4 ms·

Learning dozens specific cloud services and shelling out money everywhere I go is way less appealing to me than buying a cheap dedicated server and firing up ex

by arsome 4y ago

Learning dozens specific cloud services and shelling out money everywhere I go is way less appealing to me than buying a cheap dedicated server and firing up exactly what I need. It'll take me far longer to figure out what FarGate and Cloudflare Pages and all these are and infinitely longer to keep up with the latest and greatest because it keeps changing constantly. And even once I get it, I'll have very limited control or understanding of my stack, and migration? I'm screwed. I'm not interested in playing games like that. nginx is comparatively simple, run it, it serves. Config is easy, learn it once, run it anywhere, it doesn't get a dozen new features and breaking changes every month, just does its job. I guess I'd just rather understand the real underlying technologies than some crappy commercial wrapper for them that will differ every time someone tries to rip me off.

nindalf 4y ago
For what it’s worth, there isn’t much to learn with cloudflare pages. You grant it Oauth access to a particular repo, it builds master and serves the output directory. Only thing you specify is the build command and the output directory. For example “hugo build”/“npm run build” and directory “out/“. I use it for a few reasons. I like that it’s free and the hosting of the static content is at the edge. They also take care of some things automatically, like compressing the assets once at build time and serving them with the right headers. I don’t think this is unique. I believe netlify and others have similar offerings. These providers are excellent for the use case of serving static content at low latency and low cost.
pantulis 4y ago
That's the "Linux Server Singleton" pattern from the FA, isn't it? I find it surprising that it's in 3rd position. While SSG looks simple enough to merit the first position, going with the Cloudflare serverless proposition as the next step for beginners feels strange to me. I think you would be able to "graduate" to serverless-edge functions after you grok the traditional web client/server approach, not before.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
1) Almost all of these services have generous free tiers. Even if you're running a relatively high traffic site your bill will be practically $0. 2) These technologies are stable and usually not that complicated. You are missing out on a lot of productivity by not looking into them. Understanding the "real underlying technologies" is a myth. The "underlying technologies" are constantly changing, unless you are using an extremely outdated stack: https://www.youtube.com/live/hWjT_OOBdOc?feature=share https://www.youtube.com/live/hWjT_OOBdOc?feature=share.
- glutamate 4y ago
  > The "underlying technologies" are constantly changing, unless you are using an extremely outdated stack So will also constantly change their behaviour in the edge cases. Thank you for giving me another reason for not using that crap. I'll stick with my extremely outdated stack.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    Uh, what? Your product Saltcorn uses Webpack, React, Express, Docker and probably many more modern technologies. Those were just the ones I found looking at the repo for 5min. Cloud and serverless platforms are similarly modern tech, except for deployment and hosting. Do you really think that e.g. AWS and Cloudflare "constantly change their behaviour in the edge cases"?
    - glutamate 4y ago
      yes, but I control all those dependencies with a lock file and pinned dependencies. We have tests for their behaviour including a test script in CI that boots up the service locally and connects to it, making various assertions. I think there is a difference here between the core behaviour and the edge case behaviour. I guess I would trust that in the core behaviour they do not change on a day-to-day basis but the question is how do they behave when you are pushing the tools outside the intended core use cases. Can you then really trust services that change their core implementation constantly will work for your workflow? TBH i would probably trust a CDN because I have a fairly simple use for such a service. If I were really pushing these tools, like running a video broadcast service or whatever, I would be much more worried.
nicbou 4y ago
Nginx is not relatively simple. It's not easy. It's an unintuitive, poorly documented minefield. I agree with you in principle, but in practice mthese services replace dozens of hours of banging your head against software that's one misstep from blowing your legs clean off. Sometimes, you have better things to do than tweaking nginx configs using the average of a dozen tutorials and docs that might as well be written in middle English. I don't have better things to do, which is why I bothered. I'm not sure if it was really worth it. Cloudflare took 5 minutes to set up.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- omnibrain 4y ago
  > Nginx is not relatively simple. It's not easy. It's an unintuitive, poorly documented minefield. And that's why I use Caddy.
  - heliodor 4y ago
    The original point comparing nginx with services makes sense if you replace "nginx" with "caddy". Nginx is a disaster from a usability point of view.
- joshmanders 4y ago
  The premise that OP states isn't that Cloudflare is easier, but that when that one misstep happens and attempts to blow your legs clean off, you at least are in control of the environment and can debug/fix what's going on. Not so easy on these platforms.
- jefurii 4y ago
  > Nginx is not relatively simple. Sure it is, if your needs are simple and you follow a tutorial and don't just randomly spam stuff into your config files. Nginx can get really really complicated but it doesn't have to. > mthese services replace dozens of hours of banging your head against software that's one misstep from blowing your legs clean off. Yes, you can definitely spend hours figuring out Nginx, but you can shoot your foot off with a PAAS just as easily and at least Nginx is a technology that you can use in many different situations. It's definitely worth learning a tool like that, versus a commercial service where you play in a sandbox and they can jack up the price or change the rules at any time. This is written as a long-time web developer and sysadmin. A lot of comments like the above seem to be written to try to scare younger devs away from standard tools and into the arms of PAAS vendors.
chr15m 4y ago
If you want the best of both worlds install Dokku or Piku. You get a PaaS-like experience on your own VPS.
kenmorechalfant 4y ago
Sorry, but this advice just sounds really out of date. How is "a cheap server" ever cheaper than free? I don't think you understand just how generous and simple the free static hosting CDNs are. NGINX is fine but it's absolutely not simpler than saying "hey Cloudflare, serve my main branch at this URL" and then it does all the rest automatically.
adammarples 4y ago
Disagree. Fargate is very simple and as far as I know has not changed much in years. Give it a docker image, watch it go. Want to leave? It's literally a dockerfile, take it and run it elsewhere.
selcuka 4y ago
> It'll take me far longer to figure out what FarGate and Cloudflare Pages and all these are and infinitely longer to keep up with the latest and greatest because it keeps changing constantly. First, Fargate and CloudFlare Pages are completely different things. Fargate is "serverless" Kubernetes while Pages is just static hosting (if you don't count workers). While you have a point about the former, you can't beat CF Pages (or Netlify, or Vercel, or any other modern static hosting system) in simplicity. You just push your changes to your own Github repo and it gets automagically deployed. It is also free up to the point your cheap dedicated can handle. Try it and you will be pleasantly surprised.

