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I thought the same. This guy isn't even doing business via his site as far as I can tell. How is it that you set up such a monstrosity of services instead of re

I thought the same. This guy isn't even doing business via his site as far as I can tell. How is it that you set up such a monstrosity of services instead of renting a server for a couple bucks that comes with a decent amount of traffic per month and just caps your link or throttles if you go over it. But I guess simply running Debian on some server and keeping that up to date just isn't cool anymore. Everyone running a blog about their dog needs Cloudflare, S3, heroku, micro services and docker. Obviously with no limit on what kind of bill they will generate should something go wrong. You can just vent on twitter and generate enough attention that the vendor will make an exception for you and pay you back to limit the negative publicity. Who wouldn't prefer that to the tedious work that is maintaining a Linux install on a server?

awinder 6y ago
I mean the “monstrosity of services” is a bucket holding files and a CDN. It’s 2 services. I do this for my site (that gets no traffic and hasnt been updated in years) and it’s quite nice to not have to admin a server. Now that said it looks like his job is in cloud evangelism too so I’m sure a large part is that he wants to maintain a personal account to learn/hone skills. I’d recommend anyone do that, getting a look at aws without whatever your company is doing on top of it is pretty awesome for learning. Just don’t host massive S3 images and shoot yourself in the foot ;-)
- andialo 6y ago
  What do you guys do when admining a server to make it so time-consuming/bothersome? If you just host static content you don't even need to care about security updates. Just deploy a new instance, "apt install nginx", done, forget about it. I would say less work than setting it all up on AWS. When is the last time there was an remote exploit for nginx serving static files or in Linux kernel? You dont even need to worry about security updates in this scenario. > I’m sure a large part is that he wants to maintain a personal account to learn/hone skills. Yeah, he seems to be responsible for OpenShift (marketing?) at Red Hat and he only learnt how expensive AWS is when he got a bill? Bit embarassing.
  - samdixon 6y ago
    Not making any arguments about the author, but there is a bit more work to a static site than just apt install nginx. You need to make sure your firewall is setup correctly, users are added and keys managed, ssh config has correct settings, services start automatically, certificates. Either need to deal with certs on your own or get a cdn. Either way, more work than apt install
    - andialo 6y ago
      apt install nginx will set the users for you and it also starts automatically on start, ssh default config is perfectly fine, keys are set up automatically when you start the instance - any cloud provider/VPS service/even kvm with 'uvtools' does this for your (and even if not, it's one ssh-copy-id command). But yes you need to run, for example, a certbot as well to setup certificates. so it's: apt install nginx apt install certbot certbot certonly -d your.domain -d www.your.domain # again, when you apt install certbot it installs the cron/timer automatically for automatic certificates renewly and nginx reload Still less work than going the CDN route I would say. It really seems to me you don't trust default linux settings and need to take care of everything and fine tune everything but you trust CDN providers thus making the CDN route less work for you. If you trust default settings of a linux distro, it's less time consuming setting it up yourself on linux. Yes that's how user-friendly it really is today.
stingraycharles 6y ago
I don’t know but on a site like a Hacker News I would expect an attitude where people like to hack on this kind of stuff, and not everyone wants “the most boring” type of setup. The problem is that, at least in the case of public clouds, there’s a real risk of your bill exploding. I guess the author learned a lesson here, but I don’t think it’s the right attitude to start blaming the guy for “it makes no sense to tinker with AWS services” over here. Learning is probably one of his goals.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  I would expect an attitude towards efficiency, driven by measurements and objectivity, engineering and professionalism, not a reckless, for fun, why-not, hype-based one.
  - blivens 6y ago
    This strikes me as a pretty narrow view of the hacker mindset. Sure, "hype-driven" is not exactly hacker-y, but "reckless," "for fun," and "why not" all sound exactly like hacker attitudes to me. A prime example would be Claude Shannon, who built tons of useless overcomplicated things just for fun in addition to coming up with information theory.
- hackatavis 6y ago
  I wish AWS and other clouds would cater to this crowd (which I'm a part of). I just closed my AWS account to remove this exact risk. I love hacking around and playing with the various services—it satisfies my own curiosity and also helps me at work—but it's not worth putting my financial security at risk to keep these accounts open. More than once I've stress-checked my AWS bill in the middle of the night because I was worried there'd be some hidden bill or somebody hacked in and blew up the network traffic or compute or whatever. It's just not worth the loss of peace of mind. I wonder if a potential solution is to have two billing modes that get hardlocked at signup (or require a key or something to change): one is the standard model with alerts etc. The other is a personal model that kills all of your stuff when you go over some limit. I would feel much safer if the latter were in place.

