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Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

The big issue I think we miss when people say "why are you using Dynamo, just use SQL" or "why are you using hadoop, a bash shell would be faster" or "why are you using containers and kubernetes, just host a raspberry pi in your closet":

The former examples are all managed! That's amazing for scaling teams.

(SQL can be managed with, say, RDS. Sure. But it's not the same level of managed as Dynamo (or Firebase or something like that). It still requires maintenance and tuning and upkeep. Maybe that's fine for you (remember: the point of this article was to tell you to THINK, not to just ignore any big tech products that come out). But don't discount the advantage of true serverless.)

My goal is to be totally unable to SSH into everything that powers my app. I'm not saying that I want a stack where I don't have to. I'm saying that I literally cannot, even if I wanted to real bad. That's why serverless is the future; not because of the massive scale it enables, but because fuck maintenance, fuck operations, fuck worrying about buffer overflow bugs in OpenSSL, I'll pay Amazon $N/month to do that for me, all that matters is the product.

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For anyone who's not used these "managed" services before, I want to add that it's still a fuck ton of work. The work shifts from "keeping X server running" to "how do I begin to configure and tune this service". You will run into performance issues, config gotchas, voodoo tuning, and maintenance concerns with any of AWS's managed databases or k8s.

> I'll pay Amazon $N/month to do that for me

Until you pay Amazon $N/month to provide the service, and then another $M/month to a human to manage it for you.

Exactly. There's no silver bullet, only trade offs.

In this case you're only shifting the complexity from "maintaining" to "orchestrating". "Maintaining" means you build (in a semi-automated way) once and most of your work is spent keeping the services running. In the latter, you spend most of your time building the "orchestration" and little time maintaining.

If your product is still small, it makes sense to keep most of your infrastructure in "maintaining" since the number of services is small. As the product grows (and your company starts hiring ops people), you can slowly migrate to "orchestrating".

There's no silver bullet, only trade offs.

I see this a lot and it bugs me, because it implies that it's all zero sum and there's nothing that's ever unconditionally better or worse than anything else. But that's clearly ridiculous. A hammer is unconditionally better than a rock for putting nails in things. The beauty of progress is that it enables us to have our cake and eat it too. There is no law that necessitates a dichotomy between powerful and easy.

I think you are misunderstanding the phrase trade-off. A trade-off means that something is good for one thing, but not as good for something else. Your examples are exactly an example of a trade-off. A hammer is good at hammering nails, but not good for screwing in screws, because there has been a trade-off to design the tool to make it better for hammering nails than for screwing in screws.

All tools are better at one thing then another. The point of examining trade-offs is to decide which advantages are more appropriate to which circumstance.

Why did you rephrase his analogy as a comparison between a hammer and a screwdriver, when the whole point of the comparison was that a hammer is strictly better than a rock?

A hammer isn't strictly better than a rock, it costs a lot more money/resources to obtain :)

> it implies that it's all zero sum and there's nothing that's ever unconditionally better or worse than anything else

Not necessarily - to start with, a good trade-off is unconditionally better than a bad trade-off.

Also, progress brings with it increasing complexity. Recognizing the best path includes assessing many more parameters and is far more difficult than deciding whether to use a hammer or a rock to nail things. The puzzling nature of many people to over-complicate things instead of simplifying them makes the challenge even more difficult.

By the way, the closest thing I've ever found to a silver bullet in software development (and basically any endeavor) is "Keep it simple". While this is a cliche already, it is still too often overlooked. I think this is because it isn't related to the ability to be a master at manipulating code and logic, but the ability to focus on what's really important - to know how to discard the trendy for the practical, the adventurous methods to the focused and solid - basically passionately applying occam's razor on every abstraction layer. If this was more common, I think articles like "You are not Google" would be less common.

Ever wonder how the Go team seems to get stuff done more efficiently than other groups? It's not Go, it's that they simplify (perhaps oversimplify).

> Not necessarily - to start with, a good trade-off is unconditionally better than a bad trade-off.

Are you better off with a simple dokku server, or a k8s cluster?

There's lots of good/bad on both sides... it really depends on your needs. You could use one locally or through dev layers and another for production.

You can still analyze the trade-offs of your hammer / rock choice, e.g.

Hammer pro’s: very efficient

Hammer cons: costs money, only available in industrialized societies

Rock pro’s: ubiquitous and free

Rock cons: inefficient

The point is that in tech, there is no choice which has only pros, and no choice which has only cons.

True, but nobody is using a rock still to hammer nails, or advocates for it.

Given any important problem field, it's quite likely that among the extant top solutions there is no product that is strictly dominant (better in every dimension) - most likely there will be trade offs.

I used rocks few times as kid to build some forts from scrap wood. You could nail the framing together for any modern house with a rock.

However, if you bend any nails you can't pull the nail out like with a normal framing hammer. Plus you can drive a nail faster with a proper hammer. So just use a hammer.

Problem is with software the tool also become part of what your working on. So it's never quite like this hammer and stone analogy.

Really a better analogy would be fasteners. So for instance we just have screws, nails, and joints. A simplified thing comparison would look like this, and they all become part of what your building.

  Nails
    Pros
      Fast to drive
      Still pretty strong
    Easier to remove mistakes or to disassembly.
    Cons
      Not as strong as other methods of fastening
      May crack wood if driven at the end of a board.

  Screws
    Pros
      Almost as fast as nails with a screw gun.
      Stronger joint than nails.
    Cons
      Can crack wood like nails without pre-drilling.
      Slower to remove.

  Joints
    Pros
      Strong as the wood used.
      Last as long the wood.
    Cons
      Very slow requires chiseling and cutting wood into tight inter locking shapes.
      If it's any type of joint with adhesive it can't be taken apart.

Nails are pretty forgiving to the type/size of hammer used.

Screws can be pretty finicky, for example using a too-small Philips screwdriver can strip the screw-head, and make it very difficult to tighten further or to remove.

I'm pretty fond of those screws that can take a Flathead or Philips screwdriver, though.

How about nuts+bolts?

You can have options that are definitely worse than the rest weight having a silver bullet, aka option that's definitely better than the rest. For nail driving consider a hammer and a pneumatic nail gun. Both are better than a rock, but you couldn't call either one a silver bullet. You still have to think about which one is best for your usage.

Funny enough, I've experienced the largest benefits from "scaling down" with Amazon's managed databases.

For instance I made an email newsletter system which handles subscriptions, verifications, unsubscribes, removing bounces, etc. based on Lambda, DynamoDB, and SES. What's nice about is that I don't need to have a whole VM running all the time when I just have to process a few subscriptions a day and an occasional burst of work when the newsletter goes out.

I have a db.example.com $10 a month VM on digital ocean.

It is strictly for dev and staging. Not actual production use because prod doesn't exist yet anyways.

My question is what kind of maintenance should I be doing? I don't see any maintenance. I run apt upgrade about once a month. I'm sure you'd probably want to go with something like Google Cloud or Amazon or ElephantSQL for production purely to CYA but other than that if you don't anticipate heavy load, why not just get a cheap VM and run postgresql yourself? I mean I think ssh login is pretty safe if you disable password login, right? What maintenance am I missing? Assuming you don't care about the data and are willing to do some work to recreate your databases when something goes wrong, I think a virtual machine with linode or digital ocean or even your own data center is not bad?

Amazon are pushing very hard to convince the next generation of devs who grew up writing front-end JS that databases, servers etc. are some kind of technical wizardy best outsourced, when a few weeks of reading and playing around would be enough to get them up to speed.

Hate to be super paranoid, but isn't it rather convenient the top comment on this section expresses exactly this sentiment? If anything, it proves that this perspective is working, or at least, a huge host of devs online really are front-end JS'ers who have this opinion already.

From an engineering/development sense, this is a good thing, because it means that devs are cheaper. Most devs can't even handle being a good client of things like databases. They barely comprehend what the underlying theories are behind SQL (eg sets etc).

Just like early electricity, people ran their own generators. That got outsourced, so the standard "sparky" wouldn't have the faintest idea of the requirements of the generation side, only the demand side.

The same is happening to programming.

1. Programmers are supposed to be professionals. They certainly want to be paid like professionals.

2. The effects of the back end have a nasty habit of poking through in a way that the differences between windmill generators and pumped hydraulic storage don't.

The difference is that in the case of programming, for the cost of some side-study you can get yourself a competitive advantage.

Very much this. For most use cases, the out-of-the-box configuration is fine until you hit ridiculous scale, and it's not really all that complicated to keep a service running if you take time to read the docs.

It just came to mind Jason Fried's Getting Real chapter titled "Scale Later". Page 44.

"For example, we ran Basecamp on a single server for the first year. Because we went with such a simple setup, it only took a week to implement. We didn’t start with a cluster of 15 boxes or spend months worrying about scaling. Did we experience any problems? A few. But we also realized that most of the problems we feared, like a brief slowdown, really weren’t that big of a deal to customers. As long as you keep people in the loop, and are honest about the situation, they’ll understand."

It’s not about “getting up to speed”. It’s about not having to manage it on and ongoing basis.

I wouldn’t work for a company that expects devs to manage resources that can be managed by a cloud provider and develop.

How well can you “manage” a Mysql database with storage redundancy across three availability zones and synchronous autoscaling read replicas?

How well can you manage an autoscaling database that costs basically nothing when you’re not using but scales to handle spikey traffic when you do?

Right.. so now your developers don't need to understand how to configure and tune open source directory services and RDBMS's and in-memory caches... they just need to understand how to configure and tune a cloud-provider's implementation of a directory service and RDBMS and in-memory cache..... ?

If you think using a cloud "service" out-of-the-box will "just work" your scale is probably small enough that a single server with the equivalent package installed with the default settings is going to "just work" too.

