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We embraced AWS nearly 6 months ago. We had the occasional use before then, however this time we went all in. We learnt about VPC, proper multi-zone availabilit

We embraced AWS nearly 6 months ago. We had the occasional use before then, however this time we went all in. We learnt about VPC, proper multi-zone availability, made use of a dozen of services etc. It took about a week to grasp it all and apply it in Terraform (the AWS and Hashicorp docs were helpful and thorough). We were all extremely pleased with the outcome. That was until it came down to managing all those interconnected components. We are now looking for a devops person simply because the AWS stack in its entirety is daunting. Yes, from experience it is possible to manage with just the software guys. However there's just too much going on. The more you use of AWS, the more difficult and demanding it becomes. For all that was said, we don't regret moving to AWS (were previously on Rackspace).

jacques_chester 10y ago
> That was until it came down to managing all those interconnected components. You might find BOSH[0] useful at this level. It was developed to deploy and upgrade Cloud Foundry, which itself is a complex distributed system with heavy HA requirements. It's a large part of what has made it possible to run CF on OpenStack, vSphere, AWS, Azure and GCP. (There are more coming). There's a hump to get over, but once you do, BOSH is essentially magical. At Pivotal we upgrade our entire public cloud every week or two and mostly, nobody notices. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, we do almost all the core engineering on BOSH. Microsoft and Google do some too for Azure and GCP respectively. [0] http://bosh.io/ http://bosh.io/
positr0n 10y ago
What was your win that you don't regret the move to AWS? From what you described it sounds very expensive (and requires another full time employee!) with no upside. Not doubting your decision, just curious for more info.
- busterarm 10y ago
  They're moving from Rackspace. It was already expensive.
- StanAngeloff 10y ago
  Fair question. Before moving to AWS we were running our own infrastructure on Rackspace and a lot of it was dedicated hardware, not cloud. That was expensive. Fanatical support by RS also dropped dramatically in quality, taking days to resolve issues. AWS has a lot of redundancy baked in. The notion of "replace, don't fix" also made our codebase more resilient to failure. This is also true for most cloud suppliers. With AWS we don't need a PostgreSQL admin, it's managed. Redis is managed. Storage is cheap and can be replicated across the globe. So far we've reaped all the benefits without a devops person in-house.
nicerobot 10y ago
If you're using Terraform, why are you having problems with the interconnectedness? That's exactly the benefit of Terraform. Parameterizing all the configuration dependencies is its brilliance. Nothing I've come across is as simple and easy to use and understand while still being able to fully managing an entire infrastructure.
- StanAngeloff 10y ago
  I wouldn't say we were having problems using Terraform for interconnectedness. The complexity of services used at this point warrants a person who can evaluate the architecture we've created. Can we optimise for cost, did we make the right MZ decisions, etc. Terraform was what made AWS possible for us. I would not have used the GUI.

jacques_chester 10y ago

> That was until it came down to managing all those interconnected components. You might find BOSH[0] useful at this level. It was developed to deploy and upgrade Cloud Foundry, which itself is a complex distributed system with heavy HA requirements. It's a large part of what has made it possible to run CF on OpenStack, vSphere, AWS, Azure and GCP. (There are more coming). There's a hump to get over, but once you do, BOSH is essentially magical. At Pivotal we upgrade our entire public cloud every week or two and mostly, nobody notices. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, we do almost all the core engineering on BOSH. Microsoft and Google do some too for Azure and GCP respectively. [0] http://bosh.io/ http://bosh.io/

positr0n 10y ago

What was your win that you don't regret the move to AWS? From what you described it sounds very expensive (and requires another full time employee!) with no upside. Not doubting your decision, just curious for more info.

busterarm 10y ago
They're moving from Rackspace. It was already expensive.
StanAngeloff 10y ago
Fair question. Before moving to AWS we were running our own infrastructure on Rackspace and a lot of it was dedicated hardware, not cloud. That was expensive. Fanatical support by RS also dropped dramatically in quality, taking days to resolve issues. AWS has a lot of redundancy baked in. The notion of "replace, don't fix" also made our codebase more resilient to failure. This is also true for most cloud suppliers. With AWS we don't need a PostgreSQL admin, it's managed. Redis is managed. Storage is cheap and can be replicated across the globe. So far we've reaped all the benefits without a devops person in-house.

nicerobot 10y ago

If you're using Terraform, why are you having problems with the interconnectedness? That's exactly the benefit of Terraform. Parameterizing all the configuration dependencies is its brilliance. Nothing I've come across is as simple and easy to use and understand while still being able to fully managing an entire infrastructure.

StanAngeloff 10y ago
I wouldn't say we were having problems using Terraform for interconnectedness. The complexity of services used at this point warrants a person who can evaluate the architecture we've created. Can we optimise for cost, did we make the right MZ decisions, etc. Terraform was what made AWS possible for us. I would not have used the GUI.