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The cloud is absurdly overpriced. The margins are huge for cloud companies, especially on bandwidth. The gains brought by Moore’s law are pocketed by could prov
by api 2y ago
The cloud is absurdly overpriced. The margins are huge for cloud companies, especially on bandwidth. The gains brought by Moore’s law are pocketed by could providers and barely passed on because once you go “cloud native” they have fairly strong lock in. Even if you can move your work load doing so is painful and usually requires downtime.
It’s also designed to encourage and then monetize a certain style of complex, over-architected, high resource load development: microservices, use of single-cloud-proprietary services, tons of loosely coupled systems, etc. Cloud native is the J2EE of the present era.
This is an anti pattern that keeps happening over and over in our industry. It’s partly a result of the middlebrow meme— that mid developers love complexity— and partly something that is pushed because someone (consultants, cloud providers) are profiting.
Edit: I don’t mean to blast mid developers too much. One must often journey through the middlebrow meme to make it to the hooded dude on the right. The meme describes a learning trajectory. But we should try not to let the complexity explosion of mid developers become industry norm.
- HPsquared 2y agoI think it's another case of a company's organizational structure being reflected in the code. Conway's Law. Modern businesses are full of outsourcing, temporary contracts and overdone management structures. This the shape of the software they produce.
- mwcampbell 2y agoDo you count VPSes from Vultr or the like as "the cloud" for this purpose? And, incidentally, are there any VPS providers that you would recommend over Vultr when one doesn't need a whole dedicated machine in a given location?
- ourmandave 2y agoHaven't seen that middlebrow meme. Perhaps a link?
- 015a 2y agoThe gains aren't even "barely passed on". When new generation chips are released, they'll oftentimes release a new instance type at roughly the same price, then re-allocate the older generation chips to power internal services which don't promise a chip family. That internal service might be e.g. S3, so who cares, but it might also be Fargate or Lambda, where you're paying per second of wall time and thus slower chips actively cost you more money.
- torginus 2y agoTbh, the flexibility can make up for it if you know how to use it right. Sure, the servers might cost 3x as much as what you would pay at a VPS, but you can spin them up and down by the minute. For one of the projects where the demand appeared during working hours in my timezone, I did the math, and found this to be the case.
- hnthrow289570 2y ago>This is an anti pattern that keeps happening over and over in our industry. It’s partly a result of the middlebrow meme— that mid developers love complexity— and partly something that is pushed because someone (consultants, cloud providers) are profiting. Pretty un-fixable without better stewardship over the software industry. That won't come for decades, so you may as well join the dark side and make the money and practice the way you want with hobbies or start your own company to enforce it. I guess the stewardship can happen on a team level, but someone who's being restrained can always go find another job where they'll build the complexity they desire that ultimately gets maintained by someone else.