You did just read our use case didn’t you? Yes we could overprovision a single server with 5x the resources for the once a week indexing.

We could also have 4 other servers running all of the time even when we weren’t demoing anything in our UAT environment.

We could also not have any redundancy and separate out the reads and writes.

No one said the developers didn’t need to understand how to do it. I said we didn’t have to worry about maintaining infrastructure and overprovisioning.

We also have bulk processors that run messages at a trickle based on incoming instances during the day but at night and especially st the end of the week, we need 8 times the resources to meet our SLAs. Should we also overprovision that and run 8 servers all of the time?

> Yes we could overprovision a single server with 5x the resources for the once a week indexing.

You assume this is bad, but why? Your alternative seems to be locking yourself into expensive and highly proprietary vendor solutions that have their own learning curve and a wide variety of tradeoffs and complications.

The point being made is that you are still worrying about maintaining infrastructure and overprovisioning, because you're now spending time specializing your system and perhaps entire company to a specific vendor's serverless solutions.

To be clear, I don't have anything against cloud infrastructure really, but I do think some folks really don't seem to understand how powerful simple, battle-tested tools like PostgreSQL are. "Overprovisioning" may be way less of an issue than you imply (especially if you seriously only need 8 machines), and replication for PostgreSQL is a long solved problem.

So having 4-8 times as many servers that unlike AWS, we would also have five times (1 master and 8 slaves) as much storage is better than the theoretical “lock-in”? You realize with the read replicas, you’re only paying once for storage since they all use the same (redundant) storage?

Where is the “lock-in”? It is Mysql. You use the same tools to transfer data from Aurora/MySQL that you would use to transfer data from any other MySQL installation.

But we should host our entire enterprise on digital ocean or linode just in case one day we want to move our entire infrastructure to another provider?

Out of all of the business risks that most companies face, lock-in to AWS is the least of them.

How are we “specializing our system”? We have one connection string for read/writes and one for just reads. I’ve been doing the same thing since the mid 2000s with MySQL on prem. AWS simply load balances rate readers and adds more as needed.

And you don’t see any issue on spending 5 to 9 times as much on both storage and CPU? You do realize that while we are just talking about production databases, just like any other we company we have multiple environments some of which are only used sporadically. Those environments are mostly shut down - including the actually database server until we need them and scales up with reads and writes with Aurora Serverless when we do need it.

You have know idea how easy it is to set the autoscsling read replica up do you?

Usually you pay much more and have more servers when you use AWS than a basic server provider

Basic replication is maybe close to what you could call solved, but I'd say that there's still complications like georeplicating multi master write machines are still quite complicated, and need a dedicated person to manage. Hiring being what it is, it might just be easier to let Amazon hire that person for you and pay Amazon directly.

I see cloud services as a proxy to hire talented devops/dba people, and efficiently multiplex their time across several companies, rather than each company hiring mediocre devops/dba engineers. That said, I agree that for quite a few smaller companies, in house infrastructure will do the job almost as well as managed services, at much cheaper numbers. Either way, this is not an engineering decision, it's a managerial one, and the tradeoffs are around developer time, hiring and cost.

> I see cloud services as a proxy to hire talented devops/dba people, and efficiently multiplex their time across several companies

It's only a proxy in the sense that it hides them (the ops/dbas) behind a wall, and you can't actually talk directly to them about what you want to do, or what's wrong.

If you don't want to hire staff directly, consulting companies like Percona will give you direct, specific advice and support.

Basic replication is maybe close to what you could call solved,

Locally hosted basic synchronous read replicas are a solved a problem?

"No one said the developers didn’t need to understand how to do it. I said we didn’t have to worry about maintaining infrastructure and overprovisioning."

If you do not do something regularly, you tend to lose the ability to do it at all. Personally, and especially organizationally.

There is a difference between maintaining MySQL servers and the underlying operating system and writing efficient queries, optimizing indexes, knowing how to design a normalized table and knowing when to denormalize, looking at the logs to see which queries are performing slowly etc. using AWS doesn’t absolve you from knowing how to use AWS.

There is no value add in the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. It is not a companies competitive advantage to know how to do the grunt work of server administration - unless it is. Of course Dropbox or Backblaze have to optimize their low profit margin storage business.

Why not run eight servers all the time? If you are running at a scale where that is a cost you notice at all, you are not only in a very early stage, you're actually not even a company.

There are many, MANY software companies whose infrastructure needs are on the order of single digits of normal-strength servers and who are profitable to the tune of millions of dollars a year. These aren’t companies staffed with penny-pinching optimization savants; some software, even at scale, just doesn’t need that kind of gear.

A multi million dollars tech company with tens of employees cannot run a sane infrastructure with a single digit of servers.

For a trivial website in production: 2 web servers + 1 database + 1 replica.

For internal tooling: 1 CI and build server + 2 development and testing servers + 1 storage, file share, ftp server + 1 backup server.

For desktop support: At least 1 server for DHCP, DNS, Active Directory + firewall + router.

That's already 10 servers and not counting networking equipment. Less than that and you're cutting corners.

Web servers - lambda

Build server - CodeBuild you either run with prebuilt Docker containers or you use a custom built Docker container that automatically gets launched when you push your code to GitHub/CodeCommit. No server involved.

Fileshare - a lot of companies just use Dropbox or OneDrive. No server involved

FTP - managed AWS SFTP Service. No server involved.

DHCP - Managed VPN Service by AWS. No server involved.

DNS - Route 53 and with Amazon Certificate Manager it will manage SSL certificates attached to your load balancer and CDN and auto renew. No servers involved.

Active Directory - Managed by AWS no server involved.

Firewall and router - no server to Manage. You create security groups and attach them to your EC2 instances, databases, etc.

You set your routing table up and attach it to your VMs.

Networking equipment and routers - again that’s a CloudFormatiom template or go old school and just configuration on a website.

9 servers (8 reads and 1 writer) running all of the time with asynchronous replication (as opposed to synchronous replication) with duplicate data - yes the storage is shared between all of the replicas.

Not to mention the four lower environments some of which the databases are automatically spun up from 0 and scaled up as needed (Aurora Serverless)

Should we also maintain those same read replicas servers in our other environments when we want to do performance testing?

Should we maintain servers overseas for our outsourced workers?

Here we are just talking about Aurora/MySQL databases. I haven’t even gotten into our VMs, load balancer, object store (S3), queueing server (or lack there of since we use SQS/SNS), our OLAP database (Redshift - no we are not “locked in” it users standard Postgres drivers), etc.

AWS is not about saving money on like for like resources as you would on bare metal, but in the case of databases where your load is spiky you do. It’s about provisioning resources as needed when needed and not having to either pay as many infrastructure folks. Heck before my manager who hired me and one other person came in, the company had no one onsite that had any formal AWS expertise. They completely relied on a managed service provider - who they pay much less than they would pay for one dedicated infrastructure guy.

I’m first and foremost a developer/lead/software architect (depending on which way the wind is blowing at any given point in my career), but yes I have managed infrastructure on prem as part of my job years ago, including replicated MySQL servers. There is absolutely no way that I could spin up and manage all of the resources I need for a project and develop at the efficacy level at a colo as I can with just a CloudFormation template with AWS.

I’ve worked at a company that rented stacks of servers that sat idle most of the time but we used to simulate thousands of mobile connections to our backend servers - we did large B2B field services deployments. Today, it would be running a Pythom script that spun up an autoscaling group of VMs to whatever number we needed.

The question is how often is that necessary? Once again the point goes back to the article title. You are not Google. Unless your product is actually large, you probably don't need all of that and even if you do, you can probably just do part of it in the cloud for significantly cheaper and get close to the same result.

This obsession with making something completely bulletproof and scalable is the exact problem they are discussing. You probably don't need it in most cases but just want it. I am guilty of this as well and it is very difficult to avoid doing.

You think only Google needs to protect against data loss?

We have a process that reads a lot of data from the database on a periodic basis and sends it to ElasticSearch. We would either have to spend more and overprovision it to handle peak load or we can just turn on autoscaling for read replicas. Since the read replicas use the same storage as the reader/writer it’s much faster.

Yes we need “bulletproof” and scalability or our clients we have six and seven figure contracts with won’t be happy and will be up in arms.

> You think only Google needs to protect against data loss?

Just have a cron job taking backups in a server and sending somewhere else?

It has been working for the last 40 years...

So a cron job can give me point in time recovery?

Can a cron job give me automatic failover to another server that is in sync with the master? Can it give me autoscaling read replicas?

Who is going to get up in the middle of the night when the cron job fails?

Yes I am sure my company that has six and seven figure contracts would be just as well served self hosting MySQL on Linode.

OTOH the last "cloud" solution I've seen was a database that allowed a team to schedule itself. It was backed on Google cloud, had autoscaling backend. It was "serverless" (app engine), and had backups etc configured.

Cost to run it for 4 years: $70000.

QPS ? 5 was the highest I ever found.

You don't need this capacity. You just don't.

But it's got to be a good business to be in ...

Instead of just assuming pricing based on Google pricing (which we weren’t talking about), you could always just find AWS pricing.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/

Storage cost of 500Gb of data for four years - $2400

Backing up is free up to the amount of online storage.

IO request are $0.12 per million.

Transfer to/from VMs in the same availability zone is free.

A r5.large reserved instance is $6600 a year.

Of course if your needs are less, you could get much cheaper cpu and memory.

Why do you have a specific need to read the database periodically polling it instead of just pushing the data to elastic search at the same time that it reaches the database? I don’t know anything about your architecture, but unless you’re handling data on a very big scale probably rationalising the architecture would give you much more performance and maintainability than putting everything in the cloud.

