6 ms·

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/mont

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.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Symapthy, is more like it. Theyve been convinced by the cloud rental services that it's different now and too hard, when it's really not because all that SaaS is still running on a webserver. There's just a new gate keeper with a huge marketing budget that charges by the minute now.
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      > and would definitely take longer than 40 minutes to even get their head wrapped around what’s going on. If a grown up person (who is presumably making a good money in their React/JS thing) can't figure on how to install a web server in 40 minutes (with all SO, Google and a bazillion of articles on how to do so) then... Like come on, twenty years ago you still needed to get your ass off the chair and go to the bookstore, find and buy a proper book and actually read it. Now you just need to type "Ubuntu 20 install webserver" in to the search and voila.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  The same amount of time if I would need to "stand up" a rented DB, including figuring out a bazillion of providers and options, configuring proper instance sizes, turning needed knobs for backups to work... Or you suppose what a rented service doesn't need anything at all?
throwaway894345 4y ago
Serverless is almost always a trivial cost compared to VPS. With lambda, you get like 1M free invocations per month and the price per ms is `$0.0000000017` for 128MB on ARM. If your endpoint takes 10ms to run and you're running it constantly for a month, it will cost you less than $0.05 (it will actually be about half of that because you get the first 1M invocations free each month, but ignoring that...). As you point out, running RDS is more expensive, but RDS isn't serverless. You would probably want to look at DynamoDB for a serverless database, which is considerably more affordable than RDS. Moreover, the serverless stuff is considerably easier to configure and operate than a VM.
- peterangular 4y ago
  > Moreover, the serverless stuff is considerably easier to configure and operate than a VM. Yep - and to be 100% candid on my current project I'm running 100% with GCP Functions, AppEngine Task Queues, and Firestore for persistence. I'm also AWS certified and have worked as a DevOps engineer in a PCI-regulated environment leveraging things like DyanmoDB, Lambda, etc. Cool part about running that way is my current billing is near zilch. Woo! Totally on-board with what you're saying... literally living it now =) I'm just saying that there's a ton of ways to skin a cat. And, personally I wouldn't paint with as large of a brush to say "serverless stuff is considerably easier to configure and operate than a VM." A lot of times this rings true, but I anecdotally wouldn't say it is always the case. I'm being pedantic, but I'm also trying to make a case that not always do cloud design patterns/"best-practices" make sense.
- jjav 4y ago
  > Serverless is almost always a trivial cost compared to VPS. Not my experience. Our AWS lambda cost is close to $1K/month and the usage isn't that much so we could easily host this on a few (for redundancy) of the smallish VPS instances for far less money.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    For batch workloads (not latency sensitive, can run at or near full capacity, etc), but most of the time Lambda is more affordable. You'll need to say more about your workload though.

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.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    Symapthy, is more like it. Theyve been convinced by the cloud rental services that it's different now and too hard, when it's really not because all that SaaS is still running on a webserver. There's just a new gate keeper with a huge marketing budget that charges by the minute now.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    > and would definitely take longer than 40 minutes to even get their head wrapped around what’s going on. If a grown up person (who is presumably making a good money in their React/JS thing) can't figure on how to install a web server in 40 minutes (with all SO, Google and a bazillion of articles on how to do so) then... Like come on, twenty years ago you still needed to get your ass off the chair and go to the bookstore, find and buy a proper book and actually read it. Now you just need to type "Ubuntu 20 install webserver" in to the search and voila.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
The same amount of time if I would need to "stand up" a rented DB, including figuring out a bazillion of providers and options, configuring proper instance sizes, turning needed knobs for backups to work... Or you suppose what a rented service doesn't need anything at all?

throwaway894345 4y ago

Serverless is almost always a trivial cost compared to VPS. With lambda, you get like 1M free invocations per month and the price per ms is `$0.0000000017` for 128MB on ARM. If your endpoint takes 10ms to run and you're running it constantly for a month, it will cost you less than $0.05 (it will actually be about half of that because you get the first 1M invocations free each month, but ignoring that...). As you point out, running RDS is more expensive, but RDS isn't serverless. You would probably want to look at DynamoDB for a serverless database, which is considerably more affordable than RDS. Moreover, the serverless stuff is considerably easier to configure and operate than a VM.

peterangular 4y ago
> Moreover, the serverless stuff is considerably easier to configure and operate than a VM. Yep - and to be 100% candid on my current project I'm running 100% with GCP Functions, AppEngine Task Queues, and Firestore for persistence. I'm also AWS certified and have worked as a DevOps engineer in a PCI-regulated environment leveraging things like DyanmoDB, Lambda, etc. Cool part about running that way is my current billing is near zilch. Woo! Totally on-board with what you're saying... literally living it now =) I'm just saying that there's a ton of ways to skin a cat. And, personally I wouldn't paint with as large of a brush to say "serverless stuff is considerably easier to configure and operate than a VM." A lot of times this rings true, but I anecdotally wouldn't say it is always the case. I'm being pedantic, but I'm also trying to make a case that not always do cloud design patterns/"best-practices" make sense.
jjav 4y ago
> Serverless is almost always a trivial cost compared to VPS. Not my experience. Our AWS lambda cost is close to $1K/month and the usage isn't that much so we could easily host this on a few (for redundancy) of the smallish VPS instances for far less money.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  For batch workloads (not latency sensitive, can run at or near full capacity, etc), but most of the time Lambda is more affordable. You'll need to say more about your workload though.