5 ms·

Dear hosters, you are selling wood, not furniture

65 points by zdw 2y ago

danmur 2y ago
> From the perspective of the traditional server business, such a developer is unfortunately often seen as rather helpless—someone who needs assistance with everything, can’t run their own database, and has no idea what a nameserver is. Developers who have no idea about how things work (like nameservers and databases) are pretty helpless generally, regardless of whether they call themselves cloud-native developers or not.
robertlagrant 2y ago
> And even then, it wouldn’t be as seamless as AWS/Google/Azure! I haven't used Cognito or Google's one, but Azure AD B2C is a complete mess. Or it was 3 years ago. A disaster of poor configuration options, and poor documentation, and even when we spoke to internal Azure engineers they said the same. Stick with something like Auth0, or self-host Keycloak. Don't use the Azure one if you can at all avoid it, at least for B2C applications.
- slau 2y ago
  Same with Cognito, to be honest. The vendor lock-in is so strong, the abstractions leak through every crevice, not even full AWS shops can tolerate it. I truly believe this is why email-based logins have become quite popular. You delegate the security of the authentication to the client (whether they’re a B2B client or B2C doesn’t make much of a difference), you don’t need to have 2FA, password reset flows, etc.
  - Tostino 2y ago
    For my new SaaS I went with just supporting oauth flows with Google and Microsoft to start with. Not having to deal with everything you mentioned in the last sentence is exactly why.
  - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
    B2C is still a complete mess. I was in there just today. Still doesn’t support FIDO security keys for any accounts including admins.
- m_kos 2y ago
  Google's (GCP) OAuth is more difficult to set up than it should be. I wish there were two versions of the UI: 1) the current "God mode" with hundreds of services and nested pages for cloud uber natives that grok all that, and 2) a simplfied UI for simple devs like me. There could be a few types of the simplified UI, depending on what you do (mobile dev, ML researcher, AI engineer, web dev, etc.). Currently, I spend way too much time scrolling and navigating between different pages to set up or troubleshoot basic things.
Havoc 2y ago
It’s going to take time. Short of vast amounts of capital this takes time. See the initial progression of AWS. They didn’t start with a billion cloud product. Just the primitives first
- benterix 2y ago
  Yeah, it's clear from how Hetzner Cloud develops. First it was just instances, then they added object storage, and the next services will follow. All this for a fraction of the price of AWS/Azure/GCP.
alephnerd 2y ago
As usual, another great write up by Berthub. A big issue I've noticed is a lot of the players pushing for a new "European cloud" are glorified DC hosters who do not have Product or Development experience with cloud tools or technologies, and continue to underpay their employees. I saw this at an attempted version of AWS by a major retailer in DACH - they are trying to build their own competitive hyperscaler, but their internal teams still preferred one of the big 3 CSPs (AWS, Azure, GCP) due to reliability and the talent gap in their internal CSP team. European software only does great when those vendors pay regionally competitive (doesn't have to be SV level) salaries. Look at DIPT in France, Gov.uk in the UK, and Datadog in France as examples of well made European stacks that also paid employees competitively. European companies will also HAVE to be product first - only selling on "European First" sentiment doesn't close RFPs when the CSPs have created EU staffed and managed landing zones, and companies like Google Cloud and AWS expand EU specific offerings in EU megaoffices like Warsaw and Cluj respectively. The other issue is most EMEA customers have much smaller budgets, so discounting and bundling becomes critical - and it's hard to beat vendors who can sell in the US (which is what a French vendor like Datadog has done). Finally, the growth of the cloud software ecosystem in the US, China, and India was also thanks to 5G rollouts, as much of the 5G stack is virtualized and is essentially VOIP. This meant telecom players helped spark a generation of vendors or OSS ecosystems.
- everfrustrated 2y ago
  I slightly agree but my take is less salaries and more that most companies in Europe have been totally captured by the management/academic classes [1]. You can't create what is fundamentally a highly technical product using management to tell engineers what to do. European management structures tend to keep the technical people isolated to their own lower strata and don't listen to them. AWS' success is it enabled its _engineers_ to launch products. Which is why Azure sticks out like a sore thumb. [1] This is why you generally only see innovation in Europe coming from small companies, but they don't have the capital to keep investing at pace - AWS was able to build ahead of where its customers were and those customers eventually caught up.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
notpushkin 2y ago