by arsome 4y ago

nindalf 4y ago

For what it’s worth, there isn’t much to learn with cloudflare pages. You grant it Oauth access to a particular repo, it builds master and serves the output directory. Only thing you specify is the build command and the output directory. For example “hugo build”/“npm run build” and directory “out/“. I use it for a few reasons. I like that it’s free and the hosting of the static content is at the edge. They also take care of some things automatically, like compressing the assets once at build time and serving them with the right headers. I don’t think this is unique. I believe netlify and others have similar offerings. These providers are excellent for the use case of serving static content at low latency and low cost.

pantulis 4y ago

That's the "Linux Server Singleton" pattern from the FA, isn't it? I find it surprising that it's in 3rd position. While SSG looks simple enough to merit the first position, going with the Cloudflare serverless proposition as the next step for beginners feels strange to me. I think you would be able to "graduate" to serverless-edge functions after you grok the traditional web client/server approach, not before.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

1) Almost all of these services have generous free tiers. Even if you're running a relatively high traffic site your bill will be practically $0. 2) These technologies are stable and usually not that complicated. You are missing out on a lot of productivity by not looking into them. Understanding the "real underlying technologies" is a myth. The "underlying technologies" are constantly changing, unless you are using an extremely outdated stack: https://www.youtube.com/live/hWjT_OOBdOc?feature=share https://www.youtube.com/live/hWjT_OOBdOc?feature=share.

