3 ms·

As you describe the goals and features of your system, I think the AWS solution is too complicated, even over-kill, for what you are trying to achive. I use AWS

As you describe the goals and features of your system, I think the AWS solution is too complicated, even over-kill, for what you are trying to achive. I use AWS extensively for the 'big projects', I also use it as a CDN for all projects, but for the small projects (in terms of complexity and capacity), I find it much simpler to implement a two-tier service. For example, for comments (form submission in general), it is much simpler to write a node app, host it on a free-tier and persist the data also on a free-tier (for example Heroku+Firebase). Parse.com was great b/c you could do it all in one tier since the offered server side logic. Granted, if you ever pass the free tier limits, normally the price breaks of these PAAS providers are high so cost does not scale 'by the cent' like AWS; however, if you pass the free tier you must be making good traffic which should translate to good income so infra cost shouldn't be a problem.

bikamonki 10y ago
Downvote all you want but IMO this is a Rube Goldberg machine that uses 5!!! AWS services to persist what? 5k comments for the entire lifecycle of the website? The modern programmer is quite good at playing Legos with the myriad of micro webservices out there (which is good play/training) but has forgotten how to think like an 'engineer' must think.
- jimpick 10y ago
  Any working solution actually has thousands of components. I'd defend this particular Rube Goldberg machine by pointing out that 99% of the time, none of my code is running on the server side - it's all Amazon S3. The only time my code runs in the cloud is when a comment gets submitted. I'd argue that it's pretty easy to reason about. I've got some more blog posts coming. :-)
  - bikamonki 10y ago
    Don't get me wrong, what you've done is how we will build web stack solutions from now on: orchestrated microservices. My hopefully constructive critique is that as engineers we ought to find the best solution for a given problem, even at the expense of such solution not being universal. Take the myriad of tiny to medium websites that use WP, it is like renting an 18-wheeler to move one tiny box. The engineered correct solution would be a static site. Now, for a site with just a handful of posts and comments we should think of a much simpler solution for comments persistence. In fact, after reading about your software I am inspired to think and try to come up with such solution, let's see :)
jimpick 10y ago
Yep, lots of options out there. One of my motivations for doing the project was to just learn how to provision a bunch of AWS services and make it reproducible. I might write a little shim so you can also just run the API as a standard Node.js app. At the end of the day it's just a JavaScript bundle and a single REST API method. Even with a service like Heroku, a choice needs to be made for what service to use to store the data (eg. postgres). Heroku's free tier is almost like a course-grained Lambda because the VMs spin down after a period of inactivity. I'm actually really excited about https://zeit.co/ https://zeit.co/ - check that out. In the long run, the hosting cost for this type of application should be pretty close to zero. People will choose their cloud/hosting solution based on other factors.

bikamonki 10y ago

Downvote all you want but IMO this is a Rube Goldberg machine that uses 5!!! AWS services to persist what? 5k comments for the entire lifecycle of the website? The modern programmer is quite good at playing Legos with the myriad of micro webservices out there (which is good play/training) but has forgotten how to think like an 'engineer' must think.

jimpick 10y ago
Any working solution actually has thousands of components. I'd defend this particular Rube Goldberg machine by pointing out that 99% of the time, none of my code is running on the server side - it's all Amazon S3. The only time my code runs in the cloud is when a comment gets submitted. I'd argue that it's pretty easy to reason about. I've got some more blog posts coming. :-)
- bikamonki 10y ago
  Don't get me wrong, what you've done is how we will build web stack solutions from now on: orchestrated microservices. My hopefully constructive critique is that as engineers we ought to find the best solution for a given problem, even at the expense of such solution not being universal. Take the myriad of tiny to medium websites that use WP, it is like renting an 18-wheeler to move one tiny box. The engineered correct solution would be a static site. Now, for a site with just a handful of posts and comments we should think of a much simpler solution for comments persistence. In fact, after reading about your software I am inspired to think and try to come up with such solution, let's see :)

jimpick 10y ago

Yep, lots of options out there. One of my motivations for doing the project was to just learn how to provision a bunch of AWS services and make it reproducible. I might write a little shim so you can also just run the API as a standard Node.js app. At the end of the day it's just a JavaScript bundle and a single REST API method. Even with a service like Heroku, a choice needs to be made for what service to use to store the data (eg. postgres). Heroku's free tier is almost like a course-grained Lambda because the VMs spin down after a period of inactivity. I'm actually really excited about https://zeit.co/ https://zeit.co/ - check that out. In the long run, the hosting cost for this type of application should be pretty close to zero. People will choose their cloud/hosting solution based on other factors.