[baq]

Slow VMs on overprovisioned cloud hosts which cost as much per month as a dedicated box per year have broken a generation of engineers.

You could host so much from your macbook. The average HN startup could be hosted on a $200 minipc from a closet for the first couple of years if not more - and I'm talking expensive here for the extra RAM you want to not restart every hour when you have a memory leak.

[ramraj07]

I don't see how that's the root cause. ClickHouse and snowflake run on your so-called slow vms on overprovisioned cloud hosts and they're efficient as hell. It's all about your optimizations.

The real problem is the lack of understanding by most engineers the degree of overprovisioning they do for code that's simple and doing stupid things using an inefficient 4th order language on top of 5 different useless (imo) abstractions.

[FridgeSeal]

No but my developer velocity! We should sacrifice literally everything else in order to enable me!!!! Nothing else matters except for my ease of life!

/s

[federiconafria]

Not only that, you have a pile of layers that could be advantageous in some situations but are an overkill in most.

I've seen Spark clusters being replaced by a single container using less than 1 CPU core and few 100s MB of RAM.

[sofixa]

Raw compute wise, you're almost right (almost because real cloud hosts aren't overprovisioned, you get the full CPU/memory/disk reserved for you).

But you actually need more than compute. You might need a database, cache, message broker, scheduler, to send emails, and a million other things you can always DIY with FOSS software, but take time. If you have more money than time, get off the shelf services that provide those with guarantees and maintenance; if not, the DIY route is also great for learning.

[baq]

My point is all of this can be hosted on a single bare metal box, a small one at that! We used to do just that back in mid naughts and computers only got faster. Half of those cloud services are preconfigured FOSS derivatives behind the scenes anyway (probably…)

[rfoo]

> so much from your macbook

At least on cloud I can actually have hundreds of GiBs of RAM. If I want this on my Macbook it's even more expensive than my cloud bill.

[nasretdinov]

Strangely I've found inverse to be true: many backend technologies are actually quite good with memory management and often require as little as a few GiB of RAM or even less to serve production traffic. Often a single IDE consumes more RAM than a production Go binary that serves thousands of requests per second for example

[baq]

You can, but if you need it you’re not searching for a product market fit anymore.