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Does anyone know an adblock rule to filter out HN articles telling me to buy an on-prem server to replace AWS? Seriously though, why are valueless bait articles

Does anyone know an adblock rule to filter out HN articles telling me to buy an on-prem server to replace AWS? Seriously though, why are valueless bait articles like this so popular here? Is it collective satire that I'm missing? Is "you don't need AWS" a trendy counterculture thing? I could swear I've clicked through to equivalent articles at least five times from HN.

rmbyrro 4y ago
May have multiple reasons: 1) Some people just like the infra work, so they presume everyone likes as well. AWS eliminates/simplifies a good portion of it. 2) Some feel a sense of superiority saying they can pull off an entire infra on Hertzner. They know many younger engineers can't, since they started with AWS in mind. 3) AWS has a terrible reputation as an employer. Perhaps some these anti-AWS blog writers might have worked there, know someone who did, or heard one of the AWS PIP horror stories...
- mulmboy 4y ago
  Interesting take, > Some people just like the infra work I think AWS improves infra work. Using CDK is a joy - primarily because it's clean, simple, and reproducible once you have stuff up and running. But the process of getting stuff up and running is its own kind of drug, it's a serious puzzle (unless you really really know what you're doing) which I find really rewarding to solve. I'm a pig in mud with CDK. Compare that with traditional infra work and I immediately start to worry about how to make sure that everything is provisioned correctly, that other people on the team aren't messing things up, how I'm going to implement zero-trust type auth without something akin to IAM, how I'm going to implement monitoring without the monitoring system becoming its own beast....
  - rmbyrro 4y ago
    Absolutely. I'm referring to the traditional infra work. I think these people should seek a job at AWS, Azure, GCP.
- randomtwiddler 4y ago
  I avoid it because of unsafe billing practices. As someone higher up in the comments said, "don't buy stuff you can't afford". The problem there is understanding AWS billing is an industry itself. Numerous stories of people who thought they understood something they didn't. Software bugs resulting in bankrupty. I have to have billing predictability out of my service provider. I'm not aware of AWS employment issues other than it being a place to burn you out, but the wearhouse side has had plenty of newsworthy incidents.
muh_gradle 4y ago
Finding AWS alternatives in an AWS world generates clicks.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
> Is "you don't need AWS" a trendy counterculture thing? It's this. There's a growing counterculture that likes to hate on Big Tech, and a lot of these folks do so by making disingenuous criticisms against Big Tech. These criticisms are usually low-effort and inaccurate but the authors know they'll get upvotes and spread their screed because of how popular it is to hate on big tech in these countercultures. It's a shame because there's certainly valid, deep criticisms to offer Big Tech but once it became counterculture-popular to hate on Big Tech then people just began taking potshots where they can. Criticizing the cloud is a popular one because a lot of engineers genuinely don't know a lot about ops and don't know what a cloud is and isn't, they just use it because a senior engineer at their company made the (usually reasonable) decision to opt into a cloud. Alternatively they're junior engineers that have only written software on their machines and don't know what the difference is between running on a local Linux machine and running a net-connected service. That makes it fertile ground to make unsubstantiated claims because most engineers don't actually understand what's happening.

rmbyrro 4y ago

May have multiple reasons: 1) Some people just like the infra work, so they presume everyone likes as well. AWS eliminates/simplifies a good portion of it. 2) Some feel a sense of superiority saying they can pull off an entire infra on Hertzner. They know many younger engineers can't, since they started with AWS in mind. 3) AWS has a terrible reputation as an employer. Perhaps some these anti-AWS blog writers might have worked there, know someone who did, or heard one of the AWS PIP horror stories...

mulmboy 4y ago
Interesting take, > Some people just like the infra work I think AWS improves infra work. Using CDK is a joy - primarily because it's clean, simple, and reproducible once you have stuff up and running. But the process of getting stuff up and running is its own kind of drug, it's a serious puzzle (unless you really really know what you're doing) which I find really rewarding to solve. I'm a pig in mud with CDK. Compare that with traditional infra work and I immediately start to worry about how to make sure that everything is provisioned correctly, that other people on the team aren't messing things up, how I'm going to implement zero-trust type auth without something akin to IAM, how I'm going to implement monitoring without the monitoring system becoming its own beast....
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  Absolutely. I'm referring to the traditional infra work. I think these people should seek a job at AWS, Azure, GCP.
randomtwiddler 4y ago
I avoid it because of unsafe billing practices. As someone higher up in the comments said, "don't buy stuff you can't afford". The problem there is understanding AWS billing is an industry itself. Numerous stories of people who thought they understood something they didn't. Software bugs resulting in bankrupty. I have to have billing predictability out of my service provider. I'm not aware of AWS employment issues other than it being a place to burn you out, but the wearhouse side has had plenty of newsworthy incidents.

muh_gradle 4y ago

Finding AWS alternatives in an AWS world generates clicks.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

> Is "you don't need AWS" a trendy counterculture thing? It's this. There's a growing counterculture that likes to hate on Big Tech, and a lot of these folks do so by making disingenuous criticisms against Big Tech. These criticisms are usually low-effort and inaccurate but the authors know they'll get upvotes and spread their screed because of how popular it is to hate on big tech in these countercultures. It's a shame because there's certainly valid, deep criticisms to offer Big Tech but once it became counterculture-popular to hate on Big Tech then people just began taking potshots where they can. Criticizing the cloud is a popular one because a lot of engineers genuinely don't know a lot about ops and don't know what a cloud is and isn't, they just use it because a senior engineer at their company made the (usually reasonable) decision to opt into a cloud. Alternatively they're junior engineers that have only written software on their machines and don't know what the difference is between running on a local Linux machine and running a net-connected service. That makes it fertile ground to make unsubstantiated claims because most engineers don't actually understand what's happening.