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I've been hiring dev ops engineers lately, and the consensus seems to be in the candidates I've talked to that all of the cloud providers are somewhat painful t

by skohan 6y ago

I've been hiring dev ops engineers lately, and the consensus seems to be in the candidates I've talked to that all of the cloud providers are somewhat painful to work with. I've worked the most with AWS so I'll use it as an example, but it seems like they sell on "new services", so they are incentivized to release quickly, which leads to services with a lot of holes and poor documentation, making it almost essential to get paid support to work around these issues. It makes me wonder what it would look like to build a minimal cloud product which focused on a few core services with an emphasis on reliability, performance and developer ergonomics.

EarthLaunch 6y ago
That sounds like DigitalOcean’s approach.
- Jgrubb 6y ago
  Idk, DO is adding a lot of managed services lately so it doesn't feel like they're going for the simple, well implemented commodity play for the long run.
  - zwily 6y ago
    Managed services are where the money is. :)
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      Managed services are where the lock-in is; or perhaps more generously, where the "increased friction to change providers" arises. If your deployment is nothing more than scp from the post-build products on Github, you can use literally any server anywhere with SSH access. No lock in. But if your deployment is a button click from inside a DO managed service, well... you're SOL if you want to move. You have to build all the stuff you avoided building before (the time savings and therefore money savings). I really feel like some combination of the two should be possible. I've not yet seen a host come along that offers it. No large company would because they want reliable revenue generated due to lock in. I've thought about building it. The older I get the more it interests me. I've got all the basic scripts to make it work. Maybe I'll dive in one of these days..
OzzyB 6y ago
The only option I can see as an alternative "minimal" cloud is one that runs Kubernetes on one of the "mid-tier" hosting platforms. DigitalOcean, Linode, heck even OVH now have K8s offerings with ready-to-go (and free) control node/panel instances. Of course K8s isn't shallow but at least when you master their way of doing things you're free to go and do whatever you want. It's cheaper too.
- raesene9 6y ago
  One small note of caution there is that using managed k8s solutions has some consequences for flexibility of what you can do. For one example, in most managed k8s setups, you can't change the admission controllers used on a cluster unless the cloud provider exposes this via an interface. Some cloud providers do more of this than others. So with a minimal k8s managed option you might get stuck if your cloud provider doesn't support an admission controller or other API server option you need.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
It’s a true difference of kind with Google though. Yes they are annoying, but other providers try much harder to have customer service, planned deprecation. Google flagrantly, with absolutely the “fuuuck you” vibe Yegge writes about, does not care. It fundamentally doesn’t support you. It promises X, delivers incompatible Y, deprecates Y for Z, doesn’t document anything along the way, has no useful support docs, crams upselling ads into all its docs, it’s bonkers. AWS can be hard to use and confusing. That’s just not the same thing. Poor ergonomics I can forgive, especially if there’s docs and support.

by skohan 6y ago

EarthLaunch 6y ago

That sounds like DigitalOcean’s approach.

Jgrubb 6y ago
Idk, DO is adding a lot of managed services lately so it doesn't feel like they're going for the simple, well implemented commodity play for the long run.
- zwily 6y ago
  Managed services are where the money is. :)
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    Managed services are where the lock-in is; or perhaps more generously, where the "increased friction to change providers" arises. If your deployment is nothing more than scp from the post-build products on Github, you can use literally any server anywhere with SSH access. No lock in. But if your deployment is a button click from inside a DO managed service, well... you're SOL if you want to move. You have to build all the stuff you avoided building before (the time savings and therefore money savings). I really feel like some combination of the two should be possible. I've not yet seen a host come along that offers it. No large company would because they want reliable revenue generated due to lock in. I've thought about building it. The older I get the more it interests me. I've got all the basic scripts to make it work. Maybe I'll dive in one of these days..

OzzyB 6y ago

The only option I can see as an alternative "minimal" cloud is one that runs Kubernetes on one of the "mid-tier" hosting platforms. DigitalOcean, Linode, heck even OVH now have K8s offerings with ready-to-go (and free) control node/panel instances. Of course K8s isn't shallow but at least when you master their way of doing things you're free to go and do whatever you want. It's cheaper too.

raesene9 6y ago
One small note of caution there is that using managed k8s solutions has some consequences for flexibility of what you can do. For one example, in most managed k8s setups, you can't change the admission controllers used on a cluster unless the cloud provider exposes this via an interface. Some cloud providers do more of this than others. So with a minimal k8s managed option you might get stuck if your cloud provider doesn't support an admission controller or other API server option you need.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

It’s a true difference of kind with Google though. Yes they are annoying, but other providers try much harder to have customer service, planned deprecation. Google flagrantly, with absolutely the “fuuuck you” vibe Yegge writes about, does not care. It fundamentally doesn’t support you. It promises X, delivers incompatible Y, deprecates Y for Z, doesn’t document anything along the way, has no useful support docs, crams upselling ads into all its docs, it’s bonkers. AWS can be hard to use and confusing. That’s just not the same thing. Poor ergonomics I can forgive, especially if there’s docs and support.