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Services like Vercel are the result of decades of ignorance/resistance against learning basic Linux Skills. Yes, they provide convenience but we have gone too f

Services like Vercel are the result of decades of ignorance/resistance against learning basic Linux Skills. Yes, they provide convenience but we have gone too far off in the other direction in the last decade or so. No one needs to host bare metal servers in their own basement but most people also don't need to use AWS let alone Vercel etc that are another wrapper/layer and charge excessively. The balanced approach is to learn basics of Linux, get a decent VPS or even a dedicated server (rented) and setup the stack. Plenty of documentation everywhere. Just ensure that you have good backups running. And no, most people don't need complex setup or expensive hosting. We just choose to do so because either it is the cool thing to do OR we don't know any better.

washadjeffmad 2y ago
I'm frequently surprised by how little most software engineers know about IT, infrastructure, or hardware. The floor for basic familiarity outside of support is shockingly low. I started as a BSD/Linux systems programmer / sysadmin, which required a working knowledge of infrastructure. Lack of ubiquitous resources meant higher stakes for correctness of work for the "whole stack". Now, there are as many abstraction and translation layers between the "code" and the hardware as people can come up with, despite there being excellent native tools (albeit, not sold by a vendor). It's not worse or wrong, as long as you can afford it, but despite working on PaaS and IaaS up until a few years ago, I still don't understand why so many seem allergic to fundamental auxiliary skill sets like administration.
- tracker1 2y ago
  Devil's Advocate answer... why should someone creating a web based application ui care about the underlying operating system it's running on? I daily drive Linux personally, but TBH, for the most part, I don't care about a lot of the underlying details when working on a project, and I do care more than most. Even for stuff I deploy, my preference is a pretty bare host OS, and just using Caddy + Docker to deploy and reverse-proxy applications. It works fine at the small scale, and you can vertically scale a lot. But I'm not sure I would take that approach for a lot of various applications. It really just depends.
  - herpdyderp 2y ago
    Honestly I think it's rather beautiful how low the barrier to entry is for throwing a fully-functioning web app up on the internet.
    - tracker1 2y ago
      I have to agree... I really find it hard to believe that AWS themselves haven't invested more into creating a similar UX in house. I do hope that the likes of Vercel, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and others start to align more from a developer perspective. I know hono.dev has worked to smooth over some of the edges a bit. I'm also hoping to see similar efforts for other developer toolkits, I know there's several out there, but nice to see all the same. I think there may be some strides with WASM in the future too. shuttle.rs definitely looks interesting.
  - codegeek 2y ago
    No one is saying don't use these expensive services. My argument is that most applications don't need them and people do it anyway. It works well for a while and then suddenly you get an email saying your bill is going up 1000%. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Vercel type services are not necessarily the right answer in many cases just because it is easy to start with.
    - tracker1 2y ago
      Most applications don't need more than them either. It's also easy enough to migrate off to self-hosted docker behind a load balancer if you need that as a stop-gap.
sofixa 2y ago
Strong "Dropbox is just FTP/rsync, who would need that" vibes. Look, I'm an SRE by heart and mind. I love tinkering with Linux, have around 10 different physical boxes (mostly Pi/NUC sized) running various distros for the fun of it. Just because I want to and can doesn't mean everyone should DIY everything. For a random developer working on a business thing, or a side project, any time not spent developing is a time that doesn't bring any value - it doesn't help them advance on their work. Managing a VPS is not trivial. Yeah, maybe you can get away with unattended upgrades and FTPing PHP files to it, if you're lucky. If you're not you'll pick the wrong VPS provider whose datacenter will go up in flames. Hope you remembered to do backups of everything. Many tutorials/docs, and hell, whole pieces of software are "now draw the rest of the owl" style, with terrible security and reliability defaults. You cannot expect a random developer to be aware of the intricacies of what it means to not bind to localhost only (reminder that e.g. MongoDB used to by default to bind to all interfaces, and start without a password, so you got an insecure unauthenticated DB on the internet by default; another reminder that Docker automatically port forwards all your Docker containers' exposed ports to all networks, so same thing). Yeah, it's not that hard, but you need a ton of knowledge to know how not hard it is, and even then there are caveats and tricks depending on a ton of things. > but most people also don't need to use AWS ... that are another wrapper/layer and charge excessively Yeah, this is bullshit. Yes, AWS is a wrapper around infrastructure, but unless your needs start and end with "VM with storage and a network", having pretty much any piece of software you can desire available at an API call with a clear billing structure is pure magic. How long will it take you to set up a a reliable object store? Message broker? Trace storage? PostgreSQL? All reliable, backed up, regularly updated, properly monitored. How much time will you spend in maintenance on all of those? A random small project probably doesn't need all of those, but arguing "most people" don't need AWS is like arguing "most people" don't need fancy high level languages which are just wrappers and should just code everything in assembly.
- codegeek 2y ago
  I know my comment has that vibe and I get it. But I still am going to stick to the fact that infra is not the boogeyman that companies like Vercel etc want us to believe. Not saying they don't have a purpose but they are not the default answer in many cases. There has to be a middle ground if you don't want to be held hostage if these companies suddenly spike your price by 1000% (and they do).

