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Managed services still require engineering efforts. I have never seen a transition to a cloud service that actually didn't end up requiring a new hire. It's th

Managed services still require engineering efforts. I have never seen a transition to a cloud service that actually didn't end up requiring a new hire. It's the dirty little secret of our industry.

echelon 2y ago
This is the biggest nasty secret about cloud (and SaaS for things you don't build in-house). When my last company transitioned to cloud, all of the on-prem folks had to additionally take on that responsibility. We then had to hire a bunch of new folks to ease the transition and manage the cloud pieces. And then there are new teams spun up for permissions and security. Your headcount requirements are not going to go down because of cloud. As for those that like to call DIY systems "weirdware": homegrown systems are expensive to engineer, but cheap to run. We 10x'd our cost going to 3rd party visibility and feature flagging versus the thinly staffed [1] homegrown systems. And those 3rd party systems also required a ton of engineering to support, the migrations weren't clean, and they missed a lot of key features that we had to upstream to the third parties! When SignalFx got bought out by Splunk, I've never seen an annual plan get re-wired so hastily. Top priority was moving to a new vendor, and that impacted every single team in the company. The only real tangible benefit to cloud that I've seen is that a team can instantly provision hardware, database, etc. resources without much planning. That's it. And is that worth it? (I don't really think so.) [1] Once built, half an engineering headcount per quarter to accommodate new features. Oncall rotation for one team that owned the systems. Our stuff was high resiliency and barely paged at all. No SEV1 or worse outages ever.
- deanCommie 2y ago
  What a short-sighted outlook 1) "homegrown systems are expensive to engineer, but cheap to run" misses the most important part - how much does it cost to maintain, and how much of a RISK is it? Homegrown probably means you're depending on tribal knowledge from a few core people who if they leave you're hosed. That's a risk. You also have to train EVERYONE you hire to learn the homegrown systems, instead of hiring people with externally transferrable skills that can come in and hit the ground running. 2) all of the on-prem folks had to additionally take on that responsibility Most transitions/migrations always end up with a period where you have both systems running. It's not surprising that at first everyone has additional responsibilities. It sounds like the "on-prem folks" either didn't have the skills to work in the cloud or refused to learn, and needed external hires. Well, that's one way to put themselves out of a job, and that would be the next step once the homegrown system is deprecated. Obviously there's a reason why "not invented here" syndrome exists. There's a reason "build vs buy" is a complex discussion because of more than just buy costs. People always prefer the home-grown thing, DIY. Engineers especially. On this site, particularly. And, also, plenty of successful businesses exist by cutting out layers and going on a shallower stack ("your margin is my opportunity"). But at the end of the day, for the vast majority of businesses, companies, and software shops, managing their own in-house infrastructure is a worse decision than paying a cloud vendor.
  - aledalgrande 2y ago
    I see both points but I have to agree with this one, especially if we’re talking small companies. A startup should outsource everything that is outside their core product (but not more than that), so they can focus on making their product top class.
  - jcelerier 2y ago
    > Homegrown probably means you're depending on tribal knowledge from a few core people who if they leave you're hosed. there's so much complexity and tribal knowledge with cloud deployments that if tomorrow our cloud experts leave we're also very definitely hosed too, despite everything being documented thoroughly. I'm involved in a product that leverages a cloud-based metaverse system (Mozilla Hubs) that recently had organisational changes requiring us to change our hosting approach, and it's taking the better part of a year of work to understand its logic, for something that would have been a non-issue if homegrown & self-hosted.
- pphysch 2y ago
  > This is the biggest nasty secret about cloud (and SaaS for things you don't build in-house). Yep. Huge amounts of marketing funds are spent tricking decision-makers into thinking that off-the-shelf, plug-and-play solutions exist for their idiosyncratic business problems and schemas. Sometimes such products exist, but they are so bloated with features to support the other 99% of customers. So you absolutely need at least one expert to unwind the complexity. It's known that "greenfield" software development is much easier than "brownfield"/migrations. It should also be widely known that brownfield SaaS integrations are troublesome, because it involves enormous software+data work to link the existing in-house interfaces to the third-party interfaces. As a rule of thumb, there is no such thing as "off-the-shelf". You WILL have to hire and build and deeply understand your business processes.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    This is what people tell themselves, but 99% of the time, what your business does and the scale it operates at aren't special.
    - adamisom 2y ago
      Special in the sense of scale does not equate to special in the sense of adapting to your business' needs/culture/sensemaking
    - lazide 2y ago