glutamate 4y ago
> The "underlying technologies" are constantly changing, unless you are using an extremely outdated stack So will also constantly change their behaviour in the edge cases. Thank you for giving me another reason for not using that crap. I'll stick with my extremely outdated stack.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  Uh, what? Your product Saltcorn uses Webpack, React, Express, Docker and probably many more modern technologies. Those were just the ones I found looking at the repo for 5min. Cloud and serverless platforms are similarly modern tech, except for deployment and hosting. Do you really think that e.g. AWS and Cloudflare "constantly change their behaviour in the edge cases"?
  - glutamate 4y ago
    yes, but I control all those dependencies with a lock file and pinned dependencies. We have tests for their behaviour including a test script in CI that boots up the service locally and connects to it, making various assertions. I think there is a difference here between the core behaviour and the edge case behaviour. I guess I would trust that in the core behaviour they do not change on a day-to-day basis but the question is how do they behave when you are pushing the tools outside the intended core use cases. Can you then really trust services that change their core implementation constantly will work for your workflow? TBH i would probably trust a CDN because I have a fairly simple use for such a service. If I were really pushing these tools, like running a video broadcast service or whatever, I would be much more worried.

nicbou 4y ago

Nginx is not relatively simple. It's not easy. It's an unintuitive, poorly documented minefield. I agree with you in principle, but in practice mthese services replace dozens of hours of banging your head against software that's one misstep from blowing your legs clean off. Sometimes, you have better things to do than tweaking nginx configs using the average of a dozen tutorials and docs that might as well be written in middle English. I don't have better things to do, which is why I bothered. I'm not sure if it was really worth it. Cloudflare took 5 minutes to set up.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
omnibrain 4y ago
> Nginx is not relatively simple. It's not easy. It's an unintuitive, poorly documented minefield. And that's why I use Caddy.
- heliodor 4y ago
  The original point comparing nginx with services makes sense if you replace "nginx" with "caddy". Nginx is a disaster from a usability point of view.
joshmanders 4y ago
The premise that OP states isn't that Cloudflare is easier, but that when that one misstep happens and attempts to blow your legs clean off, you at least are in control of the environment and can debug/fix what's going on. Not so easy on these platforms.
jefurii 4y ago
> Nginx is not relatively simple. Sure it is, if your needs are simple and you follow a tutorial and don't just randomly spam stuff into your config files. Nginx can get really really complicated but it doesn't have to. > mthese services replace dozens of hours of banging your head against software that's one misstep from blowing your legs clean off. Yes, you can definitely spend hours figuring out Nginx, but you can shoot your foot off with a PAAS just as easily and at least Nginx is a technology that you can use in many different situations. It's definitely worth learning a tool like that, versus a commercial service where you play in a sandbox and they can jack up the price or change the rules at any time. This is written as a long-time web developer and sysadmin. A lot of comments like the above seem to be written to try to scare younger devs away from standard tools and into the arms of PAAS vendors.

chr15m 4y ago

If you want the best of both worlds install Dokku or Piku. You get a PaaS-like experience on your own VPS.

kenmorechalfant 4y ago

Sorry, but this advice just sounds really out of date. How is "a cheap server" ever cheaper than free? I don't think you understand just how generous and simple the free static hosting CDNs are. NGINX is fine but it's absolutely not simpler than saying "hey Cloudflare, serve my main branch at this URL" and then it does all the rest automatically.

adammarples 4y ago

Disagree. Fargate is very simple and as far as I know has not changed much in years. Give it a docker image, watch it go. Want to leave? It's literally a dockerfile, take it and run it elsewhere.

selcuka 4y ago

> It'll take me far longer to figure out what FarGate and Cloudflare Pages and all these are and infinitely longer to keep up with the latest and greatest because it keeps changing constantly. First, Fargate and CloudFlare Pages are completely different things. Fargate is "serverless" Kubernetes while Pages is just static hosting (if you don't count workers). While you have a point about the former, you can't beat CF Pages (or Netlify, or Vercel, or any other modern static hosting system) in simplicity. You just push your changes to your own Github repo and it gets automagically deployed. It is also free up to the point your cheap dedicated can handle. Try it and you will be pleasantly surprised.