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Re:Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers? by rootusrootus on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @01:13PM (#30768759)
> But I'd so often dive in to understand the details and be disillusioned about how much complexity there is for relatively little benefit.

I feel similarly about many cloud services in e.g. AWS. I get where it's sometimes handy, but the management overhead can get pretty insane. I used to hear people say "just do X in AWS and ta-da you're done!" only to find out that in many cases it isn't actually a net improvement until you are doing a lot of the same thing. And then it costs $$$$$$.

Re:Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers? by JohnBooty on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @07:07PM (#30772767)
Yeah, I feel this way a lot.

In recent years I've done work for companies where it feels like the end result of a lot of very expensive AWS infra is... more expensive, and not really superior to things we had ten years ago when hosting on-prem.

There's a level of scale for which distributed AWS/Azure is necessary, but I'm not sure how many shops need that.

The devops guy at a previous gig thought I was some kind of naive simp for insisting we didn't need a cluster of Amazon's version of Redis. We were storing like, a megabyte of data in there. That's not a typo.

It's not that he was an idiot. Smart guy actually. Not sure if he was just padding his resume with experience ("sure, I've admin'd Redis clusters!") or if he was locked into some kind of default thinking that wouldn't even allow him to consider some kind of minimal setup.

Re:Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers? by voidfunc on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @11:06PM (#30774414)
The default setup trap thing resonates. Also a lot of DevOps folks I have met are former sysadmins with unflexing mindsets about the way things should be done. It all just culminates as cargo cult “best practices” that bloat your infra.
Re:Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers? by throwbigdata on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @08:01PM (#30773206)
You are correct
Re:Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers? by jmt_ on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @02:24PM (#30769596)
Totally agree. Something I find myself thinking/saying more and more is "don't underestimate what you can accomplish with a $5 VPS". Maybe a little hyperbolic, but computers are really fast these days.

Elastic resources are pretty magical when you need them, but the majority of software projects just don't end up requiring as many resources as devs/management often seem to assume. Granted, migrating to something like AWS, if you do end up needing it, is a pain, but so is adding unnecessary layers of AWS complexity for your CRUD app/API backend.

Also wonder how many devs came up on AWS and prefer it for familiarity and not having to know and worry too much about aspects of deployment outside of the code itself (i.e not having to know too much about managing postgres, nginx, etc).