Without going into specifics. We have large external data feeds that are used and correlated with other customer specific data (multitenant business customers) and it also needs to be searchable. There are times we get new data relevant to customers that cause us to reindex.

We are just focusing on databases here. There is more to infrastructure than just databases. Should we also maintain our own load balancers, queueing/messaging systems, CDN, object store, OLAP database, CI/CD servers, patch management system, alerting monitoring system, web application firewall, ADFS servers, OATH servers, key/value store, key management server, ElasticSearch cluster etc? Except for the OLAP database. All of this is set up in some form in multiple isolated environments with different accounts in one Organizational Account that manages all of the other sub accounts.

What about our infrastructure overseas so our off shore developers don’t have the latency of connecting back to the US?

For some projects we even use lambda where we don’t maintain any web servers and get scalability from 0 to $a_lot - and no there is no lock-in boogeyman there either. I can deploy the same NodeJS/Express, C#/WebAPI, Python/Django code to both lambda and a regular old VM just by changing my deployment pipeline.

Did you read the article? You are not Google. If you ever do really need that kind of redundancy and scale you will have the team to support it, with all the benefits of doing it in-house. No uptime guarantee or web dashboard will ever substitute for simply having people who know what they're doing on staff.

How a company which seems entirely driven by vertical integration is able to convince other companies that outsourcing is the way to go is an absolute mystery to me.

No, we are not Google. We do need to be able to handle spiky loads - see the other reply. No we don’t “need a team” to support.

Yes “the people in the know” are at AWS. They handle failover, autoscaling, etc.

We also use Serverless Aurora/MySQL for non production environments with production like size of data. When we don’t need to access the database, we only pay for storage. When we do need it, it’s there.

I agree for production because you want to be able to blame someone when autoscaling fails but we trust developers to run applications locally, right? Then why can't we trust them with dev and staging?

By the way what is autoscaling and why are we autoscaling databases? Im guessing the only resource thst autoscales is the bandwidth? Why can't we all get shared access to a fat pipe in production? I was under the impression that products like Google Cloud Spanner have this figured out. What exactly needs to auto scale? Isn't there just one database server in production?

In dev (which is the use case I'm talking about) you should be able to just reset the vm whenever you want, no?

The big innovation of aurora is they decoupled the compute from the storage [1]. Both compute and storage need to auto scale, but compute is the really important one that is hardest. Aurora serverless scales the compute automatically by keeping warm pools of db capacity around [2]. This is great for spiky traffic without degraded performance.

1. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/p1041-verbitski.p... 2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

No, it’s not just the bandwidth. It’s also the CPU for read and writes in the case of Serverless Aurora.

For regular autoscaling of read replicas. It brings additional servers on line using the same storage array. It isn’t just “one database”.

That’s just it. There isn’t “just one database”.

Cloud spanner seems awesome but has a base price of $740/mo, doesn’t seem to autoscale, and doesn’t support a mysql or postgres interface.

I've had servers with identical configurations, identical setup, identical programs installed the exact same way (via docker images), setup the same day

One worked, one didn't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's when I gave up on servers, virtual or not

It stands to reason that they weren't identical because if they were they would both have worked.

The thing separating you (in this case) and Amazon/Google/* is that they make sure their processes produce predictable outcomes that if they were to fail can be shutdown and the process can be redone until it yields the correct outcome.

Unless they were identical running in the same directory and listening to the same port. First one to start won.

That’s a whole different problem in a whole other place. It’s not either of them not working.

I spent this last week finally being forced to deal with Hibernate.

Devs are more than capable of pushing each other to the same conclusions.

I have _more_ maintenance, _because_ of AWS. Most libraries/services reach some sort of a stable version where they are backwards compatible. AWS (and other big providers) changes libraries all the time and things break, then you have to figure out what they did instead of having a stable interface to work with.

Curious about where you would put your DO data. A cheap VPS from DO doesn't come with much storage. You can either buy more storage for $$ or use DO Spaces for fewer $, but do Spaces talk to PostgresQL? I apologize for my ignorance; I'm just beginning to explore this stuff.

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/block-storage/

Block storage is $.10/GB; Spaces is $.02/GB. I was hoping there was a glue layer that would allow PostgresQL to use Spaces, but such a thing might not exist or be performant enough to be worth building.

Spaces is for object storage, stuff like videos, images, documents, etc. You can store references(links) to this objects in postgres if you want (very common thing to do).

Block storage is for adding volumes to your droplets (like adding a second hard drive to a computer). One advantage is that they are separated from your droplet and replicated, if your droplet disappears or dies, you can reattach the volume to another droplet. So one common use is to place the data dir of PG for example, in the external volume. You should still have proper backups. DO also has a managed PG service.

No need to apologize. I have very little data so the 50GB droplet is enough. But in my use case, the data is expendable. The data had no value in development environment. You probably shouldn't do in production what I'm doing.

I have some hobby projects that are very infrequently accessed by me and my friends andy family. Relative to their usefulness, $10/mo would be way too expensive. With S3 and lambdas, my aws bill has been more like $1 to $3, depending on traffic and amount of active side projects.

Edit: those don't include a propoer DB, though, I have been basically using S3 as the DB. Not sure how much a RDS instance or something would add to the bill.

Why would you need "a whole VM"?

Just run it as a systemd service or a Docker/Kubernetes-managed container on one of the VMs that run the rest of the application.

Also no need to use all those AWS-proprietary services, just use an existing task queue system based on PostgreSQL/RabbitMQ/etc.

You have a database that only needs to be accessible part of the time. Why not keep going to an embedded database?

If you are hunting vampires there are the choice of the Silver Bullet avaible.

Some times, the benefits from something compared to another thing are so great that there are no downsides. If the rasp in the closets doesn't suffice you can always add another one.

The costs associated with "maintaining" usually involve the possibility of a 3am call for whoever is in charge of maintaining. Orchestrating can be done ahead of time, during your 9-5, and that's super valuable. It's still a lot of work, but it's work that can be done on my time, at my pace.

Managed services still have plenty of unexplained goings-on, and 3AM pages.

We moved some stuff from AWS back to on prems because it broke less often and in more obvious ways.

Said like a person who hasn't actually ever converted. It's nothing like that at all.

12 outages since 2011, and none of them are anything like what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...

We've moved from on-prem to AWS fully and we see random issues all the time while their status page shows all green, so I feel you probably have a small amount of resources in use with them or something, because what you're saying doesn't jive with what we see daily. I see you've also copy-pasted your response to other comments too.

Can you actually quantify any of this or are you asking me to trust you? What I gave is an objective standard, what you've given so far is "trust me I'm right".

Are you just ignoring that the cloud isn't a the savior for everyone because it furthers your own agenda, either publically or personally? We spend the GDP of some nations with AWS yearly, so I guarantee you're not at our scale to see these sorts of issues that most definitely are not caused by us and are indeed issues with AWS as confirmed by our account rep.

There are nations that have very tiny GDPs (and AWS is very expensive) so that's not saying much, and I didn't say AWS was flawless, I said that AWS was a hell of a lot better than anything you could come up with unless you're literally at Amazon scale (and we both know you arent), and nearly none of your software's problems are AWS's fault.

Using AWS has been a legitimate excuse for an outage or service delivery issue a dozen times since 2011. The end. Write your apps to be more resilient if you've had more than that many outages at those times (and honestly even those outages weren't complete).

> AWS was a hell of a lot better than anything you could come up with unless you're literally at Amazon scale

AWS is a hell of a lot better than most people here can come up with for solving AWS specific set of problems and priorities. But those problems and priorities generally do not match the problem space of the people using it exactly.

For example, AWS has a lot of complexity for dealing with services and deployment because it needs to be versatile enough to meet wildly different scenarios. In designing a solution for one company and their needs over the next few years, you wouldn't attempt to match what AWS does, because the majority of companies use only a small fraction of the available services, so that wouldn't be a good use of time and resources.

AWS is good enough for very many companies so they appeal to large chunks of the market, but let's not act like that makes them a perfect or "best" solution. They're just a very scaleable and versatile solution so it's unlikely they can't handle your problem. You'll often pay more for that scaleability and versatility though, and if you knew perfectly (or within good bounds) what to expect when designing a system, it's really not that hard to beat AWS on a cost and growth level with a well designed plan.

Edit: Whoops, s/dell/well/, but it probably works either way... ;)

I'm starting to think this person refuses to be logical, not directed at you kbenson. PlayStation Network ran fine for years in our own datacenters, we decided to move to AWS instead of dealing with acquiring and maintaining our own hardware. Trust me, Sony isn't lacking some very bright people, we just don't want to deal with on-prem anymore, so yeah we'll throw ridiculous money at them for that pleasure.

diminoten -- relax, take a breath. Your rude and condescending tone is unnecessary. We don't see eye-to-eye, but I'm not discounting your experience. I can't say I'm getting the same vibe from you.

I think the only thing you wrote here I would point out is that you seem to vastly underestimate the operational cost of running your own in-house infrastructure. You're comparing AWS costs to hardware costs, but that's not what AWS gives you, it lets you restructure how you task your entire SA team. You still need them, but they can now work on very different issues, and you don't need to hire new people to work on the things they are now freed up to work on.

And again, I cannot over emphasize how much more control over your own time AWS gives you. It's night/day, and discounting that is a mistake.

Without breaking my employer confidentiality agreement? No. But you basing off reported outages is you trusting Amazon in the same way you don't trust me, that is, on their word.

I'd rather trust a corporation providing some information over an individual providing absolutely nothing, especially when that corporation's information matches with my own internal information.

The reality is, if you're having problems with AWS, it's you, and not AWS, for 99.9999999% of your problems. Continuing to pretend it's AWS is a face-saving, ego protecting activity that no rational person plays part in.