> If someone tries to program [auth] themselves, they either do it incorrectly (or not well enough) or keep an expert busy for weeks and weeks. Or they could set up something like https://goauthentik.io/ https://goauthentik.io/? (Shameless plug: if you use my Docker dashboard, https://lunni.dev/ https://lunni.dev/, you can install it in a couple clicks from the Marketplace.) Or any other open source option – there are dozens at this point. And honestly speaking, auth isn’t that hard in the first place. You do have to remember a few things, but if you follow something like https://lucia-auth.com/ https://lucia-auth.com/ it shouldn’t take you more than an hour to set up some decent auth with 2FA and OIDC support. A bit more time to implement sign-in rate limiting and email verification and you have a robust system that (a) works in a way that you understand and (b) you can reuse between projects without paying a dime.
llarsson 2y ago
It is interesting that this relates exactly to everything that goes as "cloud native" these days, without really mentioning the fact that due to Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's huge landscape of open source software that targets specifically Kubernetes, you can have a comprehensive platform on "any" infrastructure. On-premise, private cloud, public clouds that are in the EC2/S3 era of services (VMs and object storage)... it doesn't matter. You can literally run the same database that powers YouTube, it's freely available and operates great on Kubernetes. Yes, the problem is that someone has to manage it all (full disclosure: I work for Elastisys, a company exactly in the space of fully-managed application platforms on top of the infra operated by others). But the fact that smaller cloud providers haven't had the money to invest in their capabilities to offer managed services to the same degree as the enormous hyperscalers isn't exactly impossible to overcome. In fact, it's never been more possible. Other comments here show that very well, too. And that the particular choice of identity management services is perhaps not the best for showing where the hyperscaler options shine.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > due to Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's huge landscape of open source software that targets specifically Kubernetes, you can have a comprehensive platform on "any" infrastructure Most CNCF projects and incubators are coming out of American, Chinese, and Indian teams at American or Chinese firms. The 5G rollout in the US, China, and India in the mid-2010s meant an entire ecosystem of K8s and eBPF versed engineers exist in those geos. There isn't a similar ecosystem in Europe, and all the major telcos in Europe decided to become resellers of white labeled American cloud products.
  - arielcostas 2y ago
    Totally, but IMHO it's better to use those open source building blocks on top of an european provider (or your own infra) instead of getting locked in into any domestic (or foreign) service. Why pay AWS for Cognito and get locked in there, when you can run Keycloak on top of K8s on any provider. We can definitely reinvent the wheel, perhaps even making better products, but for the time being these open source tools are good enough, again, IMHO
zelon88 2y ago
> Not everything is equally good or affordable, but it’s crucial to understand what the world is moving toward (even if maybe they shouldn’t). And this is exactly how we get to Elon Musk creating a constitutional crisis. Complacency. Complacency with Tesla servitizing the automobile. Complacency with someone doing a Sieg Heil... Twice... on national television. Maybe if you don't take the first leap, you won't be in the position that so many Tesla owners are in now. "I didn't know he was crazy!" Well maybe you should have. Maybe you should have read all the signs and seen all the writing on the wall and listened to all the enthusiasts and experts who warned you.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  Obviously this carries the risk of creating an incredibly off-topic thread, but usually they "I didn't know" excuse is the result of being unwilling to see red flags for what they are. In Elon's case, his angry narcissistic nature was obvious years ago (like his 2018 "pedo boy" tweet). Of course, "red flags" can be abused and become premature optimization, so sometimes you have to have your foot on the accelerator but not forget where the brake pedal is. Relating this back to technology and hosting, we have to maintain strong fundamentals while we use abstractions and building blocks. I'm "old" in technology years (48) but I'm seeing a lot of mid-level to "senior" developers who barely understand the basics of SQL or operating systems.
Our_Benefactors 2y ago
I might be the only one that thought this was Airbnb platform advice from the headline.
mehukatti 2y ago
This blog post really resonates with me. I'm originally one of those "server guys" who had 20 years of experience with Linux and hosting all kinds of software (my last gig was running OpenStack). I was also pretty deep in Red Hat ecosystem and had their highest certification (RHCA). But sadly in my EU country these server oriented tech roles kind of dried out around 10 years ago and the rest were outsourced to Indian companies. That's why I work at AWS nowadays.

