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

91–100 of 158 posts

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#91

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

Unless.. you do a really good job, like heroku, vercel etc.

Also why is AWS so complicated? That’s where the money is: enterprises!

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#92

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

Yeah wait till you need to do SOC2 and friends! Azure has tools to help you with this.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#93

Post by quickthrower2 »

brunkerhart wrote: post #87

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?

The comparison should be this vs. aws rather than this vs. bare metal … but I get your point.

Apps need some kind of persistence state. That requires some thought and annoyances to deal with however you do it. There is no leakproof abstraction. Takes 5s to retrieve the data? Get digging!

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#94

Post by tempfortwitt90 »

I currently run a micro-saas product on a $4 a month namecheap server using the LAMP stack. It runs fast for all 34 companies, or 400+ employees, using it.

I've looked into moving it to Google cloud or AWS and it just seems daunting. Honestly, I use ftp, cpanel, and phpmyadmin.

Is there a way to get this product into the 'cloud' in case it grows, easily?

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#95

Post by erulabs »

Applications developers often tell me about (to quote another post here) "the lurching tedium" of cloud infrastructure development.

Growing up in a datacenter, opening tickets and checking them weekly, hoping for the vendor to finally ship the right backplane; datacenter engineering used to take weeks, months, years. Waiting 30 seconds for terraform plan to check 120 resources which corresponds to thousands of pounds of metal and enough wattage to blow up the city I live in... doesn't seem too bad. That said, I understand where you javascript folks are coming from with your iteration loops, but still, you've gotten understand: it's so easy now.

Leaky abstraction, sure. But it's always great to see innovation in cloud infra.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#96

Post by matus_congrady »

(Please take my opinion with a grain of salt, as I might be biased - I'm a founder at a startup that solves a very similar problem).

The cloud (and by "cloud" I mostly mean AWS) in general is indeed insanely complex. Not only is it complex and hard to use for dedicated and trained DevOps/Cloud experts, it's even more overwhelming for developers wanting to just deploy their simple apps.

This statement is in my opinion almost universaly accepted - during our market research, we've interviewed ~150 DevOps/Cloud experts and ~250 developers that have been using AWS. Only ~2.5% of them have said that the complexity of AWS is not an issue for them.

That being said, I understand that AWS has to be complex by design. Not only it offers ~250 different services, but the flexible/configurable way it's designed simply requires a lot of expertise and configuration. For example, the granularity and capabilities of AWS IAM is unparalelled. But it comes at a cost - the configurational and architectural complexity is just beyond what an average AWS user is willing to accept.

An alternative to the cloud complexity are the PaaS platforms (such as Heroku or Render). But they also have their disadvantages - mostly significantly increased costs, lower flexibility and far less supported use-cases.

At https://stacktape.com, we're developing an abstraction over AWS, that is simple enough so that any developer can use it, yet allows to configure/extend anything you might need for complex applications. Stacktape is like a PaaS platform that deploys applications/infrastructure to your own AWS account.

We believe that Stacktape offers the perfect mix of ease-of-use, productivity, cost-efficiency and flexibility. It can be used to deploy anything from side projects to complex enterprise applications.

I'll be very happy to hear your thoughts or to hear any feedback.

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#97

Post by fulafel »

lemarchr wrote: post #69

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…

To add, CDK is quite distant vs this - it's AWS proprietary, painfully slow testing cycle, lots of limitations & faults leak in due to being based on CloudFormation, has nothing like the compiler plugins, etc. Plus the stuff in https://docs.winglang.io/faq/why-a-language

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#98

Post by fulafel »

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?

https://docs.winglang.io/faq/why-a-language

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#99

Post by jpraczyk »

fulafel wrote: post #97
lemarchr wrote: post #69

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…

To add, CDK is quite distant vs this - it's AWS proprietary, painfully slow testing cycle, lots of limitations & faults leak in due to being based on CloudFormation, has nothing like the compiler plugins, etc. Plus the stuff in https://docs.winglang.io/faq/why-a-language

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk uses CDK's constructs

Re: Cloud, Why So Difficult?

#100

Post by Kinrany »

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?

There's likely a clever way to do that despite Wing's explanation, but it'll be a whole separate project.

Wing will pave the way and come up with a good abstraction or two, then become obsolete once general purpose languages with better ecosystems can do the same.

Post reply on HN