[oersted]

After 8 years operating like this, I have had approximately the same number of critical outages in standard Cloud as with these providers.

One included a whole OVH building burning down with our server in it, and recovery was faster than the recent AWS and Cloudflare outages. We felt less impotent and we could do more to mitigate the situation.

If you want to, these providers also offer VMs, object storage and other virtualized services for way cheaper with similar guarantees, they are not stuck in the last century.

And I don’t know how people are using cloud, but most config issues happen above the VM/Docker/Kubernetes level, which is the same wether you are on cloud or not. Even fully managed database deployments or serverless backends are not really that much simpler or less error-prone than deploying the containers yourself. Actually the complexity of Cloud is often a worse minefield of footguns, with their myriad artificial quirks and limitations. Often dealing with the true complexities of the underlying open-source technologies they are reselling ends up being easier and more predictable.

This fearmongering is really weakening us as an industry. Just try it, it is not as complex or dangerous as they claim.

[jrk]

It is not only not that much more complex, it is often less complex.

Higher-level services like PaaS (Heroku and above) genuinely do abstract a number of details. But EC2 is just renting pseudo-bare computers—they save no complexity, and they add more by being diskless and requiring networked storage (EBS). The main thing they give you is the ability to spin up arbitrarily many more identical instances at a moment’s notice (usually, at least theoretically, though the amount of the time that you actually hit unavailability or shadow quotas is surprisingly high).

[aurareturn]

I'm a geek and I like to tinker with hardware. I want to maximum my $/hardware and have built a ton of DIY computers myself since I was young. I'm all about getting the most hardware for the money.

But I'd like to sleep at night and the cost of AWS is not a significant issue to the business.

[oersted]

That’s fair enough but that’s a luxury position, if costs are not concern to you then there’s not much point in discussing the merits of different methods to manage infrastructure efficiently.

And yes of course such costs are nothing if you are thinking of $300K just on a couple sysadmins. But this is just a bizarre bubble in a handful of small areas in the US and I am not sure how it can stay like that for much longer in this era of remote work.

We built a whole business with $100K in seed and a few government grants. I have worked with quite a few world-class senior engineers happily making 40K-70K.

[aurareturn]

Don't get me wrong. If I'm starting a brand new business with my own money and no funding, I'd absolutely buying a cheap dedicated instance. In the past, AWS gave out generous credits to startups/new businesses. This is no longer the case.

Once my business requires reliability and I need to hire a dedicated person to manage, I'd absolutely move to the cloud. I personally like Digital Ocean/Render.