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by tomc1985 3236 days ago
Run+know your infra, none of this is a problem. Serverless is a scam.
1 comments

So run my static content only blog on dedicated hardware that I have to administer rather than throw it in an S3 bucket with a Cloudfront on it? No thank you.

Qualify your statements.

You don't really need to administer it, there are plenty of hosting options, not just bare metal. And you can always add Cloudlflare anyway.
You're missing my point. "Serverless" just means "Applications built on cloud services rather than server(s) I have to administer".

The OP said I should run my own infrastructure. I -could- host my blog by running a web server atop a server I administer, sure. I'd have to take on all the infrastructural tasks of doing that, securing it, ensuring any availability/scalability concerns I may have are taken care of, etc, but I -could- do that.

Instead, S3 + Cloudfront (or, sure, any flavor of hosting and edge caching options you care for; I was not implying "Just AWS") means I don't have to worry about any of that. For me, the reduced level of control, increased availability, scalability, and easy "it just works", is worth the tradeoff. As is the pennies per month it costs me given the low utilization and pay-as-you-go model. It's hardly a scam.

I wouldn't call it a scam. You need a certain level of expertise anyway, otherwise you not only screw up your service, but also, in the case of AWS, lose money. Practically speaking, the amount of work needed to set up a blog on S3 with CloudFlare is not that different from the one needed to deploy, say, a WordPress droplet on DigitalOcean. You just click a few times and it works, you can basically forget it. The only difference is that you are guaranteed not to pay more than $5 or whatever your monthly plan is.

Of course scalability is incomparable in both cases, so if it's something that really matters - and matters more than money - of course something like AWS is a better choice.

It's as simple as shared host FTP drop (for static content), or a cheap VPS on DO, Linode, or what-have-you. Takes all of an hour to configure (with some practice), and if you are running a flavor of linux with APT and ufw, that includes setting up a firewall and unattended-upgrades.

And Cloudflare is still an option, since everyone needs their precious caching.