6 ms·

This is why I think we need a 'simple cloud' where people can spin up a single server nearly instantly, with sane defaults which are configurable if needed, and

by samhw 5y ago

This is why I think we need a 'simple cloud' where people can spin up a single server nearly instantly, with sane defaults which are configurable if needed, and a super simple flow to connect it to GitHub (maybe even "Go to your repo and `curl foo.sh/setup?id=ZnVjayB0ZXJyYWZvcm0K | sh`, then commit the result"). There's so much you could do from a UX point of view. Nobody wants to be fiddling around with IAM roles, trying to add the right ingress rules so their server can actually connect to the internet, configuring TCP_NODELAY, etc - and then constantly wondering if their server is secure. Just to run some CRUD React app whose requirements are the same as the other 99.99% of developers.

eropple 5y ago
You pretty much just described Render. https://render.com https://render.com It's not perfect, and there is probably a point in time for a project where you'll need to evaluate other options, but I haven't found much that's better for small-scale stuff if you don't want to think too hard.
- samhw 5y ago
  That's fantastic! I'll have to take a look. Thanks for showing me. I was aware of Heroku, but this seems like the modern equivalent which I had in mind. (I do think you could likely go even simpler, though - there's a whole spectrum of complexity which could accommodate different services at each point.) Edit: Apropos of "there's a point in time where you'll need to evaluate other options": I think a good selling point would be a well-designed flow for 'ejecting' to a self-hosted or AWS/GCP environment. Yeah, yeah, it's not good for lock-in, but by the exact same token it would be a strong selling point. Done well, you could assuage the "we may as well get it out of the way now" concerns by saying that you'll make it easier to set up shop on AWS.
  - eropple 5y ago
    You could go simpler than Render, and some folks do--but you go simpler at the cost of drastically reducing the value of a thing for whole categories of non-toy projects. For example, if you want to host a static thing there are a lot of pretty easy options, but the second you need something as foreign to the "JAMstack ideal" as "a datastore" like "for a blog with comments" now you're in multiple control panels and you're shuttling secrets around and you're confronted with paying multiple companies just to launch a blog and the whole thing physically hurts. Some mild complexity in deploy (and it is mild, a render.yaml file in your repo's super easy) comes from having the options to actually do things, I think.
  - cldellow 5y ago
    I've been running a SaaS on Render for about a year now. In past lives, I managed ~$50k/mo of AWS spend for one company and $1k/mo of Heroku spend for another. Render's great for letting us just focus on the app. There are things I want them to improve, but I'm confident they'll get there eventually.
    - anurag 5y ago
      Lots of improvements and additions planned for the coming months. Thank you for sticking with us.
- anurag 5y ago
  (Render founder) thanks for the mention. We have 50+ person companies running entirely on Render with zero devops engineers. The point at which you need to evaluate options is a lot further out than you'd expect (and continues to disappear into the distance).
  - snerual 5y ago
    Hi Founder, I've been wanting to use render for a long time now at our startup, but last time I looked at your GDPR info it was lacking. We sell to public education institutes in the EU, so it is a make or break for us. We might not be your target customer in that case, but otherwise I would love to hear what is possible.
    - anurag 5y ago
      We already sign DPAs, but expect to see more public information on GDPR later this year.
  - eropple 5y ago
    Hey dude. I've been very happy with the day-job stuff we run in Render, that's why I mentioned it. ;) If (devops hat on) you want baseline compute/storage, I think I could see running on Render long-term. Where I (speaking personally) get off the ride is when I start needing external stuff, and that's usually pronounced "AWS services". Stuff like SQS and SNS are still The Killer App for AWS for me, and while I was poking at Render for my most recent personal project, it was easier to put compute and data storage into Fargate/RDS and not have to think about multiple control planes. A seamless, please-not-Terraform way to cross-manage Render resources with other cloud options would be pretty killer. (Which is directly in tension with the discussions of simplicity here. Turns out cloud stuff is hard.)
    - anurag 5y ago
      Completely agreed on building/offering higher-level services like SQS, SNS, S3. We're only at ~10% of where I want the platform to be, which is also why we're hiring quite aggressively!
sam_lowry_ 5y ago
Hetzner has its Cloud offering which is simple and configurable over API and cloud-init.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  "Hetzner Cloud" is a VPS service, this entire conversation is about managed services vs unmanaged. Running under QEMU doesn't mean a server is managed.
  - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    Er... There are different levels of managed services. I am totally OK with the cloud that manages storage, backup and networking as well as provisioning. Every usage of RDS or Dynamo I saw until now did not need scaling nor DBA outsourcing that AWS provides. For me, Hetzner Cloud hits the sweet spot for side projects. And I use their bare metal servers to run high-volume websites. P.S. Surprisingly, non-tech businesses are often offset by Hetzner rather than by crooks with registered office in Suntec Tower, Singapore that run their "managed" services on Aquia that runs on AWS.
gwbas1c 5y ago
I thought that's Heroku?
vlovich123 5y ago
Have you tried Cloudflare pages + functions? Curious what you see as the big pieces that are missing from your ideal world? Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  I’m not the same person, but for me to consider cloudfare functions I would need a standard solution that is not a vendor lock but something that I can run on developers machines and any server. I would also need a nice development environment. Right now I would rather develop using fastcgi than faas.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    That’s fair. For what it’s worth you can run everything locally and on any server via miniflare. This is all integrated into Wrangler 2.0 which lets you trivially switch between running things locally and in prod. The concept itself is generally portable with several services offering largely compatible implementations although there is more porting work than would be ideal. As for standards/vendor lock-in concerns, I’m sure that will get resolved sooner rather than later.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Once you understand how to deploy into AWS, it really is quite simple, and honestly not that expensive. It takes... a day or so of work to get those "IAM roles" and "ingress rules" right, and then you never have to mess with them again, and if you're using a tool like Terraform, you have a blueprint for yourself around how to riff on that concept as well, so future permissions changes are even easier. In other words, nearly every complaint in this thread about the cloud is solved with some experience in the cloud. There's a reason it's so ubiquitous, and that's because it really is pretty damn simple once you get the hang of it.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  > Once you understand how to deploy into AWS, it really is quite simple I've seen enough 500 line YAML files to disagree with you.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Yeah, I've avoided CloudFormation like the plague, Terraform is really so much better.
- ryanjkirk 5y ago
  Our current CloudFormation pipeline template is over 5,000 lines of yaml. That's probably on the high-end, but based on your statements, it sounds like you haven't seen a corporate cloud footprint.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    I recommend using a tool that lets you break that up, something like Terraform.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aiisjustanif 5y ago
Heroku?
Shorel 5y ago
In that case, the cloud is already simple. I use it to spin a Windows server, then connect to Steam, download a game server, download some mods from S3 and start the service. The rules are in security groups. I add one Steam security group, and then another group for each game, and the machine has both of them at the same time. When the machine is running, everything is one PowerShell script. Using a Linux dev instance can only be even more simple.

