4 ms·

It just means you don't have to worry at all about managing the servers, using thing like AWS Lambda which handle it for you. Generally these services will scal

It just means you don't have to worry at all about managing the servers, using thing like AWS Lambda which handle it for you. Generally these services will scale up and down for you as well.

oneplane 10y ago
That just worries me all the more. You basically get software engineers that wall themselves into their garden. It's like nodejs all over again...
- nostrademons 10y ago
  That's been the trend in the software industry since about 2000. When I started then, the job description was just "software engineer", and you were expected to know networking, databases, low-level code, UI code, scripting, etc. Now you have "frontend software engineer", "backend software engineer", "full-stack software engineer" (which seems to mean web framework + database, which is a very different meaning from what "full stack" meant when I started, or what it means at big companies like Google), "AWS specialist", "web developer", "Android developer", "iOS developer", "SRE", "devops", "data scientist", "machine-learning researcher", "infrastructure engineer", etc. It's actually a boon to entrepreneurial types who really do know the full stack inside and out. So many startups these days are "slap a web or mobile app in front of a manual process", so people who really do understand computation and all the things computers can do have less competition.
  - scardine 10y ago
    If you don't understand why GOOD startups do this, take a look at the "Doing things that don't scale[1]" lecture from "How to Start a Startup" series by Sam Altman at Stanford. [1] https://clip.mn/video/yt-oQOC-qy-GDY https://clip.mn/video/yt-oQOC-qy-GDY
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - losteric 10y ago
    We're still figuring out how to separate responsibilities for building software... it's the same cycle of maturation that construction, manufacturing, and every other large domain goes through.
- audleman 10y ago
  I think this type of thing will end up being useful for special cases, but in general we'll still want to run our own servers. Their use case of creating a public API is a great one: it's a simple interface and having Lambda handle the auto-scaling is pretty awesome.
  - coredog64 10y ago
    We are using Lambda to export CloudWatch metrics to another system. Haven't exceeded the free tier of Lambda yet, and CW itself was only $5 last month. Having a t2 up the whole time would have been way more, plus it would have been subject to our Chaos Monkey.
    - oneplane 10y ago
      Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper if you have a dedicated box where you can run your own VMs and add and remove services as you please? So far, running one at base cost with leased hardware costs about 1/10th of any 'cloud' provider out there, with lots more resources to go around. Right now, if want to spin up a new instance, container or process, I can do it locally, in vagrant or on a VM on the dedicated box all with the same config and management ease of the configuration management stack (we use SaltStack). It also works just fine with stuff like GCE or AWS, but those simply are never ever the 'cheapest' option. At best, they are a in-between solution when we need more hardware. It's great for temporary scaling, but of nominal resource usage there is no point in using those services at all, at least for us. The cost of a dedicated box is static, no matter how much you use, and yet it is always lower than the mean cost or 95th percentile of any AWS/GCE kind of thing. For (converted currency from euro) about 100USD we get 16 E5 cores, 92GB RAM, 1TB SSD RAID10, 10TB HDD RAID10 and 8TB transfer on a dual 1Gbit link. For the life of me I can't find any combination on Amazon to match that.

It just means you don't have to worry at all about managing the servers, using thing like AWS Lambda which handle it for you. Generally these services will scale up and down for you as well.

oneplane 10y ago

That just worries me all the more. You basically get software engineers that wall themselves into their garden. It's like nodejs all over again...

nostrademons 10y ago
That's been the trend in the software industry since about 2000. When I started then, the job description was just "software engineer", and you were expected to know networking, databases, low-level code, UI code, scripting, etc. Now you have "frontend software engineer", "backend software engineer", "full-stack software engineer" (which seems to mean web framework + database, which is a very different meaning from what "full stack" meant when I started, or what it means at big companies like Google), "AWS specialist", "web developer", "Android developer", "iOS developer", "SRE", "devops", "data scientist", "machine-learning researcher", "infrastructure engineer", etc. It's actually a boon to entrepreneurial types who really do know the full stack inside and out. So many startups these days are "slap a web or mobile app in front of a manual process", so people who really do understand computation and all the things computers can do have less competition.
- scardine 10y ago
  If you don't understand why GOOD startups do this, take a look at the "Doing things that don't scale[1]" lecture from "How to Start a Startup" series by Sam Altman at Stanford. [1] https://clip.mn/video/yt-oQOC-qy-GDY https://clip.mn/video/yt-oQOC-qy-GDY
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- losteric 10y ago
  We're still figuring out how to separate responsibilities for building software... it's the same cycle of maturation that construction, manufacturing, and every other large domain goes through.
audleman 10y ago
I think this type of thing will end up being useful for special cases, but in general we'll still want to run our own servers. Their use case of creating a public API is a great one: it's a simple interface and having Lambda handle the auto-scaling is pretty awesome.
- coredog64 10y ago
  We are using Lambda to export CloudWatch metrics to another system. Haven't exceeded the free tier of Lambda yet, and CW itself was only $5 last month. Having a t2 up the whole time would have been way more, plus it would have been subject to our Chaos Monkey.
  - oneplane 10y ago
    Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper if you have a dedicated box where you can run your own VMs and add and remove services as you please? So far, running one at base cost with leased hardware costs about 1/10th of any 'cloud' provider out there, with lots more resources to go around. Right now, if want to spin up a new instance, container or process, I can do it locally, in vagrant or on a VM on the dedicated box all with the same config and management ease of the configuration management stack (we use SaltStack). It also works just fine with stuff like GCE or AWS, but those simply are never ever the 'cheapest' option. At best, they are a in-between solution when we need more hardware. It's great for temporary scaling, but of nominal resource usage there is no point in using those services at all, at least for us. The cost of a dedicated box is static, no matter how much you use, and yet it is always lower than the mean cost or 95th percentile of any AWS/GCE kind of thing. For (converted currency from euro) about 100USD we get 16 E5 cores, 92GB RAM, 1TB SSD RAID10, 10TB HDD RAID10 and 8TB transfer on a dual 1Gbit link. For the life of me I can't find any combination on Amazon to match that.