      They don’t have to be special to be bespoke. And almost all business integrations are highly bespoke.
- spamizbad 2y ago
  I love the term "weirdware": I've seen systems like that built (and used!) first-hand multiple times in my career. They can sometimes be very odd force multipliers in unexpected ways. My favorite example is a home-rolled payroll applications specifically for sales people from over a decade ago. When I first arrived at the org I thought they were absolutely insane to have created such a thing. But its killer feature was that it allowed our org to pay out commissions rapidly (same day) and also allowed negotiating on a per-account residual commission basis as well as giving management the option to buy-out residuals. Off-the-shelf solutions at that time kinda-sorta did this but required either massive upfront $$$ and a ton of integration work. A plucky startup couldn't afford it. This was built, tested, and rolled-out in 45 days by 2 engineers and basically allowed them to poach top sales people because they knew they could get paid faster and had more flexibility on residuals.
  - davedx 2y ago
    Ha I built an internal app just like that for field sales at a mid sized company. One of the best projects I ever worked on.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    That's the tradeoff everyone makes when they say something isn't in their "core competency" - they give up any real competitive advantage that area of expertise could bring them. That often makes total sense like with accounting or HR, but most companies take it way too far in engineering and internal support software. Engineers make the same mistake all the time too: we love to say that "premature optimization is the root of all evil", ignoring that the full quote is "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. _Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%_"
- throwup238 2y ago
  > The only real tangible benefit to cloud that I've seen is that a team can instantly provision hardware, database, etc. resources without much planning. That's it. And is that worth it? (I don't really think so.) Yes! Maybe not for you or me, but it’s definitely worth it to tons of organizations where everyone including engineering was beholden to old school IT departments that take months to spin up a VM after pages of bureaucratic back and forth. The cloud moves it from an IT issue to department budgeting. The other advantage of cloud was moving capex to opex which the finance people liked because *hand wave* something about amortization. Those are the two reasons most established companies moved to the cloud. It had little to do with the actual cost but how it was spent and who was in charge of doing it.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    where everyone including engineering was beholden to old school IT departments that take months to spin up a VM after pages of bureaucratic back and forth. The cloud moves it from an IT issue to department budgeting. My F500 company put a stop to that. There is new paperwork in place to requisition cloud resources. The bureaucracy will not be replaced.
    - ndriscoll 2y ago
      Even the startup I worked at in my last job didn't let people just spin up whatever resources they felt like in AWS. Changes had to go through architecture/security review, and I might have been the only SDE who was allowed to log into AWS at all. We were subject to SOC 2, but I imagine it's relatively common for SaaS companies to have some kind of compliance framework assuming they want F500s as customers?
  - dopylitty 2y ago
    Having seen the results of everyone being able to spin up a VM (or an EMR cluster, or an EKS cluster) I can say a little more bureaucracy is probably a good thing. You end up wasting huge amounts of money on resources that are just sitting around idle (no your fancy automation to shut them down won't work because maybe that dev cluster is actually needed at 2am on Sunday. It's an org problem, not a technical problem). But more importantly you give the cloud providers an excuse to destroy another square mile of pristine forest and build a giant 4 story grey box that wastes enormous amounts of already limited water and energy.
- sneak 2y ago
  > Your headcount requirements are not going to go down because of cloud. Depends on how big you are. I'm one person and I do a lot of things with the cloud that I could not do if I had to rack servers (or even order dedicateds). Same goes for small 5-10 person teams that are good with Terraform. I've seen some orgs punching waaaay above their weight given their size. Not possible without classic IaaS.
  - lanstin 2y ago
    Being able to put everything into (good) source with all the lessons we have about how to manage source code over time puts incredible power into teams that can handle it.
    - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
      That sort of thing is much easier to do with a standard k8s/ansible/whatever stack than having to juggle proprietary cloud provider stacks.
  - throwaway29511 2y ago
    > do a lot of things with the cloud that I could not do if I had to rack servers It's not a binary choice between cloud and physical racks in a data center. There is a wide range of options. Companies like Hetzner enables you to click a button and get a dedicated instance, while Digitalocean can provide you with a VM. Both options are cheap and doesn't require much time. If you do this often, you probably also have an ansible setup to install the base software (like k8s or a simpler stack), you are ready to go within minutes. Just like you would have a terraform config for your cloud