by samhw 5y ago

eropple 5y ago

You pretty much just described Render. https://render.com https://render.com It's not perfect, and there is probably a point in time for a project where you'll need to evaluate other options, but I haven't found much that's better for small-scale stuff if you don't want to think too hard.

samhw 5y ago
That's fantastic! I'll have to take a look. Thanks for showing me. I was aware of Heroku, but this seems like the modern equivalent which I had in mind. (I do think you could likely go even simpler, though - there's a whole spectrum of complexity which could accommodate different services at each point.) Edit: Apropos of "there's a point in time where you'll need to evaluate other options": I think a good selling point would be a well-designed flow for 'ejecting' to a self-hosted or AWS/GCP environment. Yeah, yeah, it's not good for lock-in, but by the exact same token it would be a strong selling point. Done well, you could assuage the "we may as well get it out of the way now" concerns by saying that you'll make it easier to set up shop on AWS.
- eropple 5y ago
  You could go simpler than Render, and some folks do--but you go simpler at the cost of drastically reducing the value of a thing for whole categories of non-toy projects. For example, if you want to host a static thing there are a lot of pretty easy options, but the second you need something as foreign to the "JAMstack ideal" as "a datastore" like "for a blog with comments" now you're in multiple control panels and you're shuttling secrets around and you're confronted with paying multiple companies just to launch a blog and the whole thing physically hurts. Some mild complexity in deploy (and it is mild, a render.yaml file in your repo's super easy) comes from having the options to actually do things, I think.
- cldellow 5y ago
  I've been running a SaaS on Render for about a year now. In past lives, I managed ~$50k/mo of AWS spend for one company and $1k/mo of Heroku spend for another. Render's great for letting us just focus on the app. There are things I want them to improve, but I'm confident they'll get there eventually.
  - anurag 5y ago
    Lots of improvements and additions planned for the coming months. Thank you for sticking with us.
anurag 5y ago
(Render founder) thanks for the mention. We have 50+ person companies running entirely on Render with zero devops engineers. The point at which you need to evaluate options is a lot further out than you'd expect (and continues to disappear into the distance).
- snerual 5y ago
  Hi Founder, I've been wanting to use render for a long time now at our startup, but last time I looked at your GDPR info it was lacking. We sell to public education institutes in the EU, so it is a make or break for us. We might not be your target customer in that case, but otherwise I would love to hear what is possible.
  - anurag 5y ago
    We already sign DPAs, but expect to see more public information on GDPR later this year.
- eropple 5y ago
  Hey dude. I've been very happy with the day-job stuff we run in Render, that's why I mentioned it. ;) If (devops hat on) you want baseline compute/storage, I think I could see running on Render long-term. Where I (speaking personally) get off the ride is when I start needing external stuff, and that's usually pronounced "AWS services". Stuff like SQS and SNS are still The Killer App for AWS for me, and while I was poking at Render for my most recent personal project, it was easier to put compute and data storage into Fargate/RDS and not have to think about multiple control planes. A seamless, please-not-Terraform way to cross-manage Render resources with other cloud options would be pretty killer. (Which is directly in tension with the discussions of simplicity here. Turns out cloud stuff is hard.)
  - anurag 5y ago
    Completely agreed on building/offering higher-level services like SQS, SNS, S3. We're only at ~10% of where I want the platform to be, which is also why we're hiring quite aggressively!

