[pchiusano]

I don’t know if you feel this way, but my complaint about the more hyped cloud services is that not only can they be expensive (fine) but the promised time-savings and simplicity of operating the system often doesn’t really materialize either, except in restricted circumstances that you don’t appreciate in advance and only find out later after you’ve already committed.

If it really did save time and were simpler, some companies would (quite reasonably) be willing to pay a premium for that - time is money and all that. In reality it seems like people often end up with the worst of both worlds - it’s expensive, complicated, still needs a huge staff to maintain, and doesn’t even work that well.

[tluyben2]

Well it is better than making even trivial architectures with actual hardware (I have some pictures of me hauling servers over xmas a long time ago; that was cheap (in monthlies and hardware, not in hours!) but I would and do pay a premium for that). Otherwise I do agree somewhat; most overbearing systems can be done much simpler but we are all preparing (and thus paying) for eventualities that most likely will never occur or will not influence the bottom line.

Tech like AWS Lambda (of which I like the theoretical idea) are meant to remedy the issues with complexity for a premium. But that premium makes, personally, my eyes water. I cannot see any high volume operation justifying going live with it. Are there big examples of those? And how is it justified vs the alternatives (which are, besides some programmer+admin time and scalability) far more efficient?

[garethmcc]

There are some significant high volume cases. We work with companies doing billions of Lambda invocations per month and realising large cost saving benefits. Lambda itself is usually the smallest part of the bill as one of the advantages of building serverless applications is you shift the responsibility of certain execution to specially designed managed services as opposed to code consuming CPU cycles; for example API Gateway takes over routing, S3 takes over file system calls, etc. A large portion of savings organisations see though is in time to production, as well as the overhead of managing servers and container clusters which is a lot more costly than you might think. Especially in the environment we are in now where qualified Dev Ops talent is hard to come by and at a premium. Sure, a developer can take some time to try and learn how to put together some infrastructure, but that's time taken away from adding direct value to business needs and not to mention the fall out when things go pear shaped later because it turns out a few hours Googling doesn't turn someone into a DevOps expert.

[tluyben2]

You definitely know what you are doing then; I see mostly the negative cases... The abuses of things for which they are not made etc. Thanks for the insight!

> as well as the overhead of managing servers and container clusters which is a lot more costly than you might think

A lot of people underestimate that in my experience; I see a lot of people who find it cool setting them up (also, a large amount are not doing this scripted but via the web interface). My current case has a myriad of VPC, container clusters, load balancers, clusters, auto scaling etc and it looks really impressive but it's very costly and their dev (who was also devops) disappeared as he buckled under the stress. Also, none of that is needed in this case (not saying there are not many cases it is needed!).

Anyway I will experiment more with Lambda; I think I'm tainted by the very costly abuse cases I had to move to normal linux environments to make affordable for the startup.

[pdimitar]

Thanks for sharing. I am aware there is no small amount of cases where the cloud offerings do save money in total.

But to be fair, for most projects the complexity that Amazon's services carry with them is absolutely not justified. Sure I can learn to work with 10-20 Amazon services but even me as a senior guy who knows his way around pretty much anything you throw at him, that's precious time spent not helping the direct business needs but basically making sure the house won't collapse.

And a lot of smaller companies like to merge the "programmer" and "DevOps" titles into one person because of course, that means one paycheck and not two. And as you said, they get angry that you can't become a pro sysadmin in an afternoon.

I suppose I am just trying to say yet again that many companies reach for BigCorp tools when they really ought to be fine with 2-3 DigitalOcean droplets and 1 dedicated DB droplet, plus 1 extra for backups.

[garethmcc]

But it does save an enormous amount of time. We have numerous customers using tools like the Serverless Framework to help put together sophisticated systems in days that would have traditionally taken months. I've experienced it myself personally and worked with multiple customers who see the same thing.

Its also not the initial time saving. After implementation, infrastructure maintenance is almost non-existent because the services are all managed for you and you can focus on providing direct value and not worrying about whether your infrastructure can meet your needs.