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  "Cloud" is an accounting trick that moves CapEx to OpEx. That's it. It has no technical reason to exist.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Virtual Machines becoming sufficiently performant is a technical reason for it to exist. It's far less viable if we didn't get vmx and related extensions to the x86 command set.
  - bushbaba 2y ago
    Having done both cloud and on prem. It’s soo much more than that. Pace of innovation increases with cloud as you no longer have product beholden to the infra team jira hell.
    - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
      "Infra team jira hell" exists precisely because of accounting CapEx trickery. There are no technical reasons for it to exist.
roncesvalles 2y ago
Eh, sure but it's not the same person. There are far more people who can "do cloud" than those who genuinely understand distributed systems well enough to build and operate a homegrown data infrastructure.
- makmanalp 2y ago
  True, but anyone who's a cheaper hire because they can "do cloud" but not homegrown also represents a sacrifice in terms of what's you get. In terms of your operational capabilities, you'll likely be paying for that with a crisis first where everyone yells at your team because of a problem in your managed provider you can't fix, and you can't get someone from the provider on the line and helpful in a way that gets you out of it faster. So then you'll tack on add a massive yearly support retainer for a response time SLA that's still bad for your business bottom line and support that's not incentivized to prioritize you. I have stories from name-brand PaaS/IaaS companies. It's like outsourcing (I don't mean offshore, I mean any kind). It can be a reasonable thing to do if you don't pretend you're getting the same thing for less money and really actually plan around that. But people often do pretend it's the same, and the results aren't immediately apparent. And when they're finally blatantly apparent, either the guilty party has cashed out and left, or people don't have enough perspective to point to the real root cause. I'm not saying building your own infra is generally a good idea of course. It's just that beyond a certain size, for more businesses than you'd think, reliability has to be a core competency you invest in. And homegrown is a lot easier than it used to be because the offerings in terms of tooling and platforms are way better such that you can strategically craft your level of managedness for optimum cost/benefit on multiple criteria.
999900000999 2y ago
It depends on your scale. As a solo dev just being able to point my apps to firebase and not worry about it saves a ridiculous amount of time. At Uber's scale they probably have to tweak Dynamo and other services so much they might as well bring em in house. I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen a new AWS, something like Walmart Web Services.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  On the other hand as a solo dev `sudo apt-get install postgresql` plus a short tweak of your pg_hba.conf and a quick script to run pg_dump every night is about as much work as setting up a cloud service. Managed databases provide a lot of useful features, especially if shit hits the fan. I'm not saying you shouldn't use them. But the work you put into reasonable self-hosted services and reasonable managed services often scale at a surprisingly similar pace.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    Alright, what about Auth or other features Firebase has built in ? I still have to host it somewhere.
    - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
      Auth is included in your stack, e.g: django comes with it. Plus you own the accounts, so you are not locked in. Sync is the firebase kill feature, but most apps can live without it.
      - 999900000999 2y ago
        For a side project it's not that serious. Firebase is ready to go without me thinking of the details. If I'm using Flutter or React, I already have a nice client side sdk to use. The 12th of never when I need to scale it I can switch to a different stack. Firebase functions allows me to do some server side data manipulation. That said, if I was at work and needed to propose something I'd probably spend more time thinking of this. But for all my side projects firebase is my goto. Let's just say we're having a competition to see who can crank out a basic crud app first. You're not beating me with Flutter and Firebase.
rco8786 2y ago
Bingo. You still need your whole Ops and tooling teams. They just become Cloud Ops and Cloud Tooling.
devjab 2y ago
You wish! In my experience they just load all the cloud work on to developers. Like, I’m setting up virtual networks, private endpoints, firewalls and what not, because if I don’t there won’t be horrible (I basically knew nothing about networking before I did it and I still don’t know if anything we do is correct in any manner) security but no security. It’ll bite the company in the ass eventually, or maybe it won’t, but it is what it is.
diob 2y ago
I don't think it's a secret, I think the idea is it will allow you to be more resilient then a custom solution. Why? If the person(s) who made the custom solution leave, you can't as easily hire a replacement. What's more, hiring immediately effective folks becomes harder, even if those folks who made it don't leave. It's a tradeoff, but I don't think folks are keeping secrets around it.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  Not true. The hiring pool for developers that know Postgres is maybe a thousand times larger than those that know DynamoDB.
lanstin 2y ago
Cloud costs more but gives you data enter as a service. Software defined everything.
acchow 2y ago
What about after the transition is complete? Surely managing a… managed service… is less costly?