65 points by zdw 2y ago

> From the perspective of the traditional server business, such a developer is unfortunately often seen as rather helpless—someone who needs assistance with everything, can’t run their own database, and has no idea what a nameserver is. Developers who have no idea about how things work (like nameservers and databases) are pretty helpless generally, regardless of whether they call themselves cloud-native developers or not.

robertlagrant 2y ago

> And even then, it wouldn’t be as seamless as AWS/Google/Azure! I haven't used Cognito or Google's one, but Azure AD B2C is a complete mess. Or it was 3 years ago. A disaster of poor configuration options, and poor documentation, and even when we spoke to internal Azure engineers they said the same. Stick with something like Auth0, or self-host Keycloak. Don't use the Azure one if you can at all avoid it, at least for B2C applications.

slau 2y ago
Same with Cognito, to be honest. The vendor lock-in is so strong, the abstractions leak through every crevice, not even full AWS shops can tolerate it. I truly believe this is why email-based logins have become quite popular. You delegate the security of the authentication to the client (whether they’re a B2B client or B2C doesn’t make much of a difference), you don’t need to have 2FA, password reset flows, etc.
- Tostino 2y ago
  For my new SaaS I went with just supporting oauth flows with Google and Microsoft to start with. Not having to deal with everything you mentioned in the last sentence is exactly why.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  B2C is still a complete mess. I was in there just today. Still doesn’t support FIDO security keys for any accounts including admins.
m_kos 2y ago
Google's (GCP) OAuth is more difficult to set up than it should be. I wish there were two versions of the UI: 1) the current "God mode" with hundreds of services and nested pages for cloud uber natives that grok all that, and 2) a simplfied UI for simple devs like me. There could be a few types of the simplified UI, depending on what you do (mobile dev, ML researcher, AI engineer, web dev, etc.). Currently, I spend way too much time scrolling and navigating between different pages to set up or troubleshoot basic things.

Havoc 2y ago

It’s going to take time. Short of vast amounts of capital this takes time. See the initial progression of AWS. They didn’t start with a billion cloud product. Just the primitives first

benterix 2y ago
Yeah, it's clear from how Hetzner Cloud develops. First it was just instances, then they added object storage, and the next services will follow. All this for a fraction of the price of AWS/Azure/GCP.

alephnerd 2y ago

As usual, another great write up by Berthub. A big issue I've noticed is a lot of the players pushing for a new "European cloud" are glorified DC hosters who do not have Product or Development experience with cloud tools or technologies, and continue to underpay their employees. I saw this at an attempted version of AWS by a major retailer in DACH - they are trying to build their own competitive hyperscaler, but their internal teams still preferred one of the big 3 CSPs (AWS, Azure, GCP) due to reliability and the talent gap in their internal CSP team. European software only does great when those vendors pay regionally competitive (doesn't have to be SV level) salaries. Look at DIPT in France, Gov.uk in the UK, and Datadog in France as examples of well made European stacks that also paid employees competitively. European companies will also HAVE to be product first - only selling on "European First" sentiment doesn't close RFPs when the CSPs have created EU staffed and managed landing zones, and companies like Google Cloud and AWS expand EU specific offerings in EU megaoffices like Warsaw and Cluj respectively. The other issue is most EMEA customers have much smaller budgets, so discounting and bundling becomes critical - and it's hard to beat vendors who can sell in the US (which is what a French vendor like Datadog has done). Finally, the growth of the cloud software ecosystem in the US, China, and India was also thanks to 5G rollouts, as much of the 5G stack is virtualized and is essentially VOIP. This meant telecom players helped spark a generation of vendors or OSS ecosystems.

everfrustrated 2y ago
I slightly agree but my take is less salaries and more that most companies in Europe have been totally captured by the management/academic classes [1]. You can't create what is fundamentally a highly technical product using management to tell engineers what to do. European management structures tend to keep the technical people isolated to their own lower strata and don't listen to them. AWS' success is it enabled its _engineers_ to launch products. Which is why Azure sticks out like a sore thumb. [1] This is why you generally only see innovation in Europe coming from small companies, but they don't have the capital to keep investing at pace - AWS was able to build ahead of where its customers were and those customers eventually caught up.
- alephnerd 2y ago

