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AWS is much like renting a car. If you only need a car for a week out of the year, you're much better off renting one rather than buying one and leaving it idle

AWS is much like renting a car. If you only need a car for a week out of the year, you're much better off renting one rather than buying one and leaving it idle for 51 weeks. But if you know you'll need a car every day, it's much cheaper to buy or long-term lease one rather than rent at the daily rate. AWS is the daily-rate car rental. It's great when you have 1) highly variable load, and 2) your entire infrastructure is instrumented to scale up and down quickly with minimal manual intervention. If, for example, you are running a large e-commerce site -- the case it was designed for -- AWS is great. Your load will be average most of the year, then go up a lot for Christmas shopping in November, then go up even more in December... then load goes back down to average for the remaining 10 months. Part of the issue is also cultural. Younger developers who grew up hearing "cloud is awesome" every day think the very idea of colocating hardware is archaic and ridiculous, and won't even consider it.

cookiecaper 11y ago
Yeah, I agree with you. A good rollout would use bare-metal base hardware and scalable on-demand instances that can be auto-spawned and auto-decommissioned in the cloud. However, I agree that the node.js generation is coming up believing that cloud is implicitly superior. Really I think this is a reaction to the fact that they don't know anything about system administration, either software or hardware, and they're trying to cover that up by claiming that anyone who uses real hardware is behind the times (in fact, they've even taken it to the extreme that anyone who uses a real server-side language is behind the times). It'd be great if we had more understanding of the marketing and political efforts in the tech world and had an entity that tried to counteract some of these fads before they got out of control. node.js itself would be a good target for such an entity.

cookiecaper 11y ago

Yeah, I agree with you. A good rollout would use bare-metal base hardware and scalable on-demand instances that can be auto-spawned and auto-decommissioned in the cloud. However, I agree that the node.js generation is coming up believing that cloud is implicitly superior. Really I think this is a reaction to the fact that they don't know anything about system administration, either software or hardware, and they're trying to cover that up by claiming that anyone who uses real hardware is behind the times (in fact, they've even taken it to the extreme that anyone who uses a real server-side language is behind the times). It'd be great if we had more understanding of the marketing and political efforts in the tech world and had an entity that tried to counteract some of these fads before they got out of control. node.js itself would be a good target for such an entity.