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99.999...% of us don't work or seriously touch in AI in any way. At best you make an API call to something that might do some AI, but at that point its just ano

99.999...% of us don't work or seriously touch in AI in any way. At best you make an API call to something that might do some AI, but at that point its just another service. So for the vast majority of people doing dev work, boring choices are correct. I've had a lot of junior devs come to me with proposals for microservice architectures that can autoscale, be orchestrated, have 0 downtime with red/blue deployments, etc, etc, when at the end of the day it could be done with a boring, single server (plus second for resiliency, but not needed for scaling) with just a few endpoints. It will be done much faster & simpler, which means it will be cheaper and less likely to fail. My guess is that the same is true in a lot of AI work. Yes there is core stuff that needs to be performant, scalable, and modern, but I'm sure there is also a ton of boring old regular internal corporate infra that can be done 'boring'.

threeseed 3y ago
The first approach will be significantly cheaper if using the cloud. It allows you to use spot/ephemeral instances and scale down capacity to almost zero cost without any loss in availability. Single server in the cloud is great for dev environments and if you don't care about uptime. But given that poor uptime is toxic for customer retention only incompetent businesses would deliberately not choose to use something better suited. Especially when it's so much cheaper.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > The first approach will be significantly cheaper if using the cloud. Only if you're regularly scaling down to zero (AKA too few paying customers to stay in business). > only incompetent businesses would deliberately not choose to use something better suited. There's a time and place for both approaches. If you're serving anywhere near the number of users needed to show a profit, spot instances are extremely expensive.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    Ignoring managed services: Spot instances are the cheapest types of instances you can get. Auto-scaling the smallest compute instances for your use case is the most efficient architecture you can get. It doesn't matter what time or place it is. These are facts that you can check for yourself on AWS/GCP etc cost calculators.

threeseed 3y ago

The first approach will be significantly cheaper if using the cloud. It allows you to use spot/ephemeral instances and scale down capacity to almost zero cost without any loss in availability. Single server in the cloud is great for dev environments and if you don't care about uptime. But given that poor uptime is toxic for customer retention only incompetent businesses would deliberately not choose to use something better suited. Especially when it's so much cheaper.

lelanthran 3y ago
> The first approach will be significantly cheaper if using the cloud. Only if you're regularly scaling down to zero (AKA too few paying customers to stay in business). > only incompetent businesses would deliberately not choose to use something better suited. There's a time and place for both approaches. If you're serving anywhere near the number of users needed to show a profit, spot instances are extremely expensive.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Ignoring managed services: Spot instances are the cheapest types of instances you can get. Auto-scaling the smallest compute instances for your use case is the most efficient architecture you can get. It doesn't matter what time or place it is. These are facts that you can check for yourself on AWS/GCP etc cost calculators.