Managed services still require engineering efforts. I have never seen a transition to a cloud service that actually didn't end up requiring a new hire. It's the dirty little secret of our industry.

echelon 2y ago

This is the biggest nasty secret about cloud (and SaaS for things you don't build in-house). When my last company transitioned to cloud, all of the on-prem folks had to additionally take on that responsibility. We then had to hire a bunch of new folks to ease the transition and manage the cloud pieces. And then there are new teams spun up for permissions and security. Your headcount requirements are not going to go down because of cloud. As for those that like to call DIY systems "weirdware": homegrown systems are expensive to engineer, but cheap to run. We 10x'd our cost going to 3rd party visibility and feature flagging versus the thinly staffed [1] homegrown systems. And those 3rd party systems also required a ton of engineering to support, the migrations weren't clean, and they missed a lot of key features that we had to upstream to the third parties! When SignalFx got bought out by Splunk, I've never seen an annual plan get re-wired so hastily. Top priority was moving to a new vendor, and that impacted every single team in the company. The only real tangible benefit to cloud that I've seen is that a team can instantly provision hardware, database, etc. resources without much planning. That's it. And is that worth it? (I don't really think so.) [1] Once built, half an engineering headcount per quarter to accommodate new features. Oncall rotation for one team that owned the systems. Our stuff was high resiliency and barely paged at all. No SEV1 or worse outages ever.

