FreezeInTheDark

Oh for sure you want to use TLS, what's insane is the developer experience of needing to implement it yourself.

One thing that strikes me about the author's experience is how unusable Azure appears to be in all this. Like, this hits somewhat close to me as I also run a couple web projects, also written in Rust, on a serverless architecture, and frankly couldn't imagine wanting to spend the time to run them any other way. AWS Lambda for compute, and Dynamo for DB, have a perpetual free tier and it's been running practically without me touching it for years.

The AWS Rust SDK also seemed very mature to me when I was using it ... compare to:

>the only option for a database instance with a free plan was [...] serverless Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

>the MSSQL connection required TLS and this hadn’t been implemented in the sqlx connector I chose to use for my Rust-based functions. I wasted two weeks implementing TLS support in sqlx

That is insane. Not to mention the later bit with sudden, unexplained availability and the only hint that it might to be related to a _future_ deprecation? Like, imagine if this were a critical service for you. Professional malpractice on Microsoft's part.

This isn't really the main point of the article, and I did find the stuff on self-hosting interesting, but it does seem like this could have been avoided if Azure had lived up to its peers.

I can't speak to all markets, but in my experience in a HCOL city in the U.S., this is not true, at least anymore. Buying a place never broke even with renting an equivalently sized one, even in the long run. Yes, there are lifestyle advantages to homeownership, but at my current place and time, not financial advantages.

In my experience in the recent market (in a HCOL city in the U.S.), rentals (even only compared to the costs in homeownership, i.e. ignoring principal payments) are much cheaper than mortgages for an equivalently sized house/unit. That's the assertion of the article, and it rings true.

You're right that the bulk of the mortgage payments, especially towards the beginning, do not go towards building any capital, which makes the investment even less appealing.

His central point is that the "rent" you pay via the costs of homeownership are often approximately equal to the costs of actually paying rent. Since principal payments are on top of those costs, that is money you _can_ do something else with if you were renting, in this analysis.

Of course, that part of the analysis ignores the potential capital gain of the property value, which is often one of the appealing financial factors of homeownership. But the article also addresses that.