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I spent over ten years in the Rails community and as a result consider myself fairly well versed in the things that tend to come out of the mouth of DHH. This

by mdhb 3y ago

I spent over ten years in the Rails community and as a result consider myself fairly well versed in the things that tend to come out of the mouth of DHH. This particular one is very much in line with some of his other greatest hits where the more you dig into his claims and assumptions the more things don’t seem to always add up in quite the way he is presenting them. Without going super deep on the topic, he came to cloud with his on-prem architecture choices, made very few adaptions to take advantage of what cloud is good at besides trying to slap K8s around it and then was upset that the benefits never materialised. I can understand that being a shitty and painful experience but he is now acting as an anti-cloud evangelist of sorts while arguing against a series of constraints and choices that he picked and clearly weren’t appropriate for his business. But now for him that’s all that cloud can ever be as it’s all he ever knew.

willtemperley 3y ago
So in reality they've done two unnecessary migrations, burned a ton of cash on cloud compute and are selling it as a success?
sgarland 3y ago
While I don’t doubt your personal experience, I’ve spent time at a cloud-native company and boy, do they know how to spend money. Just because you’ve bought into every .aaS the cloud has doesn’t mean you’ll save money. RDS, for example, is stupidly expensive. I maintain that it’s not that hard to use Xtrabackup or any of the other free and open tooling to run regular backups for RDBMS. It’s also not that hard to set up HA. If those things seem hard, your Aurora Serverless bill is going to be even harder to swallow when it hits.
- ckdarby 3y ago
  Sounds like a great business opportunity for you that will make millions and millions.
  - sgarland 3y ago
    Touché. I have no desire to start an IaaS company. However, if I ever launch a product, it will be running on my own hardware (to be clear, I own the hardware now; this isn’t a future CAPEX) until there is a clear financial incentive to not do so.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    The challenge is selling it. I did devops contracting for years, and I gave my customers a standing offer: If they were not sure they'd save money, I'd guarantee they'd save money, including on my ongoing fees, if they moved to managed hosting instead of cloud, and I'd charge them a percentage of their savings over the first few months only to do the transition. Even in the face of that, and extensive spreadsheets, it was always a big challenge to convince people to try even with smaller parts of their services. AWS is a known entity. It's not a career risk. If something goes wrong, they have someone to blame. Of the ones that did take me up, one cut their costs (including the devops) by 90%. More typically 50%-70%. And you're making that effort to make far narrower margins.

by mdhb 3y ago

willtemperley 3y ago

So in reality they've done two unnecessary migrations, burned a ton of cash on cloud compute and are selling it as a success?

sgarland 3y ago

While I don’t doubt your personal experience, I’ve spent time at a cloud-native company and boy, do they know how to spend money. Just because you’ve bought into every .aaS the cloud has doesn’t mean you’ll save money. RDS, for example, is stupidly expensive. I maintain that it’s not that hard to use Xtrabackup or any of the other free and open tooling to run regular backups for RDBMS. It’s also not that hard to set up HA. If those things seem hard, your Aurora Serverless bill is going to be even harder to swallow when it hits.

ckdarby 3y ago
Sounds like a great business opportunity for you that will make millions and millions.
- sgarland 3y ago
  Touché. I have no desire to start an IaaS company. However, if I ever launch a product, it will be running on my own hardware (to be clear, I own the hardware now; this isn’t a future CAPEX) until there is a clear financial incentive to not do so.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The challenge is selling it. I did devops contracting for years, and I gave my customers a standing offer: If they were not sure they'd save money, I'd guarantee they'd save money, including on my ongoing fees, if they moved to managed hosting instead of cloud, and I'd charge them a percentage of their savings over the first few months only to do the transition. Even in the face of that, and extensive spreadsheets, it was always a big challenge to convince people to try even with smaller parts of their services. AWS is a known entity. It's not a career risk. If something goes wrong, they have someone to blame. Of the ones that did take me up, one cut their costs (including the devops) by 90%. More typically 50%-70%. And you're making that effort to make far narrower margins.