Which is funny because I've had an instance go down. I don't have ridiculously high volume, or distributed:

-One instance -No changes to the config -I'm the only person with access -No major outages at the time

It went down, and the AWS monitor didn't actually see it go down until 45 minutes later, which it needs to be down for a certain amount of time before their techs will take a look.

It was my first time using AWS, and I didn't want to risk waiting for tech so I rebooted the instance and it started back up again. I have no idea why, but it failed with out reason, and on reboot worked like it always did.

My point is that AWS has been solid, but they are like anything else, there are tradeoff's in using their service, and they aren't perfect.

I don't know the last time I had an instance go down. Not because it doesn't happen, but because it's sufficiently unimportant that we don't alert on it. Our ASG just brings up another to replace it.

Many applications won't be as resilient. That's the trade-off. We don't have a single stateful application. RDS/Redis/Dynamo/SQS are all managed by someone else. We had to build things differently to accommodate that constraint, but as a result we have ~35M active users and only 2 ops engineers, who spend their time building automation rather than babysitting systems.

If you lean in completely, it's a great ecosystem. Otherwise it's a terrible co-lo experience.

Funny enough, that exact scenario is covered in the certification exams too, and the correct answer is to do what you did. An ASG will fix too like another poster said, also.

Yeah, you just demonstrated why AWS is keen on you having backups to your services on their platform. You failed to do that (follow their guidance) and suffered an outage because of it. How exactly is that AWS's fault?

MY point is that AWS is very solid, and while there are plenty of trade offs, to be sure, the tradeoff is "operational" vs. "orchestration", and operational doesn't let you decide when to work on it whereas orchestration does.

While I want to avoid getting into this argument, what you are saying is the same as "well it works on my machine" and "there can't be anything wrong with Oracle Database because Oracle says there are no bugs."

No, what I'm saying is, "None of your problems are consistent across use cases, therefore they're your problems not the system being used."

I haven't actually said anything about my own experience, so it's funny you claim I have...

"I'd rather trust a corporation providing some information over an individual providing absolutely nothing, especially when that corporation's information matches with my own internal information."

Ah, I had assumed that your internal information was from experience, either your own or your organisation's. Since that is not the case I am curious where your "internal information" comes from considering you completely disregarded @bsagdiyev's personal experience.

What part of what I said makes you think my internal information isn't from experience? Just to be clear; it is. I haven't described my specific experience, so claiming I said "it works perfectly for me" is not something I've claimed.

What you tried to say was I was claiming that since it worked for me it was therefore good. That isn't the case. I'm saying because it worked for me AND EVERYBODY ELSE, it's therefore good.

It's bad enough that a Chrome extension exists to tease out real info from the lies that is the AWS status page:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/real-aws-status/ka...

How about network partitions across availability zones? Happens all the time for us, so much in fact that we had to build a tool to test connectivity across AZs just to correlate outages and find the smoking gun.

AWS status page is notorious for not indicating there is an issue either at all, or until well after the event began.

When your Redshift instance locks up, it doesn't end up on Wikipedia.

"For anyone who's not used these "managed" services before, I want to add that it's still a fuck ton of work. The work shifts from "keeping X server running" to "how do I begin to configure and tune this service"."

I have noticed that too. With some managed services you are trading a set of generally understood problems with a lot of quirky behavior of the service that's very hard to debug.

Yes, but I think very broadly speaking the quirky behavior is stuff you bump into, learn about, fix, and then can walk away from.

The daily/monthly maintenance cycle on a self hosted SQL server is “generally understood” but you still have to wake up, check your security patches, and monitor your redeployments.

You can do some of that in an automated fashion with public security updates for your containers and such. But if monitoring detects an anomaly, it’s YOU, not Heroku who gets paged.

It’s a little like owning a house vs renting. Yes if you rent you have to work around the existing building, and getting small things fixed is a process. But if the pipes explode, you make a phone call and it’s someone else’s problem. You didn’t eliminate your workload, but you shrunk the domain you need to personally be on call for.

The problem is that if I run my own servers I can fix problems (maybe with a lot of effort but at least it can be done) but with managed services I may not be able to do so. There is a lot of value in managed services but you have to be careful not to allow them to eat up your project with their bugs/quirks.

So what “problems” were you unable to fix with AWS?

Exactly this

The point is with a managed service, none of your problems will be with the service. That's what the managed service is selling.

I just finished a 2+ week support ticket w/ AWS. We were unable to connect over TLS to several of our instances, because the instance's hostname was not listed on the certificate. This is a niche bug that's trivially fixable if you own the service, but with AWS, it's a lot harder: you're going to need a technical rep who understands x509 — and nobody understands x509.

I've found & reported a bug in RDS whereby spatial indexes just didn't work; merely hinting the server to not use the spatial index would return results, but hinting it to use the spatial index would get nothing. (Spatial indexes were, admittedly, brand new at the time.)

I've had bugs w/ S3: technically the service is up, but trivial GETs from the bucket take 140 seconds to complete, rendering our service effectively down.

I've found & worked w/ AWS to fix a bug in ELB's HTTP handling.

All of these were problems with the service, since in each case it's failing to correctly implement some well-understood protocol. AWS is not perfect. (Still, it is worth it, IMO. But the parent is right: you are trading one set of issues for another, and it's worth knowing that and thinking about it and what is right for you.)

Okay, I'm sorry you thought I said AWS was perfect and bug free. I didn't, however, say that. I said (implied, really) it's better than anything you could possibly home brew. Nothing you've said here changes that.

Further, didn't I say that it's trading one set of issues for another? Or at least, I explicitly agreed with that.

I feel like you didn't read what I wrote honestly, and kind of came in with your own agenda. All I ever said was that the issues you trade off are orchestration issues vs. operational issues, and operational issues are 10x harder than orchestration issues because you don't get to decide when to work on operational issues, you tend to have to deal with them when they happen.

You wrote “The point is with a managed service, none of your problems will be with the service.”

What deathanatos wrote sounds awfully like problems with the service to me.

I don’t think S3 taking 100+ seconds to respond to a GET request can be solved by orchestration alone.

It definitely can. Reasonable timeouts and redundant systems.

It's amazing the length some people are willing to go to to defend AWS marketing slogans as a source of truth. I've seen vendor lock-in before, but AWS seems to be unique in that people actually enjoy working with a vendor whose services go down randomly to the point where they blame themselves for not being "fault-tolerant".

Guess what, if your service is not required to be up because the consuming service is super tolerant to it timing out after 140 seconds, self-hosting it becomes even more of a no-brainer. After all, you clearly need none of the redundancy AWS features.

If it makes you feel better, everything I'm saying about AWS can be said about GCP as well.

Sorry, but AWS/GCP is infinitely better at managing infrastructure than you or your company will ever be.

That's the promise but in reality every software has bugs, including managed services.

Not really, not anything like what you're describing.

12 outages since 2011, and none of them are anything like what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...

I don't feel like copy/pasting all of our comments to each other, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't do that, thanks.

Then don't do it yourself. You're dead set on ignoring people whose experience is different than yours, wrapping yourself in an echo chamber of sorts and telling others they are wrong.

I'm not dead set on anything, I'm trying to have conversations with multiple people, not create an immutable record.

And I don't think you know what an echo chamber is if you think one person can create one alone...

This is not about outages. There are many more things that can go wrong besides outages.

> The point is with a managed service, none of your problems will be with the service. That's what the managed service is selling.

Until the managed service simply goes away, of course, taking your data with it.

It's someone else problem unless it prevents you from living here, in which case it's still your problem too. I think the analogy works quite well :)

So I've worked with AWS and with our internal clusters as a dev. My experience has been that I have to make work-arounds for both, but at least with AWS, I don't have to spell out commands explicitly to the junior PEs.

EDIT: I should be clear, our PEs are generally pretty good, but because their product isn't seen by upper management as the thing which makes money, they're perpetually understaffed.

Also Amazon documents their stuff in a nice public website, internal teams documented the n-2 iteration of the system and have change notes hidden in a Google drive somewhere that if you ask the right person on the other side of the world they might be able to share you a link to.

This. So. Much.

I can't explain just how much developing on GCP has helped me simply by having such amazing documentation. I don't think I appreciated how little I knew: every company where we worked with on premise/ internal services, we would have to use custom services built by others. With GCP, you have complete freedom, not just to design your application architecture from scratch, but to understand how others (coworkers mostly) have designed _their_ applications too! And as a company, it allows the sharing of a common set of best practices, automatically, since its "recommended by Google".

Its kinda like Google/Amazon are now the System/Operations engineers for our company. Which they're good at. And its awesome.

You were able to find documentation? Where do you work?

But you’re talking about a reduction in the number of types of specialized people to the number of specializations per type of person. That makes this more scalable.

The general fact of reality is that if you are building anything technical, then knowing and managing the details, whatever the details are, will get you a lot more bang for your buck. Reality isn't just a garden variety one-size fits all kind of thing, so creating something usually isn't either. If you just want a blog like everyone else's, then that comes packaged, but if you want something special, you will always have to put in the expertise.

> will get you a lot more bang for your buck

And it _really_ is a lot. A company I work with switched from running two servers with failover to AWS, bills went from ~€120/m to ~€2.2k/m for a similar work load. Granted, nobody has to manage those servers any more, but if that price tag continues to rise that way, it's going to be much cheaper to have somebody dedicated to manage those servers vs use AWS.

Also, maybe that's just me, but I prefer to have the knowledge in my team. If everything runs on AWS, I'm at the mercy of Amazon.

If the bill went from ~€120/m to ~€2.2k/m and it was a surprise it is really a lack of proper planning. AWS pricing calculator is there for a reason...

