6 ms·

I'd rather worry about (and fix) those technical problems then having to deal with possible billing-pocalyse.

jpalomaki 4y ago
Take for example OS and app upgrades. Quite often you have few requirements, for example 1)all updates should be first tested in test env 2)updates need to be installed in timely manner 3)critical updates need to be installed quickly (30 days is too slow) When you start thinking these, they are not so easy. (1) means you can’t just run “apt upgrade” on every server - you need to manage the updates to make sure they get tested first. (2) is kind of ok, but requires some work on regular basis (at least checking things) (3) means you need to monitor the updates for your stack and classify them. You can get feeds for example for Ubuntu, but does that cover whole stack. And checking these weekly (or daily) actually gets boring. All this stuff can be done, but IMHO it is time consuming and takes time from more important things. The weekly/monthly JIRA tickets for checking x, y and z get quite annoying when you also have n other things to finish. Then you start slacking on them and feel the pain when trying to collect evidence for the next procurement process check. If you have tens or hundreds of servers and can have a separate infra team with professional sysadmins then this is all fine. My rant is mainly for small teams, where same guys are supposed to develop and run things.
- wooque 4y ago
  Small teams should just configure apt unattended upgrades and call it a day. I do this with my personal server and haven't had any issues for years.
  - remram 4y ago
    You should probably reboot it then.
peterangular 4y ago
Also the cost of those services vs. a few well-configured basic VPS hosts is nuts. I was shocked to learn that to get MySQL/Postgres in GCP it's often >$40/month - even for the insanely tiny instance sizes. We're talking for like 20G storage... In contrast I've ran some pretty hot-and-heavy MySQL/Postgres databases on basic DO/Linode VPS's for half of that cost with much success. I get these cloud tools give a ton of "out of box" features - but you are paying for it at the end of the day. Anecdotally I've noticed a huge shift away from general devs/engineers having general CLI/Linux/sysadmin knowledge.
- turtlebits 4y ago
  If you had no knowledge on standing up a DB server (installing, configuring, monitoring, logging, access control, and backups, restricting network access), how much time would that take you to learn? That and your VPS requires setup for access control, patches, updates, monitoring, logging.
  - peterangular 4y ago
    Point taken, upvote given, but for a lot of people standing up a standard redundant DB config for MySQL and Postgres isn't that big of a deal. I say this as an engineer who has a ton of relational DB experience. Before cloud providers w/DB options were so plentiful devs/engineers/sysadmins would have to set this up by hand. --- > If you had no knowledge on standing up a DB server My point is, "but yea what if you do?" There's actual value in that I've found, especially when I'm looking to save pennies at the early-stage of a startup while in the customer aq phase. Many folks have expertise in those areas without needing a cloud provider. I do get the "but all of these things!" argument (access control, patches, updates, monitoring, logging) but often those are easily solved/solvable problems even without leveraging cloud offerings. I can get very far along with an ELK/TIG stack + uptime robot and basic VPS networking features... all for a very affordable monthly bill on the infra.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    Starting a db on a web-server and running apt update/upgrade are fundamental parts of working on the web. If you or any of your developers don't know how to do that, you/they should seriously seriously spend the 40 minutes it takes to learn.
    - moreira 4y ago
      I feel like that’s where you separate the pre-cloud and post-cloud devs. It’s not hard to imagine a dev being brought up 5 years ago into a React world, with JS in the backend and something like Vercel or Netlify to deploy their app. Someone like that might be entirely uncomfortable when dumped into a plain old Linux server, and would definitely take longer than 40 minutes to even get their head wrapped around what’s going on. That’s not a knock on them - they get their job done, and to the business that’s all that matters. But yeah, just trying to, I don’t even know, empathise? Try to understand? Who knows. It’s just a different world now.
throwaway894345 4y ago
An occasional $4K charge is negligible for a business (almost everyone is better off dealing with this sort of overrun than troubleshooting servers, all else equal), and anyway this is a particularity of AWS CloudFront's billing protections rather than a fundamental flaw with serverless.
- ggktk 4y ago
  In most countries in the world, $4K charge is absolutely not negligible.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    I doubt this is true. If you're operating a tech company anywhere in the world, I'm guessing $4K is pretty close to negligible. In whatever case, indexing by country is misleading, "tech companies" in general is more interesting, if there are a handful of tech companies in the third world for which this doesn't hold, it doesn't invalidate the generalization.
    - jsiepkes 4y ago
      In SMB companies around the world "an occasional $4K charge" is definitely not negliable.
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        Again, we’re not talking about SMBs, we’re talking about tech companies generally. (What share of SMBs are there doing serverless or with any cloud footprint at all?)
ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
I'd rather have to to plan and budget than have to deal with patching (after testing the patch) every piece of software on a system the moment a patch comes out to avoid an undetectable rootkit being installed during that gap