deanCommie 2y ago
What a short-sighted outlook 1) "homegrown systems are expensive to engineer, but cheap to run" misses the most important part - how much does it cost to maintain, and how much of a RISK is it? Homegrown probably means you're depending on tribal knowledge from a few core people who if they leave you're hosed. That's a risk. You also have to train EVERYONE you hire to learn the homegrown systems, instead of hiring people with externally transferrable skills that can come in and hit the ground running. 2) all of the on-prem folks had to additionally take on that responsibility Most transitions/migrations always end up with a period where you have both systems running. It's not surprising that at first everyone has additional responsibilities. It sounds like the "on-prem folks" either didn't have the skills to work in the cloud or refused to learn, and needed external hires. Well, that's one way to put themselves out of a job, and that would be the next step once the homegrown system is deprecated. Obviously there's a reason why "not invented here" syndrome exists. There's a reason "build vs buy" is a complex discussion because of more than just buy costs. People always prefer the home-grown thing, DIY. Engineers especially. On this site, particularly. And, also, plenty of successful businesses exist by cutting out layers and going on a shallower stack ("your margin is my opportunity"). But at the end of the day, for the vast majority of businesses, companies, and software shops, managing their own in-house infrastructure is a worse decision than paying a cloud vendor.
- aledalgrande 2y ago
  I see both points but I have to agree with this one, especially if we’re talking small companies. A startup should outsource everything that is outside their core product (but not more than that), so they can focus on making their product top class.
- jcelerier 2y ago
  > Homegrown probably means you're depending on tribal knowledge from a few core people who if they leave you're hosed. there's so much complexity and tribal knowledge with cloud deployments that if tomorrow our cloud experts leave we're also very definitely hosed too, despite everything being documented thoroughly. I'm involved in a product that leverages a cloud-based metaverse system (Mozilla Hubs) that recently had organisational changes requiring us to change our hosting approach, and it's taking the better part of a year of work to understand its logic, for something that would have been a non-issue if homegrown & self-hosted.
pphysch 2y ago
> This is the biggest nasty secret about cloud (and SaaS for things you don't build in-house). Yep. Huge amounts of marketing funds are spent tricking decision-makers into thinking that off-the-shelf, plug-and-play solutions exist for their idiosyncratic business problems and schemas. Sometimes such products exist, but they are so bloated with features to support the other 99% of customers. So you absolutely need at least one expert to unwind the complexity. It's known that "greenfield" software development is much easier than "brownfield"/migrations. It should also be widely known that brownfield SaaS integrations are troublesome, because it involves enormous software+data work to link the existing in-house interfaces to the third-party interfaces. As a rule of thumb, there is no such thing as "off-the-shelf". You WILL have to hire and build and deeply understand your business processes.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  This is what people tell themselves, but 99% of the time, what your business does and the scale it operates at aren't special.
  - adamisom 2y ago
    Special in the sense of scale does not equate to special in the sense of adapting to your business' needs/culture/sensemaking
  - lazide 2y ago
    They don’t have to be special to be bespoke. And almost all business integrations are highly bespoke.
spamizbad 2y ago
I love the term "weirdware": I've seen systems like that built (and used!) first-hand multiple times in my career. They can sometimes be very odd force multipliers in unexpected ways. My favorite example is a home-rolled payroll applications specifically for sales people from over a decade ago. When I first arrived at the org I thought they were absolutely insane to have created such a thing. But its killer feature was that it allowed our org to pay out commissions rapidly (same day) and also allowed negotiating on a per-account residual commission basis as well as giving management the option to buy-out residuals. Off-the-shelf solutions at that time kinda-sorta did this but required either massive upfront $$$ and a ton of integration work. A plucky startup couldn't afford it. This was built, tested, and rolled-out in 45 days by 2 engineers and basically allowed them to poach top sales people because they knew they could get paid faster and had more flexibility on residuals.
- davedx 2y ago
  Ha I built an internal app just like that for field sales at a mid sized company. One of the best projects I ever worked on.
- throwup238 2y ago
  That's the tradeoff everyone makes when they say something isn't in their "core competency" - they give up any real competitive advantage that area of expertise could bring them. That often makes total sense like with accounting or HR, but most companies take it way too far in engineering and internal support software. Engineers make the same mistake all the time too: we love to say that "premature optimization is the root of all evil", ignoring that the full quote is "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. _Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%_"
throwup238 2y ago
> The only real tangible benefit to cloud that I've seen is that a team can instantly provision hardware, database, etc. resources without much planning. That's it. And is that worth it? (I don't really think so.) Yes! Maybe not for you or me, but it’s definitely worth it to tons of organizations where everyone including engineering was beholden to old school IT departments that take months to spin up a VM after pages of bureaucratic back and forth. The cloud moves it from an IT issue to department budgeting. The other advantage of cloud was moving capex to opex which the finance people liked because *hand wave* something about amortization. Those are the two reasons most established companies moved to the cloud. It had little to do with the actual cost but how it was spent and who was in charge of doing it.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  where everyone including engineering was beholden to old school IT departments that take months to spin up a VM after pages of bureaucratic back and forth. The cloud moves it from an IT issue to department budgeting. My F500 company put a stop to that. There is new paperwork in place to requisition cloud resources. The bureaucracy will not be replaced.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    Even the startup I worked at in my last job didn't let people just spin up whatever resources they felt like in AWS. Changes had to go through architecture/security review, and I might have been the only SDE who was allowed to log into AWS at all. We were subject to SOC 2, but I imagine it's relatively common for SaaS companies to have some kind of compliance framework assuming they want F500s as customers?
- dopylitty 2y ago
  Having seen the results of everyone being able to spin up a VM (or an EMR cluster, or an EKS cluster) I can say a little more bureaucracy is probably a good thing. You end up wasting huge amounts of money on resources that are just sitting around idle (no your fancy automation to shut them down won't work because maybe that dev cluster is actually needed at 2am on Sunday. It's an org problem, not a technical problem). But more importantly you give the cloud providers an excuse to destroy another square mile of pristine forest and build a giant 4 story grey box that wastes enormous amounts of already limited water and energy.
sneak 2y ago
> Your headcount requirements are not going to go down because of cloud. Depends on how big you are. I'm one person and I do a lot of things with the cloud that I could not do if I had to rack servers (or even order dedicateds). Same goes for small 5-10 person teams that are good with Terraform. I've seen some orgs punching waaaay above their weight given their size. Not possible without classic IaaS.
- lanstin 2y ago
  Being able to put everything into (good) source with all the lessons we have about how to manage source code over time puts incredible power into teams that can handle it.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    That sort of thing is much easier to do with a standard k8s/ansible/whatever stack than having to juggle proprietary cloud provider stacks.
- throwaway29511 2y ago
  > do a lot of things with the cloud that I could not do if I had to rack servers It's not a binary choice between cloud and physical racks in a data center. There is a wide range of options. Companies like Hetzner enables you to click a button and get a dedicated instance, while Digitalocean can provide you with a VM. Both options are cheap and doesn't require much time. If you do this often, you probably also have an ansible setup to install the base software (like k8s or a simpler stack), you are ready to go within minutes. Just like you would have a terraform config for your cloud
otabdeveloper4 2y ago
"Cloud" is an accounting trick that moves CapEx to OpEx. That's it. It has no technical reason to exist.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Virtual Machines becoming sufficiently performant is a technical reason for it to exist. It's far less viable if we didn't get vmx and related extensions to the x86 command set.
- bushbaba 2y ago
  Having done both cloud and on prem. It’s soo much more than that. Pace of innovation increases with cloud as you no longer have product beholden to the infra team jira hell.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    "Infra team jira hell" exists precisely because of accounting CapEx trickery. There are no technical reasons for it to exist.

