[throwaway894345]

> The stuff you’re saving time on, managing hosts, just isn’t that much compared to dealing with aws/terraform/etc.

This is where I feel like I'm doing stuff wrong. If we're comparing Terraform, it means we probably care about reproducibility (rather than an "AWS console vs SSH into pet hosts" scenario), so the like-for-like comparison involves bringing in something like Ansible. On top of that, you need to pick, install, and configure logging exfiltrators, monitoring agents, process managers, etc and you need to operate systems that let you explore those logs and metrics. You also need to configure SSH access and manage keys. You may also need a custom base image, so maybe you're doing packer stuff as well? On top of that, you need to run some database which means managing backups and running replicas with failover (or maybe we/re a small business and we don't care that much about reliability?). And again, we care about reproducibility, so we need to encode all of this stuff in Ansible playbooks or similar. You probably also need something like security groups to restrict which things are allowed to talk to which other things, and encoding this in Ansible or similar is maybe impossible if you don't have software-defined-networks.

It seems like a lot to get to parity with what someone could throw together with API Gateway, Lambda, S3/DynamoDB in a couple reasonably-sized Terraform files in a few hours for a pretty marginal cloud spend (most small businesses would probably stay pretty close to the free tier--these services are extremely inexpensive).

[idunno246]

Yea, I mostly agree. I feel like a lot of the negativity comes from hobbyists, where an extra hundred dollars does matter.

I think one place that I disagree is while you could do that in a few hours, your average developer couldn’t. You’re now talking about everyone to learn lambda and terraform and whatnot, whereas with a “standard” web server, that people are familiar with, a lot of that is more easily centralized. just throw some annotations and routes are done, vs the arcane api gateway config. The tools and frameworks for lambda just didn’t seem to be there yet.

Fwiw I’m all in on aws, cost was one of the easiest arguments to deflect. Ultimately we needed to show developer velocity increases as that’s the cost that mattered. And security isn’t compromised, which the bigger the company the more roadblocks I’ve seen to just give devs terraform.

[throwaway894345]

Agreed that there is a learning curve, I guess I was assuming some competence with both stacks—not starting from scratch (although I think if you were starting from scratch it would still be easier to learn AWS than self-managed hosts).

Yeah, big companies don’t like giving devs raw Terraform. My company has sandbox environments where devs can do iteration with permissive Terraform access. That works pretty well for stuff like this.

Also, I use AWS for hobbyist stuff and you can easily use this serverless stack for <$5/month.