I read this, and I think: wow, that's extraordinarily expensive. The stack he designs is $20/mo for 1,000 user sessions/day.
Back in the days of cPanel/LAMP shared hosting, you'd have similar capability for $5/mo.
Back in the days of cPanel/LAMP shared hosting, you'd have similar capability for $5/mo.
- Enterprise public cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure, expensive but scalable and enterprise friendly
- Developer public cloud, Linode/DO, cheap and easy to use
Although I say that AWS/GCP/etc are expensive, they obviously have negotiable prices for large customers. I doubt the smaller providers do that.
But it makes me wonder why people use AWS/GCP when the other providers are so much cheaper. How do Linode/DO offer such good prices? Would they kick me off if I actually maximized the server capacity they offer, like a shared cPanel host would do, back in the day?
Really? I have to say I don't understand it. I remember the "NoOps" movement from a few years ago and I just find the whole concept around it to be almost hilarious; kind of like Salesforce's old "No Software" logo (which is nowhere to be found in their newer marketing).
As I see it, as long as your organization has people using IT in any capacity at all, you will need someone in charge of IT Operations. Whatever you may want to call it: DevOps, or SRE, or PE, or even if you just decide it's something that each of your regular devs is going to be doing, it's a function that needs to be done.
Someone needs to be able to set up the systems, monitor them, scale them, secure them, and troubleshoot issues. It doesn't matter how well-engineered and maintained and automated the components you rely on are, they will break in various compound fractures and you will need to deal with the downtime and potential corruption to your composite system.
I'll eat my hat if you can point me towards a single non-trivial software service that has been running continuously without any "IT".
That's true, but I don't need to worry about the server that my database, load balancer, queuing system, RedisCache, storage, etc. is running on. I only have to worry about my applications and the actual database. If I need to provision more hardware, it's a click of a button (well actually updating my CloudFormation template).
There is an entire level of both hardware and operating system maintenance that I don't have to worry about.
Right. So you traded [relatively] inexpensive OS and infrastructure maintainers for [relatively] expensive application and tier maintainers.
This is certainly part of the reasoning for things like terraform, cloudformation, even chef/puppet/ansible—people want a single process for development of reviewing and executing code.
I always pronounced that as "nnnn..oops"
They definitely don't offer anywhere near as many services as Google, MS, Amazon, or even Alibaba's cloud offerings. But they're becoming pretty decent 'cloud lite' providers who cover what's needed for plenty of folks and companies.
Might want to go recheck the API documentation for providers like DO et al
And then I found lightsail, when I was clicking through the million different services, and I was like holy shit, this is familiar, and in like three clicks later, I had a server running! Obviously, it doesn’t have all the features DO offers (because I imagine those can be done with other AWS services), but I didn’t need them/use them (aside from DO’s DNS). Really, my only gripe I’ve had with it so far is the OS offerings. All my servers (personal & work) are CentOS, so I was slightly annoyed when I found out I could get a CentOS server on lightsail, so I just settled with Ubuntu because that’s fine and I’m familiar enough with it.
So, if you need something hosted on AWS for whatever reason, and are not familiar with it at all, but are with something like DO/Linode, lightsail is something to look into. I think the pricing was fairly comparable to DO, maybe a little more expensive, but I’m not paying for it so I didn’t really look.
Word on the street is we’re gonna start moving a lot of our infra to AWS at work though, so I guess I should probably at least figure out how the hell EC2 works...
* - when you stop and start an instance, it will change IP address. But if you attach it an Elastic IP, it stays the same.
(If, on the other hand, the "small website" is just a website, why not just put it in an S3 bucket and put Cloudflare in front? Even cheaper!)
I think what is missing is a middle ground approach that scale both ways. Or a Heroku that is built on top of DO / Linode.
Yup. That would work, but it takes out a couple of things from the original requirements I had: 1. scalability It should be able to stretch especially for bursty traffic situation. 2. I should not have to pay if the app or service is not being used.
A single downtime event on a single host will likely have costs that can never be actuarially recovered from, in this head to head. Pay the $15 extra bucks.
I think AWS would do well to expand massively its free tier. Talented startups in my world are starting to look askance at AWS fees.
1. Nginx config & tuning 2. Postgres / MySQL config & tuning 3. App server config & tuning
It is dramatically different config & tuning, so we might exist in a time where people overvalue familiarity & it colors their impressions of effort, but I don't think it's a long-term viable crutch to lean on either.
As to core services going down, I read you loud & clear, it does happen. From my experience, it happens way less often than outages on a single box though, or even a collection of boxes you're managing. And I don't know if there has been a time where there were simultaneous region failures in AWS -- and with dynamo global tables its easier than ever to get a multi-region app launched.
Pricing is the kicker for sure though. Your bill line is going to be higher. You're also priced in though which from a biz standpoint is huge. It's very difficult to budget failure, it's probably a hidden component in your engineering team costs. For startups this can be mitigated through AWS' accelerator-linked programs though, otherwise, I'd encourage any CTO / CEO / founder team to really think about how cost is not measured in the data center bill, but in that cost, plus engineer cost, plus customer retention costs, plus opportunity cost.