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I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects. And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my
by jfengel 6mo ago
I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects.
And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs.
Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so that I don't have to boil the ocean. I figure that one of these days I might actually be forced to learn IAM and VPNs and God only knows what else. Meantime, every time I touch it my eyes bug out.
- chuckadams 6mo agoYou can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day. You aren't required to implement every enterprise pattern in the book.
- DaanDL 6mo agoBut that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.
- chuckadams 6mo agoMaybe so, but it's still not the complexity nightmare that some would have us believe it is.
- liveoneggs 6mo agot4g.nano is $3/m; a similar spec-ed fargate on ecs (just any docker container) is $10/m
- jfengel 6mo agoThis sentence beautifully encapsulates my point. I know that this is just ordinary jargon, but wow that's a lot all at once. And it does seem like something I need to know before I start.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- liveoneggs 6mo agosure but on the flip side - when I signed up for vercel I had literally no idea what was going on. It just said "do you want to start a blog? here are 1000 templaptes"
- themgt 6mo agoCongrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.
- nostrebored 6mo agoEgress costs have substantially reduced (thankfully)
- aorloff 6mo agoWell this is the dream right ? You build something, well enough that it can handle the traffic, and people come, and it does. Welcome to the gaming industry
- baobabKoodaa 6mo agoNo, it is not the dream. The same thing on Hetzner or Linode would cost $30 instead of $30k.
- hkpack 6mo ago> Well this is the dream right ? Yes it is, we call these dreams a nightmare
- embedding-shape 6mo agoIf there is any single service I'd avoid on AWS it's Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there, is slow as molasses (even tiny services can need tens of minutes to deploy) and you'll experience random failures not even AWS reps can explain to you. Avoid at all costs. It's a ghost of its former self, but I'd probably still rather use Heroku today than being forced to use Lightsail even once again.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- graemep 6mo agoI have only use lightsail for one project with two VPSs, but it just works like a VPS (two, because we have another for staging). Price is competitive. Its not my favourite, but its not terrible.
- Insanity 6mo agoSame experience here, hosting some small projects on LightSail. It was pretty smooth to set up and get running, and no real complaints so far.
- callmeal 6mo ago>Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there, Lightsail is pretty competitive (price wise) with other providers. Been running s B2B app on it for a few years now - nothing much, just your basic crud app running on lightsail instance + lightsail db. Nice to have a "monthly" rate on each instead of the EC2 opaque (and "surprise!") pricing.
- te_chris 6mo ago“EC2 or Lightsail”. And this right here is why I use GCP. Google got VMs right.
- nostrebored 6mo agoGCP has similar offerings to Lightsail, Fargate, EC2, Lambda, or other compute substrates. Nobody is forcing you to use more than “basic” offerings. AWS core services are often architected that way!
- ipsento606 6mo ago> You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day You could do this, but for the life of me I can't imagine why you do this over using a platform like DO, vultr, hetzner or any one of a hundred similar services that will give you a better developer experience for this kind of workflow, often at a fraction of the price
- chuckadams 6mo agoI never said it would be cheaper. I did say it wasn't complicated.
- benoau 6mo agoWhat amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.
- ChrisBland 6mo agoI miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.
- christophilus 6mo agoRender has been excellent replacement, in my experience.
- baobabKoodaa 6mo agoLast time I tried render, it did not allow me to spin up 1 instance of my web app, so I'm never going back. (To clarify: Render would always spin up a minimum of 2 instances.)
- cpursley 6mo agoFly and Render are what heroku would be if they didn’t stop innovating. And neon db for Postgres.
- trashburger 6mo ago> And neon db for Postgres. For 90% of the time when they're up.
- baobabKoodaa 6mo agoFly is unreliable. Render does not allow you to spin up 1 instance of an app.
- the__alchemist 6mo agoWhy? It is still up, and working just as it used to.
- djyde 6mo agoI switched to Cloudflare and it's been a breath of fresh air - everything I need and the pricing is reasonable.
- KptMarchewa 6mo agoit's only a nightmare if you had not to deal with Azure
- MagicMoonlight 6mo agoAWS is aimed at enterprise, not personal projects. Personal projects wouldn’t give them any meaningful revenue because the only thing that matters is cost.