awinder 6y ago

I mean the “monstrosity of services” is a bucket holding files and a CDN. It’s 2 services. I do this for my site (that gets no traffic and hasnt been updated in years) and it’s quite nice to not have to admin a server. Now that said it looks like his job is in cloud evangelism too so I’m sure a large part is that he wants to maintain a personal account to learn/hone skills. I’d recommend anyone do that, getting a look at aws without whatever your company is doing on top of it is pretty awesome for learning. Just don’t host massive S3 images and shoot yourself in the foot ;-)

andialo 6y ago
What do you guys do when admining a server to make it so time-consuming/bothersome? If you just host static content you don't even need to care about security updates. Just deploy a new instance, "apt install nginx", done, forget about it. I would say less work than setting it all up on AWS. When is the last time there was an remote exploit for nginx serving static files or in Linux kernel? You dont even need to worry about security updates in this scenario. > I’m sure a large part is that he wants to maintain a personal account to learn/hone skills. Yeah, he seems to be responsible for OpenShift (marketing?) at Red Hat and he only learnt how expensive AWS is when he got a bill? Bit embarassing.
- samdixon 6y ago
  Not making any arguments about the author, but there is a bit more work to a static site than just apt install nginx. You need to make sure your firewall is setup correctly, users are added and keys managed, ssh config has correct settings, services start automatically, certificates. Either need to deal with certs on your own or get a cdn. Either way, more work than apt install
  - andialo 6y ago
    apt install nginx will set the users for you and it also starts automatically on start, ssh default config is perfectly fine, keys are set up automatically when you start the instance - any cloud provider/VPS service/even kvm with 'uvtools' does this for your (and even if not, it's one ssh-copy-id command). But yes you need to run, for example, a certbot as well to setup certificates. so it's: apt install nginx apt install certbot certbot certonly -d your.domain -d www.your.domain # again, when you apt install certbot it installs the cron/timer automatically for automatic certificates renewly and nginx reload Still less work than going the CDN route I would say. It really seems to me you don't trust default linux settings and need to take care of everything and fine tune everything but you trust CDN providers thus making the CDN route less work for you. If you trust default settings of a linux distro, it's less time consuming setting it up yourself on linux. Yes that's how user-friendly it really is today.

stingraycharles 6y ago

I don’t know but on a site like a Hacker News I would expect an attitude where people like to hack on this kind of stuff, and not everyone wants “the most boring” type of setup. The problem is that, at least in the case of public clouds, there’s a real risk of your bill exploding. I guess the author learned a lesson here, but I don’t think it’s the right attitude to start blaming the guy for “it makes no sense to tinker with AWS services” over here. Learning is probably one of his goals.

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
I would expect an attitude towards efficiency, driven by measurements and objectivity, engineering and professionalism, not a reckless, for fun, why-not, hype-based one.
- blivens 6y ago
  This strikes me as a pretty narrow view of the hacker mindset. Sure, "hype-driven" is not exactly hacker-y, but "reckless," "for fun," and "why not" all sound exactly like hacker attitudes to me. A prime example would be Claude Shannon, who built tons of useless overcomplicated things just for fun in addition to coming up with information theory.
hackatavis 6y ago
I wish AWS and other clouds would cater to this crowd (which I'm a part of). I just closed my AWS account to remove this exact risk. I love hacking around and playing with the various services—it satisfies my own curiosity and also helps me at work—but it's not worth putting my financial security at risk to keep these accounts open. More than once I've stress-checked my AWS bill in the middle of the night because I was worried there'd be some hidden bill or somebody hacked in and blew up the network traffic or compute or whatever. It's just not worth the loss of peace of mind. I wonder if a potential solution is to have two billing modes that get hardlocked at signup (or require a key or something to change): one is the standard model with alerts etc. The other is a personal model that kills all of your stuff when you go over some limit. I would feel much safer if the latter were in place.