However, often teams will use or attempt to use _a_lot_ more resources than what's needed, or they simply don't optimise for cost when using AWS.

My anecdote is that a company I worked for had an in-house app that run jobs on 8 m4.16xlarge instances costing around $20k/m and they were complaining it took hours to run said jobs. The actual tasks those servers were running were easily parallelizable and servers would run at capacity only for around 10% of the time as those jobs were submitted by users every few-up-to-24 hours. The app was basically a lift-and-shift from on-prem to AWS. The worst way one can use cloud. I created a demo for them where the exact jobs they were running on those m4.16xlarge would run on lambda using their existing code modified slightly. The time a job took to run went from many hours to few minutes with around 2k lambda functions running at the same time. The projected cost went from $20k/m to $1-5k/m depending on workload. I was quite happy with the result, unfortunately they ended up not using lambda and migrating off the app that in its entirety cost around $50k/m for the infrastructure. The point I'm trying to make here is that properly used cloud can save you a lot of money if you have a spikey workload.

Also, for internal apps that are used sparingly one can't beat a mix of client side JS code served from S3, using AWS Cognito tied to AD federation for auth with DynamoDB for data storage and lambda for typical server-side stuff. Such apps are easy to write, cost almost nothing if they are not used a lot and don't come with another server to manage. The only downside is that instead of managing servers, now you have to manage changes in AWS's api..., but nothing's perfect.

Proponents of the cloud love to ignore that for 'small' places, it's often perfectly fine to have a 'part-time +emergencies' ops/sysadmin person/team to manage infra.

Yes, some places will need a full time team of multiple people, but a lot of places don't, and can get a tailored solution to suit their needs perfectly, rather than just trying to fit into however it seems to work best using the soup of rube-goldberg like interdependent AWS services.

Absolutely, and unless you're riding a roller coaster, you can always grow your team with demand. When your operation has grown enough, you can shift from consultants to employees to save money and get the knowledge into the company, you don't have to start with a team of three to manage one server.

Exactly - and good consultants/contractors will still provide you with the in-house docs/guides/configuration management that will help you either transition existing, or hire new staff when the time comes.

Holy cow, that's nuts. A pair of perfectly webservers (m5.xlarge) comes in at ~€250/m. And cheaper if you get reserved instances. ~€2.2k/m for a pair of instances and maybe a load balancer is incredible!

If you can use servers _without_disks_ and without bandwidth, then yeah that's the price. Add some EBS, specially provisioned IOPS.

Not even getting into the fact that an m5.xlarge has roughly as much muscle as an old laptop.

Don't use PIOPS, it's a scam.

Get normal disks of a larger size, it comes with 3 IOPS per GB.

It is, especially when they are running a lot of base load, so it's not about firing up 20 nodes for an hour and then idling along on one node for the rest of the week.

"We'd rather not manage the database ourselves" was the answer from the lead dev, and I do understand that: it's not the developers' job to manage servers. In this company, management has removed themselves from anything technical and the devs don't like managing servers, so they say "let's use AWS, we'll write some code once to create our environment and Amazon takes care of the rest" - and by this point they are committed, with months having been spent on getting things running on AWS, changing the code where necessary etc, so reversing it would be a hard thing to sell to investors and the team.

What really bugs me about this is that it reminds me of the dotcom days. Microsoft ASP stacks made it easier to find less experienced developers to quickly develope sites, no one having an awareness of optimisation and instead would throw hardware at it. Large clusters of DEC Alpha servers would handle the same amount of traffic as a single FreeBSD on a PC, but this cost difference wasn't a problem when investor cash flowed easily and shifting Microsoft and Cisco products fed into the revenues of the system integrators which was fine since revenue growth mattered more than profits.

I've seen this with many AWS deployments, which on a pure hardware cost is 3-5 times more, but with the way it makes it 'easy' to scale instead of optimise instead costs 10-20 times more. When the investor cash starts drying up and the focus is going to be on competing for profits in a market that is much smaller in general, many organisations are going to find themselves locked into AWS and for them it's going to feel like IE6 and asp.net all over again.

Same goes for J2EE, Flash, and a bunch of other technologies. Your focus on ASP.NET seems rather biased.

I don't think you could describe J2EE as "made it easier to find less experienced developers to quickly develop sites". If anything, it's diametrically opposed to that goal.

And back in dotcom days, it was ASP, not ASP.NET. Which is to say, much like PHP, except with VBScript as a language, and COM as a library API/ABI.

Bang on. Realistically the value of Amazon's managed side is in the early stages. At latter stages with people, it's significantly lower cost to tune real resources, and you get added performance benefits.

We make a decent business out of doing just this, at scale for clients today.

Agree. AWS and the likes is an awesome tool to get access to a lot of compute power quickly which is great for unexpectedly large workloads or experimenting during early stages. For established businesses/processes the cost of running on premises is often significantly lower.

We manage about 150T of data for company on relatively inexpensive raid array + one replica + offline backup. It is accessible on our 10Gbps intranet for processing cluster, users to pull to their workstations, etc. The whole thing is running on stock HP servers for many years and never had outages beyond disks (which are in raid) predicting failure and maybe one redundant PSU failure. We did the math of replicating what we have with Amazon or Google and it would cost a fortune.

Would love to hear more about that business — do you help people go from cloud back to on-prem?

We're all about mixed mode. Let's never pretend that we ought focus on a specific one and only business. Clients like Amazon, clients like Azure - clients then get forced by (say the BC Health Authority) to run on physical machines in a British Columbia hosted datacenter.

We help make that happen, and help folks manage the lifecycle associated with it.

Companies just really suck at managing hardware or resources. The bigger and the more consultants they get, the more terrible they get, that's what you come after.

Chances are you will find tens of instances without any naming or tagging, of the more expensive types, created by previous dudes who long left. Thanks to AWS tooling it's easy to identify them, see if they use any resource and either delete or scale down dramatically.

It's not a size thing - it's all companies, and it's about significantly more than just 'finding instances'. The 'finding instances' side of AWS is something we just do for free (AWS, Azure, etc) for our existing customers.

Our goal is to provide actual value and do real DevOps work, regardless of whether you're AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. This includes physical, mixed-mode, cloud bursting, and changing constantly. <----- That's what keeps it interesting.

If that were universally true, then why did Netflix go all in on AWS?

hype maybe? Got a backroom deal for the exposure? Oh, and you probably aren't netflix either. But they have a pretty severe case of vendor lock in now, will be interesting to see how it plays out. As of 2018 they spend 40 million on cloud services, 23 million of that on aws.

Do you think you are gonna get AWS's attention with that $10 s3 instance when something goes wrong?!? You will have negative leverage after signing up for vendor lock in.

I'll take linux servers any day, thanks.

So you think Netflix was suckered into using AWS and if they had just listened to random people on HN they would have made different choices?

I’m sure with all of your developers using the repository pattern to “abstract their database access”, you can change your database at the drop of a dime.

Companies rarely change infrastructure wholesale no matter how many levels of abstraction you put in front of your resources.

While at the same time you’re spending money maintaining hardware instead of focusing on your business’s competitive advantage.

so, you might be dealing with some half/truths here.

Netflix does NOT use aws for their meat and potatoes streaming, just the housekeeping. They use OWS for the heavy lifting.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/netflix-is-not-...

But re: maintaining hardware, I only maintain my dev box these days. We are fine with hosted linux services, but backup/monitoring/updating is just too trivial, and the hosting so affordable (and predictable) w/linux it would have to be a hype/marketing/nepotic decision to switch to aws in our case. The internet is still built on a backbone and run by linux, any programmer would be foolhardy to ignore that bit of reality for very long.

So what do you think AWS services are running on if not Linux?

Netflix is by far AWSs largest customer.

From the horses mouth on why they decided to move to AWS:

https://www.se-radio.net/2014/12/episode-216-adrian-cockcrof...

You could also go to YouTube and watch any of the dozens of talks NetFlix has done at ReInvent.

Of course Netflix caches it’s videos in the ISPs data center. But caching is not the “heavy lifting”.

Please do not spread falsehoods.

If your "managed services" are a ton of work, then they're not really managed.

I built a system selling and fulfilling 15k tshirts/day on Google App Engine using (what is now called) the Cloud Datastore. The programming limitations are annoying (it's useless for analytics) but it was rock solid reliable, autoscaled, and completely automated. Nobody wore a pager, and sometimes the entire team would go camping. You simply cannot get that kind of stress-free life out of a traditional RDBMS stack.

If anything I had much more troubles with the datastore than with any other DB ever. We are migrating away and the day it's over will be thz biggest profesional relief I've experienced. I guess you coule consider that you don't need to manage it, but the trade off is that you have to go around all the limitations through nasty software hacks instead of just a simple configuration.

I also am curious to know what sorts of problems you've had.

I have noticed that people tend to get into trouble when they force the datastore to be something it's not. For example, I mentioned that it's terrible for analytics - there are no aggregation queries.

In the case of the tshirt retailer, I replicated a portion of our data into a database that was good for analytics (postgres, actually). We could afford to lose the analytics dashboard for a few hours due to a poorly tested migration (and did, a few times), but the sales flow never went down.

The datastore is not appropriate for every project (which echoes the original article) but it's a good tool when used appropriately.

It definitely sounds like they shouldn't have used datastore in the first place if it's giving them that much trouble. A common pattern we use is to replicate the data in bigquery, either by stream or batch job that flows over pubsub - perfectly scalable and resilient to failure.

Regarding Google Cloud Datastore, what kind of limitations have you met?

Yeah, I think it's a trade off. Certain services can be a no-brainer, but others will cause pain if your particular use case doesn't align precisely with the service's strengths and limitations.