sam_lowry_ 5y ago

Hetzner has its Cloud offering which is simple and configurable over API and cloud-init.

sascha_sl 5y ago
"Hetzner Cloud" is a VPS service, this entire conversation is about managed services vs unmanaged. Running under QEMU doesn't mean a server is managed.
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  Er... There are different levels of managed services. I am totally OK with the cloud that manages storage, backup and networking as well as provisioning. Every usage of RDS or Dynamo I saw until now did not need scaling nor DBA outsourcing that AWS provides. For me, Hetzner Cloud hits the sweet spot for side projects. And I use their bare metal servers to run high-volume websites. P.S. Surprisingly, non-tech businesses are often offset by Hetzner rather than by crooks with registered office in Suntec Tower, Singapore that run their "managed" services on Aquia that runs on AWS.

gwbas1c 5y ago

I thought that's Heroku?

vlovich123 5y ago

Have you tried Cloudflare pages + functions? Curious what you see as the big pieces that are missing from your ideal world? Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare.

speedgoose 5y ago
I’m not the same person, but for me to consider cloudfare functions I would need a standard solution that is not a vendor lock but something that I can run on developers machines and any server. I would also need a nice development environment. Right now I would rather develop using fastcgi than faas.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  That’s fair. For what it’s worth you can run everything locally and on any server via miniflare. This is all integrated into Wrangler 2.0 which lets you trivially switch between running things locally and in prod. The concept itself is generally portable with several services offering largely compatible implementations although there is more porting work than would be ideal. As for standards/vendor lock-in concerns, I’m sure that will get resolved sooner rather than later.

TameAntelope 5y ago

Once you understand how to deploy into AWS, it really is quite simple, and honestly not that expensive. It takes... a day or so of work to get those "IAM roles" and "ingress rules" right, and then you never have to mess with them again, and if you're using a tool like Terraform, you have a blueprint for yourself around how to riff on that concept as well, so future permissions changes are even easier. In other words, nearly every complaint in this thread about the cloud is solved with some experience in the cloud. There's a reason it's so ubiquitous, and that's because it really is pretty damn simple once you get the hang of it.

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
> Once you understand how to deploy into AWS, it really is quite simple I've seen enough 500 line YAML files to disagree with you.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Yeah, I've avoided CloudFormation like the plague, Terraform is really so much better.
ryanjkirk 5y ago
Our current CloudFormation pipeline template is over 5,000 lines of yaml. That's probably on the high-end, but based on your statements, it sounds like you haven't seen a corporate cloud footprint.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  I recommend using a tool that lets you break that up, something like Terraform.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aiisjustanif 5y ago

Heroku?

Shorel 5y ago

In that case, the cloud is already simple. I use it to spin a Windows server, then connect to Steam, download a game server, download some mods from S3 and start the service. The rules are in security groups. I add one Steam security group, and then another group for each game, and the machine has both of them at the same time. When the machine is running, everything is one PowerShell script. Using a Linux dev instance can only be even more simple.