notpushkin 2y ago

> If someone tries to program [auth] themselves, they either do it incorrectly (or not well enough) or keep an expert busy for weeks and weeks. Or they could set up something like https://goauthentik.io/ https://goauthentik.io/? (Shameless plug: if you use my Docker dashboard, https://lunni.dev/ https://lunni.dev/, you can install it in a couple clicks from the Marketplace.) Or any other open source option – there are dozens at this point. And honestly speaking, auth isn’t that hard in the first place. You do have to remember a few things, but if you follow something like https://lucia-auth.com/ https://lucia-auth.com/ it shouldn’t take you more than an hour to set up some decent auth with 2FA and OIDC support. A bit more time to implement sign-in rate limiting and email verification and you have a robust system that (a) works in a way that you understand and (b) you can reuse between projects without paying a dime.

llarsson 2y ago

It is interesting that this relates exactly to everything that goes as "cloud native" these days, without really mentioning the fact that due to Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's huge landscape of open source software that targets specifically Kubernetes, you can have a comprehensive platform on "any" infrastructure. On-premise, private cloud, public clouds that are in the EC2/S3 era of services (VMs and object storage)... it doesn't matter. You can literally run the same database that powers YouTube, it's freely available and operates great on Kubernetes. Yes, the problem is that someone has to manage it all (full disclosure: I work for Elastisys, a company exactly in the space of fully-managed application platforms on top of the infra operated by others). But the fact that smaller cloud providers haven't had the money to invest in their capabilities to offer managed services to the same degree as the enormous hyperscalers isn't exactly impossible to overcome. In fact, it's never been more possible. Other comments here show that very well, too. And that the particular choice of identity management services is perhaps not the best for showing where the hyperscaler options shine.

alephnerd 2y ago
> due to Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's huge landscape of open source software that targets specifically Kubernetes, you can have a comprehensive platform on "any" infrastructure Most CNCF projects and incubators are coming out of American, Chinese, and Indian teams at American or Chinese firms. The 5G rollout in the US, China, and India in the mid-2010s meant an entire ecosystem of K8s and eBPF versed engineers exist in those geos. There isn't a similar ecosystem in Europe, and all the major telcos in Europe decided to become resellers of white labeled American cloud products.
- arielcostas 2y ago
  Totally, but IMHO it's better to use those open source building blocks on top of an european provider (or your own infra) instead of getting locked in into any domestic (or foreign) service. Why pay AWS for Cognito and get locked in there, when you can run Keycloak on top of K8s on any provider. We can definitely reinvent the wheel, perhaps even making better products, but for the time being these open source tools are good enough, again, IMHO

zelon88 2y ago

> Not everything is equally good or affordable, but it’s crucial to understand what the world is moving toward (even if maybe they shouldn’t). And this is exactly how we get to Elon Musk creating a constitutional crisis. Complacency. Complacency with Tesla servitizing the automobile. Complacency with someone doing a Sieg Heil... Twice... on national television. Maybe if you don't take the first leap, you won't be in the position that so many Tesla owners are in now. "I didn't know he was crazy!" Well maybe you should have. Maybe you should have read all the signs and seen all the writing on the wall and listened to all the enthusiasts and experts who warned you.

bdcravens 2y ago
Obviously this carries the risk of creating an incredibly off-topic thread, but usually they "I didn't know" excuse is the result of being unwilling to see red flags for what they are. In Elon's case, his angry narcissistic nature was obvious years ago (like his 2018 "pedo boy" tweet). Of course, "red flags" can be abused and become premature optimization, so sometimes you have to have your foot on the accelerator but not forget where the brake pedal is. Relating this back to technology and hosting, we have to maintain strong fundamentals while we use abstractions and building blocks. I'm "old" in technology years (48) but I'm seeing a lot of mid-level to "senior" developers who barely understand the basics of SQL or operating systems.

Our_Benefactors 2y ago

I might be the only one that thought this was Airbnb platform advice from the headline.

mehukatti 2y ago

This blog post really resonates with me. I'm originally one of those "server guys" who had 20 years of experience with Linux and hosting all kinds of software (my last gig was running OpenStack). I was also pretty deep in Red Hat ecosystem and had their highest certification (RHCA). But sadly in my EU country these server oriented tech roles kind of dried out around 10 years ago and the rest were outsourced to Indian companies. That's why I work at AWS nowadays.