Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloud, Why So Difficult?

winglang.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 158 posts

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#81

Post by scarface_74 »

re-thc wrote: post #75
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.

> 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.

Seeing the clusterfuck of the modern front end ecosystem, you act like that’s a bad thing.

But the two most popular front end frameworks that came out over the past few years didn’t exactly come from small companies.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#82

Post by scarface_74 »

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…

> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case

So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped?

“unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.”

> So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#83

Post by wkdneidbwf »

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...

it’s just that simple

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#84

Post by junon »

infogulch wrote: post #79
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 a…

This is a spot on term for this, unfortunately way too common in the SaaS world.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#85

Post by Spivak »

cosmotic wrote: post #27
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…

How many totally-different-yet-common sets of requirements are there for user uploads or task processing do you think there are that necessitate the ultimate flexibility and complexity? I suspect vendor lock-in is a more likely cause of the complexity.

> I suspect vendor lock-in is a more likely cause of the complexity.

I think people give large organizations credit for being mustache twirlingly evil when the collective consciousness that makes up AWS is simply not smart enough to be this evil. If AWS had the coordination to do this the product would be better.

It's much more likely that the complexity is the result of a huge number of teams working independently and integration complexity being 2^n. Like AWS had one good transformative idea to make coordination easier which is to be API first but that only forces superficial consistency.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#86

Post by omginternets »

scarface_74 wrote: post #81
re-thc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Seeing the clusterfuck of the modern front end ecosystem, you act like that’s a bad thing. But the two most popular front end frameworks that came out over the past few years didn’t exactly come from small companies.

Great, now do Linux. Or cURL. Or Clojure. Or Perl. Or Python.

Great tools can, and often do come from solo developers without large corporate backing.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#87

Post by brunkerhart »

What complexity are we talking about? If your app needs queues, databases or shared storage, it is because of how you designed it. Now just imagine you’re doing this yourself: install servers, os, software, configure integrations, do patches, upgrades, repair hardware. Would it be any simpler?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#88

Post by nightpool »

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…

"You want a high-availability website allows user-uploaded files and does asynchronous task processing? You're probably going to have to get familiar with servers, load balancers, queues, and object storage, at a minimum."

Really? I disagree. I could probably build that with Rails and Heroku in an afternoon, after creating a single S3 bucket and an access key for presigned POST. AWS has "necessary complexity" in the same way a giant hole in your head improves your brain's cooling potential. (i.e. maybe, in some very rare cases, but you almost certainly don't need it)

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#89

Post by scarface_74 »

omginternets wrote: post #86
scarface_74 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing the clusterfuck of the modern front end ecosystem, you act like that’s a bad thing. But the two most popular front end frameworks that came out over the past few years didn’t exactly come from small companies.

Great, now do Linux. Or cURL. Or Clojure. Or Perl. Or Python. Great tools can, and often do come from solo developers without large corporate backing.

So the top contributors of modern Linux are large corporations. cURL is not a framework

And isn’t that the ultimate in survivorship bias? How many other languages and frameworks would you have left you screwed if you jumped into whole hog in before they had popular uptake?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#90

Post by e12e »

infogulch wrote: post #79
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 a…

A colleague once coined the term "horizontal abstractions" (referring to a lot of the java "enterprise" pomp and ceremony) referring to much the same effect (there's no pyramid of abstractions - just more layers of similar complexity).
Post reply on HN