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Sometimes I wonder if the old world where you had to buy computers and drive to the datacenter at 3 in the morning to replace dead hard drives was really so bad
by jrockway 5y ago
Sometimes I wonder if the old world where you had to buy computers and drive to the datacenter at 3 in the morning to replace dead hard drives was really so bad.
I guess it was really so bad. Everything you have to build for yourself in the cloud is something you probably needed in your self-hosted stack -- a directory of users, permissions (and escalation), firewall rules, SSH key material, etc. I feel like no matter what production stack you choose, you're always in that "6 of one, half-dozen of another" state. Lots of stuff to interfere with getting your code out there and keeping it running.
(My real question is why the cloud providers don't offer these things for you -- they give you the tools to build solutions, not solutions. But I just want to work on my app. I wonder why things like App Engine never really caught on. I guess being opinionated drives more people away than it brings in with the promise of more simplicity, though to some extent App Engine was too simple, which is always bad. Meanwhile, what cloud providers offer certainly lets you bring your own opinion and build it out yourself. I wish there was a comfortable middle ground.)
- bigyikes 5y agoHaven’t used it in years, but Heroku was really great in this respect. It was very easy to just focus on making a good app instead of trying to configure everything myself. I guess there’s probably not much demand for this kind of thing at large scales.
- hnzix 5y agoHeroku can be a hard sell to mgmt because of the cost, but if it's framed in terms of "this means you don't need to pay for two AWS cloud architects to be on call" then it's a much easier pitch.
- jfoster 5y agoI think the primary concerns with what App Engine started out as were flexibility and vendor lock-in. Feels like it is a very solvable problem, though. Only a matter of time.
- topkeks 5y agoIMHO Cloud Run (Knative) is a pretty decent "next generation App Engine" without vendor lock-in.
- saargrin 5y agoim working as a devops for a security conscious on-prem startup and .. oh boy it IS really so bad
- startledaxolotl 5y agosubtly provide management with a copy of the phoenix project
- startledaxolotl 5y ago>they give you the tools to build solutions, not solutions. Hmmm, well the first generation of a cloud providers offerings has to be the bare necessities (EC2, VPC, IAM RDS etc). Then you can start providing a second gen of services that use the first gen, like AWS's ECS, and then a third gen like Fargate.