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Disagree on AWS. It's not that hard, and if you're gonna spend any amount of time figuring some vendor locked cloud system (which they all are), AWS is the best

Disagree on AWS. It's not that hard, and if you're gonna spend any amount of time figuring some vendor locked cloud system (which they all are), AWS is the best bet. And you obviously need to be careful with using every service that company throws at you, but barring that they provide the most solid reliable suite of services you can hope for so you spend more time on logic and business after some initial time investment.

thinkingkong 6y ago
No AWS _is_ hard. It's hard. They're all hard. They require tons and tons of knowledge before understanding what to look at, how to use it, when to use it, etc. Everyone who thinks these systems are simple completely take for granted the years and years of knowledge they've acquired. Even in the form of shared vocabulary, AWS is insane. IAM is a whole other nightmare of complexity that is insanely powerful, but I wouldn't dare point anyone in that direction if they were just starting out.
- porknubbins 6y ago
  I’ve found AWS services individually to be straightforward but the UI is full of unintuitive menus so you always end up having to google “how to x on AWS”. Also understanding how to make the services interact takes a fairly high level of networking knowledge.
yowlingcat 6y ago
I dunno about that. AWS is useful at a certain point, but I must say, if I want to spin up a prototype that I need to get into production ASAP with no pre-existing infra, the first tool I reach for is Heroku. It's hard to beat how clean the UX is. Why? It's opinionated. I get an instance of an RDBMS and my service. It's really easy to install Heroku apps. It doesn't make me learn unrelated abstractions to do that, or fill my life with pointless noise and bullshit. I will always appreciate AWS for how I can rely on it in production, but it definitely require a lot more verbosity and configuration than it needs to. I wish we would remember the product design lessons DHH taught us. Convention is preferable to configuration when possible for a reason. It reduces unnecessary complexity. It makes it easier for your brain to work with.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  The option I suggested, Render, is essentially the new Heroku. It's focused on dev experience, run by ex-Stripe people who worked on their infra and it's much less expensive than Heroku has been post-acquisition. If you want something managed that requires minimal time worrying about infra, they're a great choice. For something that truly requires low costs per user, I wouldn't use them but they make a ton of sense for many projects. And to be fair, AWS also has some serious limitations in terms of price scalability compared to a VPS like Digital Ocean or Linode: https://questinglog.com/costs-are-part-of-scalability/#just-egress-bandwidth-costs-can-be-considerable https://questinglog.com/costs-are-part-of-scalability/#just-...
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Heroku is great not just because of its DX, but 1) because it's a subsidiary of Salesforce and I know it won't disappear tomorrow and 2) it has a thriving app ecosystem. It's a real stretch to compare a recent $2.25M seed funded upstart with it and borderline malpractice to suggest running your production workloads on it. With AWS although you have to pay the premium on egress, you don't pay that until you leave their sandbox; what's more, you can add links into your VPC that sidestep it. If you're just running open source software or a kubes cluster on commodity boxes and you're fine owning all of your operational burden, sure. Use whatever you like. But if you want reliability and good DX, your options get narrower. Personally, I think that AWS Code Suite and VS/Azure spaces (and GitHub spaces by proxy) are going to be the real challengers in this space. There is a real UX problem to solve but it doesn't mean I want to necessarily use a different platform.
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      We have almost exactly opposite opinions. I would have recommended Heroku back in 2012 without question. I would not now. If Render is good enough for Stripe's production workloads, then it's good enough for mine.
      - 6y ago

thinkingkong 6y ago

No AWS _is_ hard. It's hard. They're all hard. They require tons and tons of knowledge before understanding what to look at, how to use it, when to use it, etc. Everyone who thinks these systems are simple completely take for granted the years and years of knowledge they've acquired. Even in the form of shared vocabulary, AWS is insane. IAM is a whole other nightmare of complexity that is insanely powerful, but I wouldn't dare point anyone in that direction if they were just starting out.

porknubbins 6y ago
I’ve found AWS services individually to be straightforward but the UI is full of unintuitive menus so you always end up having to google “how to x on AWS”. Also understanding how to make the services interact takes a fairly high level of networking knowledge.

yowlingcat 6y ago

I dunno about that. AWS is useful at a certain point, but I must say, if I want to spin up a prototype that I need to get into production ASAP with no pre-existing infra, the first tool I reach for is Heroku. It's hard to beat how clean the UX is. Why? It's opinionated. I get an instance of an RDBMS and my service. It's really easy to install Heroku apps. It doesn't make me learn unrelated abstractions to do that, or fill my life with pointless noise and bullshit. I will always appreciate AWS for how I can rely on it in production, but it definitely require a lot more verbosity and configuration than it needs to. I wish we would remember the product design lessons DHH taught us. Convention is preferable to configuration when possible for a reason. It reduces unnecessary complexity. It makes it easier for your brain to work with.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
The option I suggested, Render, is essentially the new Heroku. It's focused on dev experience, run by ex-Stripe people who worked on their infra and it's much less expensive than Heroku has been post-acquisition. If you want something managed that requires minimal time worrying about infra, they're a great choice. For something that truly requires low costs per user, I wouldn't use them but they make a ton of sense for many projects. And to be fair, AWS also has some serious limitations in terms of price scalability compared to a VPS like Digital Ocean or Linode: https://questinglog.com/costs-are-part-of-scalability/#just-egress-bandwidth-costs-can-be-considerable https://questinglog.com/costs-are-part-of-scalability/#just-...
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Heroku is great not just because of its DX, but 1) because it's a subsidiary of Salesforce and I know it won't disappear tomorrow and 2) it has a thriving app ecosystem. It's a real stretch to compare a recent $2.25M seed funded upstart with it and borderline malpractice to suggest running your production workloads on it. With AWS although you have to pay the premium on egress, you don't pay that until you leave their sandbox; what's more, you can add links into your VPC that sidestep it. If you're just running open source software or a kubes cluster on commodity boxes and you're fine owning all of your operational burden, sure. Use whatever you like. But if you want reliability and good DX, your options get narrower. Personally, I think that AWS Code Suite and VS/Azure spaces (and GitHub spaces by proxy) are going to be the real challengers in this space. There is a real UX problem to solve but it doesn't mean I want to necessarily use a different platform.
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    We have almost exactly opposite opinions. I would have recommended Heroku back in 2012 without question. I would not now. If Render is good enough for Stripe's production workloads, then it's good enough for mine.
    - 6y ago