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I agree. It’s a golden age to be a developer. We can be truly agile with system architecture. The last big system I wrote went through at least three complete a

I agree. It’s a golden age to be a developer. We can be truly agile with system architecture. The last big system I wrote went through at least three complete architecture overhauls, but all that means is a fun few afternoons on the AWS console. Earlier systems I worked on had to have architecture locked down three months into the project.

choeger 7y ago
We might have a different concept of "architecture", but for me it looks like all cloud apps share the very same one. A bunch of (hopefully) cpu bound workers connected to one huge, intransparent persistence service. Not that this is not a viable architecture, but there exist different ones.
- opportune 7y ago
  I don’t understand, you acknowledge that vanilla web apps wrapping CRUD aren’t the only architectures but are the only ones suited to cloud? The entire point of the post you’re responding to is that cloud makes many architectures easy, including that one. I can personally vouch for having done wildly different use cases on cloud involving analytics and data processing.
  - choeger 7y ago
    > vanilla web apps wrapping CRUD This is the only use case you see for what I described? Most data processing I saw works exactly like that, too: some compute cluster using a shared persistence layer (either object store or a network filesystem). Edge computing, otoh, explicitly exists because not everything can be handled well in that way.
- mzz80 7y ago
  You’re not looking beyond the most trivial services. Most complex applications are best designed and scaled through multiple services. For example, how do you handle long running asynchronous processing, distributed pub sub, or services that have widely different performance and scaling characteristics? If you haven’t seen this, it might be time to start looking for a more interesting job.
  - choeger 7y ago
    I did not say that you usually need multiple services for scaling. I just noticed that the end architecture looks roughly the same to me once you go into the cloud. For a truly distributed system just look at a distributed hashtable. You can do it with a cloud provider, but it somehow contradicts the point of a DHT to control the nodes, does it not?
caust1c 7y ago
I don't think I've ever seen "fun" and "aws console" used in the same sentence before. The value to me personally is the reliability. Amazon continues to deliver on highly reliable services, which is IMO the main reason they can charge such a premium.
- zymhan 7y ago
  > I don't think I've ever seen "fun" and "aws console" used in the same sentence before. To each their own, but the ability to deploy seemingly endless amounts of computing power to do whatever I want, with the click of my mouse, is something I could only dream of as a kid.
  - jiggawatts 7y ago
    I had that kid-like wonder at a recent project where I had to re-architect an Amazon-hosted website for a customer. It took me back to that childhood experience of playing with Lego. Everything just "snaps together", and a lot of things that ought to be difficult were shockingly easy. Mid-way through the project the customer apologised because they forgot to mention that they needed geo-redundancy for every layer, including the database. It was a checkbox on AWS Aurora. A literal checkbox. I pressed it. There was a progress notification and then it was done. Just like that. A distributed cluster. I know what's involved, it's not like I haven't built SQL Server clusters dozens of times before, I've even scripted the process before. But it's kind of magic to see it condensed down to a the absolutely most trivial true/false button that it could possibly be.
- monkin 7y ago
  > I don't think I've ever seen "fun" and "aws console" used in the same sentence before. In my opinion AWS Console is one of the best designed from all cloud providers out there. GCP is years behind, even with $100k credits I just can force myself to use that pice of unusable crap. Probably Material Design is here to blame, as it's terrible on web. DigitalOcean does a great job with their interface but they don't even have 1/20 of features offered by AWS, at the end it will share the fate of GCP. Being extremely bloated. :)

choeger 7y ago

We might have a different concept of "architecture", but for me it looks like all cloud apps share the very same one. A bunch of (hopefully) cpu bound workers connected to one huge, intransparent persistence service. Not that this is not a viable architecture, but there exist different ones.

opportune 7y ago
I don’t understand, you acknowledge that vanilla web apps wrapping CRUD aren’t the only architectures but are the only ones suited to cloud? The entire point of the post you’re responding to is that cloud makes many architectures easy, including that one. I can personally vouch for having done wildly different use cases on cloud involving analytics and data processing.
- choeger 7y ago
  > vanilla web apps wrapping CRUD This is the only use case you see for what I described? Most data processing I saw works exactly like that, too: some compute cluster using a shared persistence layer (either object store or a network filesystem). Edge computing, otoh, explicitly exists because not everything can be handled well in that way.
mzz80 7y ago
You’re not looking beyond the most trivial services. Most complex applications are best designed and scaled through multiple services. For example, how do you handle long running asynchronous processing, distributed pub sub, or services that have widely different performance and scaling characteristics? If you haven’t seen this, it might be time to start looking for a more interesting job.
- choeger 7y ago
  I did not say that you usually need multiple services for scaling. I just noticed that the end architecture looks roughly the same to me once you go into the cloud. For a truly distributed system just look at a distributed hashtable. You can do it with a cloud provider, but it somehow contradicts the point of a DHT to control the nodes, does it not?

caust1c 7y ago

I don't think I've ever seen "fun" and "aws console" used in the same sentence before. The value to me personally is the reliability. Amazon continues to deliver on highly reliable services, which is IMO the main reason they can charge such a premium.

zymhan 7y ago
> I don't think I've ever seen "fun" and "aws console" used in the same sentence before. To each their own, but the ability to deploy seemingly endless amounts of computing power to do whatever I want, with the click of my mouse, is something I could only dream of as a kid.
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  I had that kid-like wonder at a recent project where I had to re-architect an Amazon-hosted website for a customer. It took me back to that childhood experience of playing with Lego. Everything just "snaps together", and a lot of things that ought to be difficult were shockingly easy. Mid-way through the project the customer apologised because they forgot to mention that they needed geo-redundancy for every layer, including the database. It was a checkbox on AWS Aurora. A literal checkbox. I pressed it. There was a progress notification and then it was done. Just like that. A distributed cluster. I know what's involved, it's not like I haven't built SQL Server clusters dozens of times before, I've even scripted the process before. But it's kind of magic to see it condensed down to a the absolutely most trivial true/false button that it could possibly be.
monkin 7y ago
> I don't think I've ever seen "fun" and "aws console" used in the same sentence before. In my opinion AWS Console is one of the best designed from all cloud providers out there. GCP is years behind, even with $100k credits I just can force myself to use that pice of unusable crap. Probably Material Design is here to blame, as it's terrible on web. DigitalOcean does a great job with their interface but they don't even have 1/20 of features offered by AWS, at the end it will share the fate of GCP. Being extremely bloated. :)