5 ms·

I never understood the benefits of the cloud for 99% of the projects. I just moved https://vlang.io https://vlang.io from Google Cloud (my free credit expired)

I never understood the benefits of the cloud for 99% of the projects. I just moved https://vlang.io https://vlang.io from Google Cloud (my free credit expired) to an Amazon Lightsail VPS (any VPS will do), and my spending went from ~$70 to $3.5/month. And the performance actually improved a bit.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
A2017U1 7y ago
I'm confused, is that not still "the cloud" you are using? There's certainly a huge range of pricing for the exact same services (sometimes worse services cough OVH dedi servers cough)
- GordonS 7y ago
  I have a feeling you know this, but "the cloud" is nowadays generally taken to mean providers (such as AWS and Azure) that have IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings, with a focus on the latter two.
- sheeshkebab 7y ago
  If you are not using load balancers, lambdas, provisioned iops, internet scale databases, pipelines, streams, cdns, data object storage, machine learning apis - you are not using “cloud”.
- freehunter 7y ago
  It's a server in "the cloud" but it's not cloud services. If you're running an OS on bare metal or a blank VM, you're basically just co-locating in someone else's datacenter which is a very traditional model.
dRaBoQ 7y ago
That. I see tons of posts of under/fresh grads trying to use microservices, k8s and TerraForm for their tiny < 100 qps apps. A properly designed monolith on a dedicated server/VM can easily serve tens of thousands of users just fine and will be far easier to maintain than this mess (plus way cheaper as well). The main advantage of those tools is when you have a number of distributed teams and you want to scale to millions of users. For nearly anything else, a far smaller setup is what you want.
- joncrane 7y ago
  I would argue that the majority of AWS' profits come from inefficiencies of their customers. They know, and try to educate. The crazy thing is, even used inefficiently, the Cloud is still a very good value prop for a lot of businesses.
  - danpalmer 7y ago
    They might try to educate, but I don't think they engineer their products to make "getting it right" easy. It's not in their interests, but they _could_ make a product that is much easier to use correctly, cheaply, or both. AWS creates work, and creates spend, much more than it needs to.
    - iends 7y ago
      Yes, AWS incentives are not aligned with their customers. Any sufficiently sized organization on AWS ends up building custom tooling to help manage cost. They may also hire consultants to help optimize cost. This is all by design.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        My experience is that AWS is remarkably open to helping you get things right. They seem to focus on making things possible before easy, but (Enterprise) support is quite good and have specific incentives on spend efficiency that run counter to the short-term goals of Amazon. I can only imagine how the Oracle cloud must go for victims^Wcustomers. Systems engineering is hard, on-prem or in-cloud.
        jacob019 7y ago
        TIL ^w
        pm90 7y ago
        I don't get it yet... what does it mean?
paxys 7y ago
How is Amazon Lightsail not the "cloud"? In fact it gives you even less flexibility and control than managing your own EC2 instances.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

A2017U1 7y ago

I'm confused, is that not still "the cloud" you are using? There's certainly a huge range of pricing for the exact same services (sometimes worse services cough OVH dedi servers cough)

GordonS 7y ago
I have a feeling you know this, but "the cloud" is nowadays generally taken to mean providers (such as AWS and Azure) that have IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings, with a focus on the latter two.
sheeshkebab 7y ago
If you are not using load balancers, lambdas, provisioned iops, internet scale databases, pipelines, streams, cdns, data object storage, machine learning apis - you are not using “cloud”.
freehunter 7y ago
It's a server in "the cloud" but it's not cloud services. If you're running an OS on bare metal or a blank VM, you're basically just co-locating in someone else's datacenter which is a very traditional model.

dRaBoQ 7y ago

That. I see tons of posts of under/fresh grads trying to use microservices, k8s and TerraForm for their tiny < 100 qps apps. A properly designed monolith on a dedicated server/VM can easily serve tens of thousands of users just fine and will be far easier to maintain than this mess (plus way cheaper as well). The main advantage of those tools is when you have a number of distributed teams and you want to scale to millions of users. For nearly anything else, a far smaller setup is what you want.

joncrane 7y ago
I would argue that the majority of AWS' profits come from inefficiencies of their customers. They know, and try to educate. The crazy thing is, even used inefficiently, the Cloud is still a very good value prop for a lot of businesses.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  They might try to educate, but I don't think they engineer their products to make "getting it right" easy. It's not in their interests, but they _could_ make a product that is much easier to use correctly, cheaply, or both. AWS creates work, and creates spend, much more than it needs to.
  - iends 7y ago
    Yes, AWS incentives are not aligned with their customers. Any sufficiently sized organization on AWS ends up building custom tooling to help manage cost. They may also hire consultants to help optimize cost. This is all by design.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      My experience is that AWS is remarkably open to helping you get things right. They seem to focus on making things possible before easy, but (Enterprise) support is quite good and have specific incentives on spend efficiency that run counter to the short-term goals of Amazon. I can only imagine how the Oracle cloud must go for victims^Wcustomers. Systems engineering is hard, on-prem or in-cloud.
      - jacob019 7y ago
        TIL ^w
        pm90 7y ago
        I don't get it yet... what does it mean?

paxys 7y ago

How is Amazon Lightsail not the "cloud"? In fact it gives you even less flexibility and control than managing your own EC2 instances.