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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

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651–660 of 684 posts

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless we're talking actual PaaS (Heroku, Render, Railway, etc), the cloud also needs a dedicated skillset, so "cloud" doesn't remove the need from a sysadmin. If you can get (and trust they do it right) developers to do AWS or Kubernetes, you should be able to trust them to do conventional Linux sysadmin on a bunch of dedicated boxes.

I suspect you're either severely underestimating what the cloud offers or thinking of a very narrow set of software businesses. A full stack/backed dev is more than capable of learning both, but one of those has way more foot guns than the other.

Agree. There's lots of programmer-centric SDKs and tools that abstract away a lot of the infrastructure details and make it feel like writing/running code.

A few years ago I worked at a place that was on AWS ECS and I think I can count on 1 hand the number of times I needed to SSH into a machine each year. Half of those times were SSHing into the singular VM we had that ran a Strong Swan IPsec tunnel to a vendor.

The current place I work we have bastions and EKS. Occasionally, I SSH into a bastion but usually just use Cloudflare Tunnels (they run as k8s pods and the control plane is private so the bastions are helpful for bootstrapping things). Out of that stuff, it's all been converted to immutable infrastructure and gets recreated once a month with the latest AMI. Probably could kill the bastions and run Cloudflare Tunnel agents on Fargate on ECS to eliminate all the o.g. sysadmin work but some people are nostalgic so I gotta wean em off VMs

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#652
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please make your substantive points without calling names or crossing into personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you dang; here's the thing, even the most charitable reading of GPs comment indicates that he feels being unable to restrict a child's right of access to their parent is unfair in some way. No matter what you may think of parents, it is absolutely horrific that someone will argue for restricting the rights of children, and do it in a way that he feels is acceptable in society (custody is only in small part abou…

I'm not taking issue with your substantive points, but you need to make them in a respectful way that serves curious conversation.

When you feel like someone else is doing something outrageous (e.g. trampling over children's rights), that of course gets pretty hard to do. In such cases the better options are to (1) wait until the activation subsides before posting, or (2) just walk away.

Incidentally, the GP comment was also a provocation, I suppose mostly because of the "cool fact" snark intensifier. But it wasn't enough of a violation to clear the bar for a moderation reply, whereas your post was. That's often the case with responses to provocation - they end up being even more provocative in their own right.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#653
post #268
post #145

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Tell me how I can easily determine the price from my IaC deployment as well. Heck, I even have a hard time telling the price I pay on an account by account basis; because we have savings plans, those get charged against the root account and then I see $0 spent on EC2 in the individual account because it's all covered with a savings plan. And when I'm putting together that IaC and trying to decide which new instance t…

In cost explore, on the right hand side where filters appear, click the “more” button at the bottom then the first option that appears (which is “charge type” or something like that) and select “usage”. That will give you a view of what you’re using regardless of the savings plan, etc.

Thanks for the tip, but I tried that and I still see $0 for EC2-Instances, while if I look at Savings Plan coverage breakdown, I can see 100% of costs being covered by savings plans, broken down by instance family, but that view doesn't let me see things broken down by tag or any of the other ways you can view it in Cost Explorer.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and S3 is multiply redundant and is designed to survive a total AZ failure. So your data is physically replicated into at least 2 different AZs and might be multiply-redundant within them. They also provide a crazy SLA for data integrity, meaning that data must never be lost. S3 also has a reduced redundancy tier and infrequent access tiers that are quite a bit cheaper. It _is_ expensive, but once you crunch all…

GCS / Azure can survive a total AZ failure too, think of 3 x Replicas as RAID-1, whereas Erasure Coding is more like RAID-6. Only it's actually more resilient: Let's say you have 10 data blocks, and you have 4 parity blocks. You can now lose 4 servers containing a block and still be able to repair the data, whereas in 3 x Replica you can only lose 2, and have to store everything 300% of size, instead of only 140%. An…

The problem with erasure coding is that if a disk fails, you suddenly need to read 3-5x more data to reconstruct the missing data from parity blocks. This is especially problematic if your replicas are split across zones. The inter-zonal bandwidth is large, but not infinite.

So I'm pretty sure that you need to have at least 2 full copies in different AZs, and then likely at least some additional redundancy within a single AZ (in the form of erasure codes or a full mirror).

So that's at least 3-4x the amount of data. 1Tb of NVMe SSD capacity is around $200 and with 3x redundancy that's $600, or about 2 years of AWS S3 storage. As I said, it's expensive but not unreasonable.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#656
post #578

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They both sell it for profit, but Amazon doesn’t contribute changes upstream, so the public + rest of the industry won’t benefit from their work. It’s not an equivalence.

> Amazon doesn’t contribute changes upstream Are you sure that's the case with AGPL? Cause they can sue them and enforce the contribution. I doubt that's the case. And those who went with MIT/BSD openly allow distribution without contribution.

In the USA, small companies don’t generally have the resources to take large companies to court, even if they’re in the right.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#657
post #376

And because we have fallen for the convenience we have lost a lot of alternatives. The old rack/cage way was less convenient, but it came with a respect for our anatomy to run our stuff that I really miss.

> anatomy Autonomy? [autocorrect strikes again! :-)]

Yes, thank you!!

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't? I mean, if Amazon does commercial version of Elastic better than Elastic themselves then so be it. I don't see how one company is entitled to turn an open source project into business and the other is not. I do see issues with monopolies pushing inferior products onto users. But that would be a completely different issue, nothing to do with open source.

> I don't see how one company is entitled to turn an open source project into business and the other is not. According to the original license they are both entitled to do that, that's the problem. Do you think it's sustainable for one company to make the software for free and another one to sell it for profit?

Don’t get into open source if you don’t like your users using the software however they see fit.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#659
post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to the original license they are both entitled to do that, that's the problem. I really don't see how Amazon is to blame for this problem, they weren't the ones who picked the license. > Do you think it's sustainable for one company to make the software for free and another one to sell it for profit? They both sell it for profit, let the most profitable one win.

They both sell it for profit, but Amazon doesn’t contribute changes upstream, so the public + rest of the industry won’t benefit from their work. It’s not an equivalence.

Many companies build on top of open source to make money and don’t contribute back. That’s not the problem.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It’s like they are own worst enemy" No, you are your own worst enemy. Because of your attitude, OSS is going to go away as will all those economic benefits you are enjoying. But keep up with the its OK to pee in the pool type ethics of yours. Let's see where that gets you in the long run.

Ok - So you are annoyed I am using something for free and per the license that the authors set themselves and wanted no compensation. Got it.

Nope, I'm not going to use a license that allows that for my next project. And neither will anyone else. Enjoy doing without.
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