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Similar situation. Lived with my mother, constantly stressed about survival until she kicked me out at 14. Moved in with my upper middle class father (who shoul

by MrLeap 9y ago

Similar situation. Lived with my mother, constantly stressed about survival until she kicked me out at 14. Moved in with my upper middle class father (who should have had full custody from the beginning, courts don't always do it right eh?) For a while (my mind says 'for now'), I'm able to make about 100k in 6 months in the midwest. My formative memory combined with the local prices make this a nearly unimaginable sum. My "resting expenses" coalesce to no more than 90$ a day at the extreme. At 90$ a day I feel like i'm spending my face off. Any more and it'd feel like I was buying a jetski while unemployed with loan shark money. 58$ a month is $7,000 over a decade. Most things aren't worth that when I think of it in those terms. To expand my consulting services I bought a unity3d license for $1500 a few years ago. As soon as they decided MRR was the way I pivoted hard towards selling webgl to interested customers instead. Recommended the last company I worked for stay away from AWS Lambda for similar rent averse lock-in reasons. Locking yourself in to something like that reduces your degrees of freedom. In some ways I'm definitely hamstrung by this attitude. I will never own a home unless I save up enough to buy one in cash (I'm trying!). I rolled my truck a few months after graduating and had to get an auto loan then. I paid it and my student loans off like I was on fire and had to spit myself out. Last time I checked my credit, the "not enough lines of credit" penalties had me in the basement, which is hilarious. I'm just glad I can life like this, for now.

dijit 9y ago
The "not enough lines of credit" thing bit me too, if you don't take debt you can't have debt, it's so bizarre. Regarding your AWS lambda aversion, I am also guilty of aggressively avoiding lock-in with cloud vendors... Now I wonder if that is related to my upbringing.
- MrLeap 9y ago
  Nah you can have debt, you just have to pay a penalty (higher rates) to bring your profitability up. It's just not a game I want to play.
- scarface74 9y ago
  I don’t get the aversion to lambda. A lambda function is just a regular function that takes in a few parameters and outputs something. I always separate out the lambda interface from the main logic. Lambda is just another interface for business logic. Correctly structured, it is pretty easy to convert the core of your code to use any interface - a command line, pub sub, rest APIs etc.
  - MrLeap 9y ago
    This is what I see when I look at lambda: Lambda is just nodejs but different. It's an ec2 server running nodejs at a discount if you preform a special AWS dance. What use is that to me over just writing nodejs? Nodejs as it is can run unmodified on Azure, AWS, digitalocean and a ton of other providers. lambda invites a work moat to migration. Maybe you use it in a way that doesn't entangle you. Guaranteeing that takes more discipline than I can ascribe to your average team that's willing to use AWS Lambda. If AWS tripled its prices tomorrow, how long would it take you to migrate? Is it instantaneous? Does lambda linearly correlate with increased migration times? What if aws-sdk dropped support for all non lambda applications. Are you screwed? Even if you don't subscribe to it, the aversion should be obvious.
    - scarface74 9y ago
      You just said it- the advantage is the discount. I don't have to pay for EC2 instances to sit idle and lambda is more finely grained than EC2 based auto scaling. It really doesn't take any more discipline to separate out your Lambda interface from your code logic than it dors not to have business logic in your controller. I treat the lambda interface method like I would treat a controller. My business modules don't know anything about lambda - just like they don't know anything about http for REST services. For us, to move from lambda, it would be a matter of putting all of our lambda functions in one big solution and creating the appropriate REST endpoints. Our consuming code wouldn't change at all for lambdas triggered by http. We use Consul + Fabio for service discovery and URL lookups. We would just change the service registrations. We have a few message based triggers, but all of our messaging is abstracted into a library. We have a hybrid lambda, raw executable system. When an "event" is triggered it either triggers a real SQS message or the method submits a job to run on one of our app servers using Hashicorp's Nomad (what to do for an event is configured in Consul). I chose Nomad because it gave us the flexibility of not having to use Docker containers but we can when we need to. I would love to move to AWS Fargate so we could have serverless longer running processes with Docker containers. I'm the dev lead so I see most code that gets put into production. I try to both tie us to AWS services as tightly as possible and put facades over the services to allow portability.

by MrLeap 9y ago

dijit 9y ago

The "not enough lines of credit" thing bit me too, if you don't take debt you can't have debt, it's so bizarre. Regarding your AWS lambda aversion, I am also guilty of aggressively avoiding lock-in with cloud vendors... Now I wonder if that is related to my upbringing.

MrLeap 9y ago
Nah you can have debt, you just have to pay a penalty (higher rates) to bring your profitability up. It's just not a game I want to play.
scarface74 9y ago
I don’t get the aversion to lambda. A lambda function is just a regular function that takes in a few parameters and outputs something. I always separate out the lambda interface from the main logic. Lambda is just another interface for business logic. Correctly structured, it is pretty easy to convert the core of your code to use any interface - a command line, pub sub, rest APIs etc.
- MrLeap 9y ago
  This is what I see when I look at lambda: Lambda is just nodejs but different. It's an ec2 server running nodejs at a discount if you preform a special AWS dance. What use is that to me over just writing nodejs? Nodejs as it is can run unmodified on Azure, AWS, digitalocean and a ton of other providers. lambda invites a work moat to migration. Maybe you use it in a way that doesn't entangle you. Guaranteeing that takes more discipline than I can ascribe to your average team that's willing to use AWS Lambda. If AWS tripled its prices tomorrow, how long would it take you to migrate? Is it instantaneous? Does lambda linearly correlate with increased migration times? What if aws-sdk dropped support for all non lambda applications. Are you screwed? Even if you don't subscribe to it, the aversion should be obvious.
  - scarface74 9y ago
    You just said it- the advantage is the discount. I don't have to pay for EC2 instances to sit idle and lambda is more finely grained than EC2 based auto scaling. It really doesn't take any more discipline to separate out your Lambda interface from your code logic than it dors not to have business logic in your controller. I treat the lambda interface method like I would treat a controller. My business modules don't know anything about lambda - just like they don't know anything about http for REST services. For us, to move from lambda, it would be a matter of putting all of our lambda functions in one big solution and creating the appropriate REST endpoints. Our consuming code wouldn't change at all for lambdas triggered by http. We use Consul + Fabio for service discovery and URL lookups. We would just change the service registrations. We have a few message based triggers, but all of our messaging is abstracted into a library. We have a hybrid lambda, raw executable system. When an "event" is triggered it either triggers a real SQS message or the method submits a job to run on one of our app servers using Hashicorp's Nomad (what to do for an event is configured in Consul). I chose Nomad because it gave us the flexibility of not having to use Docker containers but we can when we need to. I would love to move to AWS Fargate so we could have serverless longer running processes with Docker containers. I'm the dev lead so I see most code that gets put into production. I try to both tie us to AWS services as tightly as possible and put facades over the services to allow portability.