roncesvalles 2y ago

Eh, sure but it's not the same person. There are far more people who can "do cloud" than those who genuinely understand distributed systems well enough to build and operate a homegrown data infrastructure.

makmanalp 2y ago
True, but anyone who's a cheaper hire because they can "do cloud" but not homegrown also represents a sacrifice in terms of what's you get. In terms of your operational capabilities, you'll likely be paying for that with a crisis first where everyone yells at your team because of a problem in your managed provider you can't fix, and you can't get someone from the provider on the line and helpful in a way that gets you out of it faster. So then you'll tack on add a massive yearly support retainer for a response time SLA that's still bad for your business bottom line and support that's not incentivized to prioritize you. I have stories from name-brand PaaS/IaaS companies. It's like outsourcing (I don't mean offshore, I mean any kind). It can be a reasonable thing to do if you don't pretend you're getting the same thing for less money and really actually plan around that. But people often do pretend it's the same, and the results aren't immediately apparent. And when they're finally blatantly apparent, either the guilty party has cashed out and left, or people don't have enough perspective to point to the real root cause. I'm not saying building your own infra is generally a good idea of course. It's just that beyond a certain size, for more businesses than you'd think, reliability has to be a core competency you invest in. And homegrown is a lot easier than it used to be because the offerings in terms of tooling and platforms are way better such that you can strategically craft your level of managedness for optimum cost/benefit on multiple criteria.

999900000999 2y ago

It depends on your scale. As a solo dev just being able to point my apps to firebase and not worry about it saves a ridiculous amount of time. At Uber's scale they probably have to tweak Dynamo and other services so much they might as well bring em in house. I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen a new AWS, something like Walmart Web Services.

wongarsu 2y ago
On the other hand as a solo dev `sudo apt-get install postgresql` plus a short tweak of your pg_hba.conf and a quick script to run pg_dump every night is about as much work as setting up a cloud service. Managed databases provide a lot of useful features, especially if shit hits the fan. I'm not saying you shouldn't use them. But the work you put into reasonable self-hosted services and reasonable managed services often scale at a surprisingly similar pace.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  Alright, what about Auth or other features Firebase has built in ? I still have to host it somewhere.
  - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    Auth is included in your stack, e.g: django comes with it. Plus you own the accounts, so you are not locked in. Sync is the firebase kill feature, but most apps can live without it.
    - 999900000999 2y ago
      For a side project it's not that serious. Firebase is ready to go without me thinking of the details. If I'm using Flutter or React, I already have a nice client side sdk to use. The 12th of never when I need to scale it I can switch to a different stack. Firebase functions allows me to do some server side data manipulation. That said, if I was at work and needed to propose something I'd probably spend more time thinking of this. But for all my side projects firebase is my goto. Let's just say we're having a competition to see who can crank out a basic crud app first. You're not beating me with Flutter and Firebase.

rco8786 2y ago

Bingo. You still need your whole Ops and tooling teams. They just become Cloud Ops and Cloud Tooling.

devjab 2y ago

You wish! In my experience they just load all the cloud work on to developers. Like, I’m setting up virtual networks, private endpoints, firewalls and what not, because if I don’t there won’t be horrible (I basically knew nothing about networking before I did it and I still don’t know if anything we do is correct in any manner) security but no security. It’ll bite the company in the ass eventually, or maybe it won’t, but it is what it is.

diob 2y ago

I don't think it's a secret, I think the idea is it will allow you to be more resilient then a custom solution. Why? If the person(s) who made the custom solution leave, you can't as easily hire a replacement. What's more, hiring immediately effective folks becomes harder, even if those folks who made it don't leave. It's a tradeoff, but I don't think folks are keeping secrets around it.

otabdeveloper4 2y ago
Not true. The hiring pool for developers that know Postgres is maybe a thousand times larger than those that know DynamoDB.

lanstin 2y ago

Cloud costs more but gives you data enter as a service. Software defined everything.

acchow 2y ago

What about after the transition is complete? Surely managing a… managed service… is less costly?