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For all its flaws in design or philosophy, cloud computing has a sweet spot. As an indie, lone dev, I can run my site, email and a basic web app for about 10 U

For all its flaws in design or philosophy, cloud computing has a sweet spot. As an indie, lone dev, I can run my site, email and a basic web app for about 10 USD a month and, if my app kicks off, I can scale it to a million users without breaking a sweat. To me, that is the true power of the modern cloud computing paradigm. An influx of great apps and services enabled by cheap scalable and sweet competitive cloud services. Was this even possible in 2000?

herpderperator 6y ago
Properly scaling a site is more than just clicking a button. Your architecture needs to have been built from the ground up in a way that actually can scale horizontally, for starters.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  True. I made an assumption that the app is built that way. Of course, if te app architecture inherently unscalable, no amount of computing power or private servers is going to help.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > True. I made an assumption that the app is built that way. Of course, if te app architecture inherently unscalable, no amount of computing power or private servers is going to help. Isn't it usually a mistake to design your app to be scalable to 10,000 users when all you may ever have is 10?
    - kumarvvr 6y ago
      Nah. Scalable design is good design. It forces you into thinking a level deeper about your app and forces you to use good architectures.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
Yes, albeit it was a bit more expensive. I was running multiple sites by myself. There was less encapsulation (unless you were working with someone on bsd), for sure, but I'd say the advantages are more visible in terms of security (hacking was much easier back then) than ease to deploy. Doing your own ops has never been that hard (YMMV) and I don't think it improved much nowadays. Scaling to n machines didn't change as well. Deploy n instances, load balancers, scaling vertically then horizontally, db sharding. You still have the same fundamentals. One pro of today is having a single artifact to deploy (tons of cowboys deployments and FTP uploads in the past). One big cons you have nowadays is learning all the latest crap $currentCompany is using and having to peel the layers of abstractions to see why things work so badly.
- skohan 6y ago
  > Doing your own ops has never been that hard I kind of disagree. It's doable, but still requires maintenance. For instance, even running a simple blog off of a VPS requires you to worry about setting up an SSL certificate and keeping it renewed, staying on top of security updates, and putting together some kind of scaling solution assuming you ever want to write a post which gets to the front page of hacker news. I think there's definitely an argument at a certain scale to just outsourcing that complexity so you can actually work on what contributes to your unique value proposition.
  - 10000truths 6y ago
    Your examples are poor. LetsEncrypt and certbot automated cert renewals a long time ago. If you’re still having to manually renew your SSL certs, you’ve picked a crappy vendor. Security updates are also as simple as a cron job that runs your favorite package manager update command. You want to run those commands on multiple machines? Use the several different FOSS orchestration platforms that make it easy for you to deploy and configure your distributed services. Sure, these things take some initial set up, but it’s nothing that can’t be accomplished in a few business days for a start-up.
zelly 6y ago
Wait until you see the "data transfer" costs for what is basically or literally free from the bare metal/colo hosts. $10 is too much for what you're describing. You could be paying $0-$3. Most users of the top public clouds are paying 2-10x more than they should just because using the public cloud "is what you do".
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  For running a static site on Amazon, for low traffic requirements, it indeed costs about 3 to 4 USD per month. Also, which bare metal server providers would you recommend?

herpderperator 6y ago

Properly scaling a site is more than just clicking a button. Your architecture needs to have been built from the ground up in a way that actually can scale horizontally, for starters.

kumarvvr 6y ago
True. I made an assumption that the app is built that way. Of course, if te app architecture inherently unscalable, no amount of computing power or private servers is going to help.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > True. I made an assumption that the app is built that way. Of course, if te app architecture inherently unscalable, no amount of computing power or private servers is going to help. Isn't it usually a mistake to design your app to be scalable to 10,000 users when all you may ever have is 10?
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    Nah. Scalable design is good design. It forces you into thinking a level deeper about your app and forces you to use good architectures.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

Yes, albeit it was a bit more expensive. I was running multiple sites by myself. There was less encapsulation (unless you were working with someone on bsd), for sure, but I'd say the advantages are more visible in terms of security (hacking was much easier back then) than ease to deploy. Doing your own ops has never been that hard (YMMV) and I don't think it improved much nowadays. Scaling to n machines didn't change as well. Deploy n instances, load balancers, scaling vertically then horizontally, db sharding. You still have the same fundamentals. One pro of today is having a single artifact to deploy (tons of cowboys deployments and FTP uploads in the past). One big cons you have nowadays is learning all the latest crap $currentCompany is using and having to peel the layers of abstractions to see why things work so badly.

skohan 6y ago
> Doing your own ops has never been that hard I kind of disagree. It's doable, but still requires maintenance. For instance, even running a simple blog off of a VPS requires you to worry about setting up an SSL certificate and keeping it renewed, staying on top of security updates, and putting together some kind of scaling solution assuming you ever want to write a post which gets to the front page of hacker news. I think there's definitely an argument at a certain scale to just outsourcing that complexity so you can actually work on what contributes to your unique value proposition.
- 10000truths 6y ago
  Your examples are poor. LetsEncrypt and certbot automated cert renewals a long time ago. If you’re still having to manually renew your SSL certs, you’ve picked a crappy vendor. Security updates are also as simple as a cron job that runs your favorite package manager update command. You want to run those commands on multiple machines? Use the several different FOSS orchestration platforms that make it easy for you to deploy and configure your distributed services. Sure, these things take some initial set up, but it’s nothing that can’t be accomplished in a few business days for a start-up.

zelly 6y ago

Wait until you see the "data transfer" costs for what is basically or literally free from the bare metal/colo hosts. $10 is too much for what you're describing. You could be paying $0-$3. Most users of the top public clouds are paying 2-10x more than they should just because using the public cloud "is what you do".

kumarvvr 6y ago
For running a static site on Amazon, for low traffic requirements, it indeed costs about 3 to 4 USD per month. Also, which bare metal server providers would you recommend?