DynamoDB vs RDS is a perfect example. Most of that boils down to the typical document store and lack of transactions challenges. God forbid you start with DynamoDB and then discover you really need a transnational unit of work, or you got your indexes wrong the first time around. If you didn't need the benefits of DynamoDB in the first place, you will be wishing you just went with a traditional RDBMS vs RDS to start with.

Lambda can be another mixed bag. It can be a PITA to troubleshoot, and their are a lot of gotchas like execution time limits, storage limits, cold start latency, and so on. But once you invested all the time getting everything setup, wired up...

In for a penny, in for a pound.

This was announced in nov, i think: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-dynamodb-transac...

When you buy a service from a big company, and it doesn't work, you get to debug the service.

Which is exactly why everything runs Linux instead of Windows.

I guess that's his point, you are not doing less work, all you did was moved your debugging from one place to another.

And let's not forget! Got a support contract so we can all BLAME someone not in the room and feel good.

>You will run into performance issues, config gotchas, voodoo tuning, and maintenance concerns with any of AWS's managed databases or k8s.

The default config for a LAMP stack will easily handle 100 requests per second. 10 if you app isn't optimized.

Run apt upgrade once a month and enable automatic security updates on ubuntu.

That is neither hard nor "vodoo".

I've used managed services and I don't see the point until you hit massive scale, at which point you can afford to hire your engineers to do it.

That doesn't sound like a shift of work. It sounds like work I already would have done - performance tuning doesn't go away by bringing things in house.

Now that person I pay to operate the service can focus on tuning, not backups and other work that's been automated away.

Sounds like a massive win to me.

It does make performance tuning harder since you likely don't have access to the codebase of the managed service, requiring more trial-and-error or just asking someone on the support team ($$)

Then you pay $O/month for AWS Enterprise Support (who are actually quite good and helpful) to help augment your $M/month employees and $N/month direct spend.

Support - in the long run - is pretty cheap (I think I pay around 300) and 100 percent worth the tradeoff. The web chat offers the fastest resolution times in my experience once you are out of the queue

To be fair, this is only a valid shift for folks moving. If you are creating something, you have both "how do I configure" and "how do I keep it moving?"

That is, the shift to managed services does largely remove a large portion, and just changes another.

Yes, but it's still pretty much a straight cost offset. If you hold your own metal, you have to do all of that and still administer the database. Sure, there could be a little overlap in storage design, nut most of the managed systems have typical operational concerns at a button click: backup, restore, HA... Unless your fleet is huge and your workload is special, you're going to win with managed services.

If you hold your own metal

That's going too much to the other extreme, ec2, droplets, etc.. are fine.

define huge?

Bigger than Netflix, assuming that you don't know something that Netflix doesn't.

And a lot of the time keeping X running is simpler than configuring and tuning this service.

He specifically mentioned Dynamo. There is nothing to configure except indexes, and read and write capacity units.

That's no joke. I have a decent software background and it was far from trivial to get going with aws services. Their documentation doesn't always quite tel you everything you need to know and half thhe time there are conflicting docs both saying to do something that's wrong. Still has been less work than a production server at my last engineering job but then again that project had a lot of issues related to age and shitty code bases. Hard to say which would have been less work honestly.

> but because fuck maintenance, fuck operations, fuck worrying about buffer overflow bugs in OpenSSL, I'll pay Amazon $N/month to do that for me, all that matters is the product.

That's nice in theory, but my experience with paying big companies for promises like that is I still end up having to debug their broken software; and it's a lot easier to do that if I can ssh into the box. I've got patches into OpenSSL that fixed DHE negotiation from certain versions of windows (especially windows mobile), that I really don't think any one's support team would have been able to fix for me / my users [1], unless I had some really detailed explanation -- at that point, I may as well be running it myself.

[1] And as proof that nobody would fix it, I offer that nobody fixed this, even though there were public posts about it for a year before my patches went in; so some people had noticed it was broken.

This.

I've been informally tracking time spent on systems my team manages and managed tools we use. (I manage infra where I work.)

There is very little difference.

And workarounds and troubleshooting spent on someone else's system mean we only learn about some proprietary system. That's bad for institutional knowledge and flexibility, and for individual careers.

Our needs don't mesh well with typical cloud offerings, so we don't use them for much. When we have, there has yet to be a cost savings - thus far they've always cost us more than we pay owning everything.

I mean, I personally like not dealing with hardware or having to spend time in data centers. But I can't justify it from a cost or a service perspective.

After amazon switched to ec2/sec kind of billing in 2017 i would say cloud is pretty good for prototyping and running CI. As to anything else i would say it depends.

absolutely. I am _right_now_ fighting ELB because we see traffic going to it but not coming out of it. If it were MY load balancer, I would just log in and tcpdump.

And you couldn’t use VPC logs?

Finally figured it out. Non-http/2 support.

Your experience with companies or your specific experience with AWS?

With companies. I don't have a lot of specific experience with AWS, except for the time when nobody mentioned that the default firewall rules are stateful, and there's a connection cap that's kind of low but scaled to instance size, and there's no indication about it, and the sales droid the assigned to my account because they smelled money didn't mention it either; but I'm not bitter. :)

Based on all the articles I see from time to time, I fully expect if I worked for a company that was built on AWS, I would spend a lot of time debugging AWS, because I end up debugging all the stuff that nobody else can, and it's a lot easier to do when I have access to everything.

Everything you mentioned is covered in a Pluralsight video.

But you criticize AWS based on a few articles and hardly any real world experience?

I didn't start off criticizing AWS; just large companies in general, based on my experience with them, and extrapolating it to AWS based on my experience with the one issue, combined with reading things that sound like the same pattern of people having to debug big company's software, and it's hard when you can't see anything.

On this specific issue; I worked with sales support, and also looked on their forums; and found things like this: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=721247

Which says 'yes, we know there's a limit; no we won't tell you what it is' and ignores the elephant in the room, that apparently if you reconfigure the network rules, the problem evaporates.

Excuse me for not banging my head against the wall or watching random videos from third parties. Actually, I only know there's a way to avoid this because I complained about it for a long time in HN threads, and finally, some lovely person told me the answer. In the mean time, I had continued my life in sensible hosting environments where there wasn't an invisible, unknowable connection limit hovering over my head.

>>> I didn't start off criticizing AWS; just large companies in general, based on my experience with them

I will reply on that because I have experience with both.

If you worked in big companies, you do have to constantly debug half baked internal tools written by other people, with little or no documentation. It's horrible when you change company later, the institutional knowledge is lost when you leave and it's worthless for you to get a new job.

AWS is absolutely nothing like that. The tooling is working and polished and documented. It's much much better than any internal tools you will find in big companies. When you're out of your depth, you can just google for help. When changing company you can continue to apply the experience and never worry about the tooling in place.

So you should be excused for not doing research on something your entire infrastructure is based on?

And just “extrapolating”?

No, my entire infrastructure is not based on AWS; this was a small side project, that didn't go into production. In part, because the network did weird things, and the support system wasn't very helpful. Mostly, because it turned out to be unnecessary.

What am I supposed to do to satisfy you here? After finding the network does weird things, and not being able to get timely help with, I should conclude that AWS will solve my needs, if only I paid them more money? If only I had wasted more time watching videos that don't come up against reasonable search terms, maybe I wouldn't have come to the conclusion that having an amorphous, uninspectable, blob of a network between my servers and the internet is a bad thing?

P.S. This may be a little of pot and kettle, but what makes it so important to you that I'm convinced that AWS is unicorns and rainbows and having more control and visibility is a bad thing?

I'm sure AWS has its perks; it's great if it works for you, and if you can take advantage of running drastically different number of instances at peak and off-peak, I think there's cost savings to be had. But when it comes down to it, I'm not willing to hitch my availability to complex systems outside my control, when I don't have to, because I don't like the feeling of not being able to do anything to fix things; and I get enough of that from dealing with the things that are broken that I can't control and don't have any choice about depending on.

PS. This may be a little of pot and kettle, but what makes it so important to you that I'm convinced that AWS is unicorns and rainbows and having more control and visibility is a bad thing?

Because I was developing and maintaining web servers, database servers, queueing systems, load balancers, mail servers and doing development at small companies before AWS in its current form existed. I’ve done both.

The problem most posters here have isn’t lack of visibility, it’s not understanding the tools - it’s a poor carpenter who doesn’t understand their tools.

Do you usually jump in on a new technology or framework and get frustrated because you don’t know how something works when you didn’t take the time to learn the technology you use?

I’m sure you’ve never had s problem with any piece of open source software that was “out of your control” or did you just download the software and patch it yourself?

The truth is that yes any piece of technology is complex and you thought you could just jump in without any research and start using it. I don’t do that for any technology. When I found out that we were going to be using ElasticSearch for a project, I spent a month learning it and still ran into some issues because of what I didn’t know. That didn’t mean there was something wrong with ES.

> Do you usually jump in on a new technology or framework and get frustrated because you don’t know how something works when you didn’t take the time to learn the technology you use?

I usually jump in and try to solve my problem with the tools that seem right for the job. Reviewing the documentation as needed. I get frustrated when the documentation doesn't match what I have observed. In this case, the connection limits of the default stateful firewall on EC2 were not mentioned anywhere I could find (knowing exactly what to to look for and where to look, I think I could find a vague mention of the general limit today). The specific limits per instance type certainly still aren't. I found forum posts about the connection limit with useless responses from employees. I reached out to my support contact and got useless information (they did get me access to bigger instances though, which just have a larger, unspecified, connection limit, that was still small enough that I could hit it). I reached the conclusion that AWS must be great, because people love it, but it has very non-transparent networking, and useless support for non-trivial issues. I'm sure if we were spending more, we would get better support people and they'd share insights into their networks -- I've seen that with our other hosting providers, although network insights there weren't needed for everyday things, just more details were nice when the network broke, so we could help them detect future issues and plan for failures.