Take for example OS and app upgrades. Quite often you have few requirements, for example 1)all updates should be first tested in test env 2)updates need to be installed in timely manner 3)critical updates need to be installed quickly (30 days is too slow) When you start thinking these, they are not so easy. (1) means you can’t just run “apt upgrade” on every server - you need to manage the updates to make sure they get tested first. (2) is kind of ok, but requires some work on regular basis (at least checking things) (3) means you need to monitor the updates for your stack and classify them. You can get feeds for example for Ubuntu, but does that cover whole stack. And checking these weekly (or daily) actually gets boring. All this stuff can be done, but IMHO it is time consuming and takes time from more important things. The weekly/monthly JIRA tickets for checking x, y and z get quite annoying when you also have n other things to finish. Then you start slacking on them and feel the pain when trying to collect evidence for the next procurement process check. If you have tens or hundreds of servers and can have a separate infra team with professional sysadmins then this is all fine. My rant is mainly for small teams, where same guys are supposed to develop and run things.

wooque 4y ago
Small teams should just configure apt unattended upgrades and call it a day. I do this with my personal server and haven't had any issues for years.
- remram 4y ago
  You should probably reboot it then.

peterangular 4y ago

Also the cost of those services vs. a few well-configured basic VPS hosts is nuts. I was shocked to learn that to get MySQL/Postgres in GCP it's often >$40/month - even for the insanely tiny instance sizes. We're talking for like 20G storage... In contrast I've ran some pretty hot-and-heavy MySQL/Postgres databases on basic DO/Linode VPS's for half of that cost with much success. I get these cloud tools give a ton of "out of box" features - but you are paying for it at the end of the day. Anecdotally I've noticed a huge shift away from general devs/engineers having general CLI/Linux/sysadmin knowledge.

turtlebits 4y ago
If you had no knowledge on standing up a DB server (installing, configuring, monitoring, logging, access control, and backups, restricting network access), how much time would that take you to learn? That and your VPS requires setup for access control, patches, updates, monitoring, logging.
- peterangular 4y ago
  Point taken, upvote given, but for a lot of people standing up a standard redundant DB config for MySQL and Postgres isn't that big of a deal. I say this as an engineer who has a ton of relational DB experience. Before cloud providers w/DB options were so plentiful devs/engineers/sysadmins would have to set this up by hand. --- > If you had no knowledge on standing up a DB server My point is, "but yea what if you do?" There's actual value in that I've found, especially when I'm looking to save pennies at the early-stage of a startup while in the customer aq phase. Many folks have expertise in those areas without needing a cloud provider. I do get the "but all of these things!" argument (access control, patches, updates, monitoring, logging) but often those are easily solved/solvable problems even without leveraging cloud offerings. I can get very far along with an ELK/TIG stack + uptime robot and basic VPS networking features... all for a very affordable monthly bill on the infra.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  Starting a db on a web-server and running apt update/upgrade are fundamental parts of working on the web. If you or any of your developers don't know how to do that, you/they should seriously seriously spend the 40 minutes it takes to learn.
  - moreira 4y ago
    I feel like that’s where you separate the pre-cloud and post-cloud devs. It’s not hard to imagine a dev being brought up 5 years ago into a React world, with JS in the backend and something like Vercel or Netlify to deploy their app. Someone like that might be entirely uncomfortable when dumped into a plain old Linux server, and would definitely take longer than 40 minutes to even get their head wrapped around what’s going on. That’s not a knock on them - they get their job done, and to the business that’s all that matters. But yeah, just trying to, I don’t even know, empathise? Try to understand? Who knows. It’s just a different world now.

throwaway894345 4y ago

An occasional $4K charge is negligible for a business (almost everyone is better off dealing with this sort of overrun than troubleshooting servers, all else equal), and anyway this is a particularity of AWS CloudFront's billing protections rather than a fundamental flaw with serverless.

ggktk 4y ago
In most countries in the world, $4K charge is absolutely not negligible.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I doubt this is true. If you're operating a tech company anywhere in the world, I'm guessing $4K is pretty close to negligible. In whatever case, indexing by country is misleading, "tech companies" in general is more interesting, if there are a handful of tech companies in the third world for which this doesn't hold, it doesn't invalidate the generalization.
  - jsiepkes 4y ago
    In SMB companies around the world "an occasional $4K charge" is definitely not negliable.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      Again, we’re not talking about SMBs, we’re talking about tech companies generally. (What share of SMBs are there doing serverless or with any cloud footprint at all?)

ImPostingOnHN 4y ago

I'd rather have to to plan and budget than have to deal with patching (after testing the patch) every piece of software on a system the moment a patch comes out to avoid an undetectable rootkit being installed during that gap