojure REPL. With that as it is, the lurching tedium of cloud development (infrastructure especially) makes me want to pull my skin off.

What is so galling about it is that, for dev purposes, almost none of these SaaSes and cloud services are really so 'big' that they couldn't be run on a beefy local workstation for development. The galling reason that I have to wait N minutes for terraform or cdk or whatever to rebuild some junk and deploy it to a bunch of neigh un-remote-debuggerable-without-firewall-shenanigans lambdas and docker containers is commercial moat-keeping for the services.

At least Azure and GCP put some token effort into local emulators of their services. AWS work has to rely on the valiant but incomplete efforts of LocalStack if they want a fast and disposable way to test infra.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#69

Post by lemarchr »

I don't understand why there's so much negativity here. From my cursory perusal of the docs this looks like a simplified, vendor agnostic re-imaging of something like CDK, with cool tooling including visualisations and out-of-the-box support for local dev. Where's the beef?

You think cloud is too expensive or unnecessary? Fair enough, this tool is not for you.

You think cloud infra is necessarily complex because you need to support . You're right! This tool is not for you (yet?).

You don't need this because you already know ? I agree, the juice is probably not worth the squeeze to learn yet another tool.

Are you approaching cloud for the first time or have been managing existing simple infra (buckets, queues, lambdas) via ClickOps and want to explore a feature constrained (hence easy to grok) Infrastructure as Code solution? Maybe give this a look.

While it's still early days, I suspect there will be many who will find this useful, and congratulate the authors for their efforts!

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#70

Post by scarface74 »

omginternets wrote: post #63
scarface74 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t? But maybe also don’t gratuitously trash someone’s work?

I’m not saying their work is bad. But every abstraction is leaky and it’s a lot easier to find someone who knows how to use the native SDKs for AWS/Azure/GCP than someone who knows an obscure framework that doesn’t cover everything.
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