If the technology mostly works, but I need deeper knowledge, maybe for optimizing, I'll seek out deeper references, but third party references during discovery is very dangerous. When there is a conflict between what is observable, what is documented in first-party sources and what is documented in third-party sources, I would have no context to know which documentation indicates intended behavior and which is most out of date.

> I’m sure you’ve never had s problem with any piece of open source software that was “out of your control” or did you just download the software and patch it yourself?

Download and patch myself, and upstream the patches if I have the time and patience. Isn't that the point of open source? Everything is broken, but at least I can inspect and fix parts of the system where I can see the code. Hell, binary patching is a thing, although I wouldn't want to do that on the regular. I've had patches accepted in the FreeBSD kernel, OpenSSL, Haproxy to fix issues, some longstanding I ran into.

At the end of the day, I'm responsible for the whole stack, because if it's not working, my users can't use my product. It doesn't matter if it's the network, software I wrote, open source software, managed software; even software on the client devices is my problem if it doesn't work. The more I can inspect, the better.

The specific limits per instance type certainly still arent

In the official documentation they do mention that different instance sizes have different networking capabilities. This is stuff you learn early on when learning AWS - from the official books.

In this case, the connection limits of the default stateful firewall on EC2 were not mentioned anywhere I could find

The fact that security groups are stateful and Nacls are stateless are questions I ask junior AWS folks when interviewing. That’s like one of the level 1 questions you ask to know whether to actually bring them in for an on-site.

and useless support for non-trivial issues. I'm sure if we were spending more, we would get better support people and they'd share insights into their networks

So what did you find when you turned on VPC logging for the network interface of the EC2 instance? Again this level of troubleshooting is a question I would ask junior admins during an interview process.

I’ve had 100% success rate with our business support using live chat. With things that were a lot hairier and with my own PEBKAC issues.

I’m sure my company wouldn’t have any trouble with approving our running our own patched version of our production database an OpenSSL....

> So what did you find when you turned on VPC logging for the network interface of the EC2 instance? Again this level of troubleshooting is a question I would ask junior admins during an interview process.

Hey --- this sounds like something my support tech should have asked me, or should have been mentioned by the employee response in the forum. I didn't look at VPC logs; I did see that SYN packets (or maybe SYN+ACK responses, I don't remember) were mysteriously missing in tcpdump between the ec2 instance and the server.

Either way, I'm not interviewing for a AWS position; I was just trying to use a managed off the shelf service. Looking through the docs now, I did find the mention of connection tracking [1], but even there, there's no mention of a limit (of course, as someone familiar with firewalls, I know there's always a limit with connection tracking, which is why I only rarely write stateful rules, and wouldn't have assumed default rules were stateful. I had read the bit about the default security group, which says:

> A default security group is named default, and it has an ID assigned by AWS. The following are the default rules for each default security group:

> Allows all inbound traffic from other instances associated with the default security group (the security group specifies itself as a source security group in its inbound rules)

> Allows all outbound traffic from the instance.

> You can add or remove inbound and outbound rules for any default security group.

Unfortunately, "allows all outbound traffic" was misleading, because it's really allows all outbound traffic subject to connection limits.

> I’m sure my company wouldn’t have any trouble with approving our running our own patched version of our production database an OpenSSL....

I'm assuming that's sarcastic, and you're actually saying you don't think you would be able to get approval to run a patched version of software. Are you saying that if you find a problem in OpenSSL (or whatever enabling technology) that causes your system to be unreliable, your employer will not let you fix it; you'll need to wait for a fixed release from upstream? From experience, upstream releases often take weeks and some upstreams are less than diligent about providing clean updates; not to pick on OpenSSL, but a lot of their updates will fix important bugs and break backwards compatibility, occasionally breaking important bits of the API that were useful. I guess, if you're in an environment where you have no ability to fix broken stuff in a timely fashion, it really doesn't matter whose responsibility it is to fix it, since it won't be fixed.

I really hope you didn't need my patch for your databases systems; but maybe you want/wanted it for your https frontends if you were doing RSA_DHE with windows 8.1 era Internet Explorer or windows mobile 8.1 so that your clients could actually connect reliably. Anyway, if you're running OpenSSL 1.0.2k or later, or 1.1.0d or later (might have been 1.1.0c), you've got my patch, so you're welcome. Fixes the issue well described here [2]

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-ne...

[2] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/104845/dhe-rsa-...

You specifically mentioned OpenSSL. Our auditors would have been up in arms at my previous company where we did do everything on prem if we ran a custom version of OpenSSL. Do you really think we could pass either HIPAA compliance or PCI compliance with our own unvetted version of it?

I work on a team where our products are all in Fargate containers. I understand the appeal of serverless -- you never need to exec into the container, but half the time when we're debugging an issue in prod that we can't reproduce locally, we'll say, "wouldn't this be easier if we could just exec into the container and find out exactly what's going on?"

Not being able to ssh into a container sounds like a missing feature of that particular container solution? I would expect that I can ssh into a docker container hosted in a kubernetes cluster. Hmm, pretty sure I must've done this dozens of times.

Removing SSH should be the goal though. If you follow the old Visible Ops book you also "Electrify the Fence" and introduce accountability, etc. If your goal is to see what a process is doing introduce tracing. If you need to add a "println()" then push that out as a change because the environment is changing from your altering of it. Because the tool doesn't exist yet that you need to SSH into a box doesn't mean it shouldn't - you have to instrument the tooling to prevent you from needing this adhoc ability. Admittedly it scares me still but ideally the end game is to never need to or have the ability to do so through a tool which has all the things you are looking for without allowing a human to be too human and miss a semi-colon.

> "println()" then push that out as a change

No, when you actually need to debug in production that's usually not what you want. Changing or restarting the software you are debugging might well make the behaviour you want to understand go away.

> introduce tracing

Yeah, well, that's basically "logging in". Just over less mature and likely less secure protocol than SSH.

You don't need ptrace and tcpdump to debug software. It's just that it can shave a few weeks off your time when you need to reproduce something in the more tricky cases.

These discussions tend to surface in the context of containers but that's all very irrelevant. You need to debug software isn't affected by the way you package it.

You need to be able to troubleshoot things in production though.

Perhaps whenever a developer wants to troubleshoot the orchestrator could make a clone of the container. The clone continuously receives the same input as the original and gets to believe that it affects the back end in the same way. That way the developer can dissect the container without impacting real data.

> My goal is to be totally unable to SSH into everything that powers my app

That sounds like a nightmare to me, and I'm not even a server guy, I'm a backend guy only managing my personal projects.

> I'll pay Amazon $N/month to do that for me, all that matters is the product.

I don't want to pay Amazon anything, I want to pay Linode/Digital Ocean 5 or 10 or 20 dollars per month and I can do the rest myself pretty well. My personal projects will never ever going to reach Google's scale and seeing that they don't bring me anything (they're not intended to) I'm not that eager to pay an order a magnitude more to a company like Amazon or Google in order to host those projects.

it's astounding how much a $20 linode can handle (as a web host) with a proper software stack and performance-minded coding.

but companies throw money, hardware and vendor lock-in at problems way before commiting to sound engineering practices.

i have a friend who works at an online sub-prime lender, says their ruby backend does hundreds of queries per request and takes seconds to load. but they have money to burn so they just throw hardware at it. they spend mid-five figures per month on their infrastructure and third party devops stuff).

meanwhile, we run a 20k/day pageview ecommerce site on a $40/mo linode at 25% peak load. it's bonkers how much waste there is.

i think offloading this stuff to "someone else" and micro-services just makes you care even less about how big a pile of shit your code is.

And we just thought the frontend of websites and services was bad.

Seems the insanely bad coding and ignorance of speed and performance goes all the way to the backend too!

Disappointing.

One of the things I'm most grateful for as a programmer was the ability to learn a lot of performance-minded backend design principles within the Salesforce ecosystem. Salesforce was always brutally unforgiving in terms of the amount of I/O it would let you do per transaction, which led me to become much more aware of how those things worked under the hood, and had the effect of teaching me how to better design my code to fit within the limits.

When you can't use more than a couple seconds of CPU time per transaction, or you have a fixed and spartan heap size for a big algorithm, you learn good habits real quick.

I imagine a lot of engineers today haven't had the experience of working within hardware limits, hence all the waste everywhere.

> When you can't use more than a couple seconds of CPU time per transaction

hmm, i guess that explains why salesforce is universally known for being slow; 2 seconds is an eternity.

we deliver every full page on the site within 250ms from initial request to page fully loaded (with js and css fully executed and settled). images/videos finish later depending on sizes and qtys.

I don’t disagree that Salesforce is slow but this is a different workload, think db/business logic to perform a task, processing records, etc, not loading a typical page/assets.

i just signed up for a trial of salesforce and at least when there's not much data in the account it doesnt seem too slow. i was going off of what some coworkers related to me from past experience.

i think it's expected that if you're doing some editing/reporting/exporting en masse, then a couple seconds could be okay (assuming it's thousands or tens of thousands of records, not a hundred). but not for single-record actions / interactions.

Astonishingly it turns out that bad programmers are everywhere and aren't made any better by handling a different domain of problems. Truly shocking.

We process up to 15 million events per second on a $15K HP server.

a pretty meaningless metric without knowing what an "event" is.

The event is market data update. On one hand it is in fact pretty simple. On the other hand, it is not much simpler than something like “user X liked Y” or even “product Z added to cart”. I think it shows what a well designed, optimized code can do on a normal hardware. Remember there is 3-4 billion instructions that a modern cpu is pumping out per second.

