You Don't Need the Cloud

Re:You Don't Need the Cloud by surfer7837 on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:32AM (#30058857)

> RDS. It’s slow and super expensive. I don’t want to worry about one-off queries or migrations. If you use only 5% of your server capacity you can afford to do inefficient things at times.

The author has clearly not had to do a database migration at 3AM. AWS is more expensive but so is my time, so it works out better all the time.

Isn’t computer science all about building on abstractions? Where do you draw the line? Should I write a kernel every time because Red Hat /MSFT charges me $100?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:You Don't Need the Cloud by gwbas1c on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:50AM (#30059112)

Not every web app is high-scale, constant load. Many are ultra-low load and can do DB migrations by simply warning users about anticipated downtime.

I've worked in both environments. It's about understanding your business needs; "cloud" can quickly turn into premature optimization and burn time/money if you don't need it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:You Don't Need the Cloud by wim on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:54AM (#30059158)

I'm not entirely convinced the cloud magically makes all these things low maintenance? A lot of the work seems to depend on how simple your architecture is, cloud or no. I also read about plenty of things that go wrong on the cloud: misconfigurations, huge bills, having to do premature optimization work because you pay for every CPU cycle and each GB of RAM.

I'm not saying the cloud doesn't have a place, but I think 99% of the long tail of services don't even need to do migrations at 3am. And running a MySQL instance on a dedicated server with humongous amounts of RAM and speedy NVME drives for $100/month or so is not a bad deal.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:You Don't Need the Cloud by surfer7837 on Monday January 24, 2022 @11:32AM (#30059885)

But wait until your master worker falls over and you have to promote your read replica. RDS handles everything for me, I just have to monitor it and be ready for any alerts from Promthesus.

I mean I’d say cloud providers measuring everything is a pro. I’ve been at companies in the past that have lost track of all their physical tin. One machine had been doing nothing for 5 years

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:You Don't Need the Cloud by loriverkutya on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:52AM (#30059130)

RDS is amazing, we upgraded our postgres DBs from 8.something to 11.something with one click/db and 5 minutes downtime a few weeks ago. Bigger/smaller instances and read replicas are also one click away in case you need to scale up or down. The builtin snapshot and backup capabilities are working out of the box, set it up and forget about it till you need to restore. Easily managable via terraform or your choice of infrastructure as code tools.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:You Don't Need the Cloud by TameAntelope on Monday January 24, 2022 @11:48AM (#30060184)

Serverless RDS has been a dream so far, zero complaints.

And +1 to Terraform. I really do think these problems are related to experience, with some folks favoring complaints over getting their hands dirty and figuring things out for themselves.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:You Don't Need the Cloud by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday January 24, 2022 @11:56AM (#30060307)

> Isn’t computer science all about building on abstractions?

Wow, I guess this is why so much software is so slow and fragile these days.

[ Parent | on HN ]