washadjeffmad 2y ago

I'm frequently surprised by how little most software engineers know about IT, infrastructure, or hardware. The floor for basic familiarity outside of support is shockingly low. I started as a BSD/Linux systems programmer / sysadmin, which required a working knowledge of infrastructure. Lack of ubiquitous resources meant higher stakes for correctness of work for the "whole stack". Now, there are as many abstraction and translation layers between the "code" and the hardware as people can come up with, despite there being excellent native tools (albeit, not sold by a vendor). It's not worse or wrong, as long as you can afford it, but despite working on PaaS and IaaS up until a few years ago, I still don't understand why so many seem allergic to fundamental auxiliary skill sets like administration.

tracker1 2y ago
Devil's Advocate answer... why should someone creating a web based application ui care about the underlying operating system it's running on? I daily drive Linux personally, but TBH, for the most part, I don't care about a lot of the underlying details when working on a project, and I do care more than most. Even for stuff I deploy, my preference is a pretty bare host OS, and just using Caddy + Docker to deploy and reverse-proxy applications. It works fine at the small scale, and you can vertically scale a lot. But I'm not sure I would take that approach for a lot of various applications. It really just depends.
- herpdyderp 2y ago
  Honestly I think it's rather beautiful how low the barrier to entry is for throwing a fully-functioning web app up on the internet.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    I have to agree... I really find it hard to believe that AWS themselves haven't invested more into creating a similar UX in house. I do hope that the likes of Vercel, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and others start to align more from a developer perspective. I know hono.dev has worked to smooth over some of the edges a bit. I'm also hoping to see similar efforts for other developer toolkits, I know there's several out there, but nice to see all the same. I think there may be some strides with WASM in the future too. shuttle.rs definitely looks interesting.
- codegeek 2y ago
  No one is saying don't use these expensive services. My argument is that most applications don't need them and people do it anyway. It works well for a while and then suddenly you get an email saying your bill is going up 1000%. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Vercel type services are not necessarily the right answer in many cases just because it is easy to start with.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    Most applications don't need more than them either. It's also easy enough to migrate off to self-hosted docker behind a load balancer if you need that as a stop-gap.

sofixa 2y ago

Strong "Dropbox is just FTP/rsync, who would need that" vibes. Look, I'm an SRE by heart and mind. I love tinkering with Linux, have around 10 different physical boxes (mostly Pi/NUC sized) running various distros for the fun of it. Just because I want to and can doesn't mean everyone should DIY everything. For a random developer working on a business thing, or a side project, any time not spent developing is a time that doesn't bring any value - it doesn't help them advance on their work. Managing a VPS is not trivial. Yeah, maybe you can get away with unattended upgrades and FTPing PHP files to it, if you're lucky. If you're not you'll pick the wrong VPS provider whose datacenter will go up in flames. Hope you remembered to do backups of everything. Many tutorials/docs, and hell, whole pieces of software are "now draw the rest of the owl" style, with terrible security and reliability defaults. You cannot expect a random developer to be aware of the intricacies of what it means to not bind to localhost only (reminder that e.g. MongoDB used to by default to bind to all interfaces, and start without a password, so you got an insecure unauthenticated DB on the internet by default; another reminder that Docker automatically port forwards all your Docker containers' exposed ports to all networks, so same thing). Yeah, it's not that hard, but you need a ton of knowledge to know how not hard it is, and even then there are caveats and tricks depending on a ton of things. > but most people also don't need to use AWS ... that are another wrapper/layer and charge excessively Yeah, this is bullshit. Yes, AWS is a wrapper around infrastructure, but unless your needs start and end with "VM with storage and a network", having pretty much any piece of software you can desire available at an API call with a clear billing structure is pure magic. How long will it take you to set up a a reliable object store? Message broker? Trace storage? PostgreSQL? All reliable, backed up, regularly updated, properly monitored. How much time will you spend in maintenance on all of those? A random small project probably doesn't need all of those, but arguing "most people" don't need AWS is like arguing "most people" don't need fancy high level languages which are just wrappers and should just code everything in assembly.

codegeek 2y ago
I know my comment has that vibe and I get it. But I still am going to stick to the fact that infra is not the boogeyman that companies like Vercel etc want us to believe. Not saying they don't have a purpose but they are not the default answer in many cases. There has to be a middle ground if you don't want to be held hostage if these companies suddenly spike your price by 1000% (and they do).