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Cloud, Why So Difficult?

winglang.io

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Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#71

Post by re-thc »

efitz wrote: post #60
voidnap wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Cloud often (usually?) has higher availability than the infra they migrated off of

I've seen more region wide outages than just an AZ e.g. where AWS us-west-2 goes out and so it doesn't make a difference.

> and then they want it yesterday

Some great SaaS you've experienced. I've been at 1s that say they want it yesterday but then realize it's too much work (already in the cloud) and just let it go until the next outage and complain again but yet again nothing gets done.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#72

Post by re-thc »

justin_oaks wrote: post #22
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.

> The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. This is a simplistic view that doesn't discuss any of the trade-offs inherent in the choice between running your own hardware and using a cloud service. Yes, it's a higher price, but it allows you to stop paying for it when you stop needing it. You can scale up rapidly. You don't have to deal with buying, main…

> You don't have to deal with buying, maintaining, or replacing hardware.

You can rent servers much the same once you at least have a bit of scale. It's never colocation or cloud. There are lots of in-betweens.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#73

Post by re-thc »

scarface74 wrote: post #56
TexanFeller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 perso…

> 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)?

And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it.

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

Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows!

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

Sounds like you've burnt in the past is all. So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage

How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case and based on it making you happy and saving you time. Nothing to do with the business needs at all.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#74

Post by carterschonwald »

I hate to say this, but this is straight up rediscovering monads.

They have a notion of phases of execution which are different execution contexts with an ordering. And yes most languages don’t have a decent facility for expressing this or staged computation. Let alone a notion of computation phases that map to distributed systems state.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#75

Post by re-thc »

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.

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

If we work like this we'd have no frameworks. Everything started from 0.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#76

Post by re-thc »

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 complexity of the cloud exists because the cloud vendors allows a user to do advanced things if the user understands how.

The complexity of the cloud exists because it wasn't designed very well and all reactionary.

You look at AWS and it feels like things are getting tacked on because there's "demand" instead of thinking of what the platform should look like and building it out. Every service is done by a different team that doesn't talk to each other as well. There's no consistency anywhere.

> If you want easy (or easier) mode, you'll have to use a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

It's been blurred a long time ago so how do you make this distinction? They all have PaaS features / services.

> There's no free lunch.

You had to pay to begin with so what's free?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#77

Post by smitty1e »

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...

I see both ends of it, but as a python/boto3 fanatic I'm not sure that the added functionality outweighs the rest of the pythonic joys on offer.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#78

Post by omginternets »

scarface74 wrote: post #70
omginternets wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your original comment went a fair bit beyond that assessment.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#79

Post by infogulch »

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...

I heard this described as the "200% problem": when you introduce a new layer to solve your annoyance with learning the layer below it, new users likely have to do 200% of the learning because now they have to learn your new layer and the layer below it because your layer is leaky. I first heard this from a great recent talk by the creator of Chef, Adam Jacob -- What if Infrastructure as Code never existed [1]. This applies to everything with a error / abstraction-leakage rate that is observable on human timescales, definitely including everything cloudy/devopsy/sysadminy. An example of an abstraction that lands on the other side of that definition are 'digital' computers, which are really analog underneath but they present an abstraction with an error rate like 1e-15 which is well below the threshold where we suspend disbelief.

Really the best you can hope for with a layer on top of system configuration is to just reduce boilerplate in the lower layer.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lPa2U239C4

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#80

Post by [deleted] »

re-thc wrote: post #73
scarface74 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perso…

> 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)? And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it. > Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself. Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows! > I compare that to the old day…

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