One large bank I used to work for had a payment processing system doing about 40 thousand transactions per day. It ran on about $8 million worth of hardware - mainly IBM mainframe. I was impressed until I found out each transaction was essentially a 60-100 byte text message. I can confidently say a well designed system can do 1000 times that load on an iPhone.

Not that it isn't probably still terrible code but the banking system is likely logging the full transaction details every time it is modified / passed to a different part of the system. I.e. fully auditable - if something goes wrong with the transaction it can be fully traced back, corrected and the underlying issue investigated.

Cloud providers have generous free tiers, so many personal projects pay $0. However, I'm in the same boat. I'd rather pay $20/month to DO and risk my site going down in a DDoS attack than having a REST endpoint basically tied to my credit card and hoping Amazon blocks all the malicious traffic.

Yep, keep your stuff portable and you can always migrate to AWS/Azure/etc. later if your personal project should turn into something bigger.

As someone tasked with protecting infrastructure, devs not being able to SSH into production is a godsend.

There's a difference from devs not being able to ssh in due to access restrictions and devs not being able to ssh in because it's not a feature of the service. I actually agree that not having unilateral access to the production system is a good thing. But not being able to have anyone able to be granted access, even for a limited time, is neither productive or safe.

so, what is to stop them from running code from the app?!? Who do you call when something breaks? Do you expect the dev to not be able to log in and investigate at 3am or whenever?

I mean if you can't trust your dev team, or the procedures surrounding them, you are kinda screwed.

To be clear, the issue isn't about trusting developers in prod. It's about limiting access to prod as an avenue for attackers who will be looking to get in there and exfil sensitive data.

Nothing to do with trust of devs.

Enjoy the many (many, many) connection reset by peer, TCP idle timeouts, and 500 Internal Server Errors on Dynamo's end.

Between that and the dogshit documentation, it's truly thrilling to be paying them a ridiculous amount of money for the privilege of having a managed service go undebuggably AWOL on the regular, instead of being able to resolve the issues locally.

Yeah and if you’re on gcp you also get dogshit support whose main strategy is to sandbag you with endless (and useless) logs collection until you give up and move on or take too long so they can close the ticket.

I can see my code handling all the exceptions correspond to the points you raised with exponential backoff. Which part of Dynamo's documentation is dogshit?

To me this comment is not a response to the article.

The article isn’t asking why use Dynamo vs SQL in the context of the traditional NoSQL vs SQL way

It’s why Dynamo vs QLDB.

Or why Cloud Firestone vs Cloud Spanner.

Or Firehose + some lambda functions vs EMR

It’s wholly separate of the managed angle and focuses on the actual complexity of the products involved and the trade offs therein.

In the surface the two sound similar, but there’s much more nuance to this article's point (take the example of Dynamo, the author isn’t opposed to it for being NoSQL, they’re opposed to it for low level technical design choices that are a poor fit for the problem their client had)

Yeah, "not my problem" sounds like a winning strategy, until you realize that it also means "nothing I can do about it" when things inevitably go wrong.

Not to mention that you're the lowest priority when something does go wrong.

But these services do break, and when they do break, often times you don't even get a useful error or log file to grep. Sometimes I just really wish I could SSH into a box to figure out what the hell is going on.

You're gaining an expertise, but instead of it being with the underlying technology, it's with the management services for that technology. I think the premise of your argument is correct that understanding these services is simpler than the technology itself, but I seem to inevitably find myself in some edge use case of the service that is poorly documented or does not work as described, and trolling stack overflow or AWS developer forums is the only solution other than trial and (no) error.

Let me tell you: it's not fun when you're entrenched into a proprietary service that is now outdated and kept only for legacy reasons, and the version you are on doesn't allow you to do things like update your programming language to a more recent version. Now you get to move to another managed service and lose all that expert knowledge you had with the old one.

> My goal is to be totally unable to SSH into everything that powers my app.

If the 0day in your familiar pastures dwindles, despair not! Rather, bestir yourself to where programmers are led astray from the sacred Assembly, neither understanding what their programming languages compile to, nor asking to see how their data is stored or transmitted in the true bits of the wire. For those who follow their computation through the layers shall gain 0day and pwn, and those who say “we trust in our APIs, in our proofs, and in our memory models and need not burden ourselves with confusing engineering detail that has no value anyhow” shall surely provide an abundance of 0day and pwnage sufficient for all of us.

Thus preacheth Pastor M. Laphroaig.

If you go server less because fuck accountability, shouldn't the extension be jobless because someone else will provide the service you did?

In that way, cloud/serverless migration is really the whole worldwide IT workforce progressively willingly migrating IT (design, development, operations & applications) out of companies, to just a few big providers.

Just like energy.

And who gets to decide destinies in the world? Those who control, have and provide energy.

What a time to be alive.

End of XIX century was the rush to oil-based energy to control the world. End of XX was the rush to data-based capture and control.

Which Dynamo are you talking about? The Dynamo paper, or Dynamo, the AWS managed database product? Dynamo-the-product makes sense for all sorts of random tasks. Full-on implementations of Dynamo-the-paper (for instance: Cassandra) fall into the bucket of "understand the problem first" that the author is talking about.

Security and privacy yet again traded for convenience. We need strict data privacy laws and then I would have a little more trust in large centralized entities that would otherwise have every incentive to abuse people's data.

Such centralized systems also become significant points of failure. What happens to your small business if one of the many services you rely on disappears or changes their API?

"All that matters is the product" sounds very much like "all that matters is the bottom line" and we've seen the travesties that occur when profit is put above all else.

It's not clear that having your own datacenter is more secure than using AWS/GCP/Azure services. In both cases there are good monitoring solutions, however I'd say that cloud-based solutions have easier immediate access to most things because they just integrate with the provider's API whereas on prem you're installing agents and whatnot.

Also having granular IAM for services and data is very helpful for security. You have a single source of truth for all your devs, and extremely granular permissions that can be changed in a central location. Contrast to building out all of that auditing and automation on your own. Granted, IAM permissions give us tons of headaches on the regular, but on balance I still think it's better when done well.

If you're concerned about AWS/GCP/Azure looking at your private business's data, I think 1.) that's explicitly not allowed in the contracts you sign 2.) many services are HIPAA compliant, hence again by law they can't 3.) They'd for sure suffer massively both legally and through loss of business if they ever did that.

It is important to understand the following:

Depending on the problem, choose the right tools. For example so far everything I've seen about React and GraphQL tells me that maybe GQL isn't necessarily the best solution for a 5-person team, but a 100 person team may have a hard time living without it.

Kubernates / Docker is significant work. And when we had 4 developers making that effort was wasteful and we literally didn't have the time. Now at 20 we're much more staffed and the things Kubernates / Docker solves is useful.

Meanwhile we have a single PostgreSQL server. No nosql caching layer. We're at a point where we aren't sure how far we gotta go before we hit limits of a PSQL server, but at least 3-4 years before we hit it.

Point is look at the tools. See where these tools win it for you. Don't just blindly pick because it can scale super well. Pick it because it gives you things you need and a simplicity you need for the current and near-term context, and have a long-term strategy how to move away from it when it is no longer useful.

> My goal is to be totally unable to SSH into everything that powers my app.

In reality that means that when something doesn't work as expected, instead of logging in and solving the problem, you'll be spending your time writing tickets and fighting through the tiers of support and their templated replies, waiting for them to eventually escalate your issue to some actual engineer. Wish you a lot of luck with that, I prefer being able to fix my own stuff (or at least give it a try first).

I'm not sure I follow, how does managed services help with choosing the right database technology for the problem set?

He doesn't care about that. JUST THE PRODUCT. That's how amazing his fantasies are.

Yeah, I can't quite square what the OP is saying with how to deal with something like Amazon Dynamo's lack of large scale transactions. (Even basic ACID was only introduced late last year, if I read correctly.)

If you choose Dynamo, then you get to blame Dynamo for not having ACID when you lose data!

This is an incredibly common fallacy in our industry. Remember, you are responsible for the appropriateness of the dependencies you choose. If you build your fancy product on a bad foundation, and the foundation crumbles, your product collapses with it and it's unprofessional to say "Well, I didn't pour the foundation, so I can't be blamed." Maybe not, but you decided to build on top of it.

A SQL database, bash, and a Raspberry Pi in your closet all are managed too. They're built on top of software that's been battle-tested over decades to keep itself running. MySQL/Postgres/whatever will manage running multiple queries for you and keeping the data consistent as well as Dynamo will. bash will manage running multiple processes for you as well as Hadoop will. A Raspberry Pi with cron will manage starting a service for you every time it powers on as well as Lambda will. The reasons to use Dynamo/Hadoop/Lambda are when you've got different problems from the ones that MySQL/bash/cron solve.

If you don't believe that this counts as "managed," then for all your words at the end, you believe at the end of the day that making a solution more complex so that failures are expected and humans are required is superior to doing a simple and all-in-code thing. For all that you claim to not like operations, you think that a system requiring operational work makes it better. You are living the philosophy of the sysadmins who run everything out of .bash_history and Perl in their homedir and think "infrastructure as code" is a fad.

With this definition unless you write your own database system, everything is managed. That makes it pretty useless to qualify anything as managed.

The Raspberry Pi is managed by you, as opposed to managed by a different company / different people so you can focus on your business problem.

Here I am still using SQLite (had to add an index yesterday!) Maybe one day I will grow up :(

SQLite is good quality software, and very heavily tested. There's nothing wrong with using it so long as you don't outright misuse it, and they are clear about when you shouldn't be using it.

I very rarely run into a situation where I need more than SQLite. The page on the subject is great: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html

I's not so good for multi user systems as I understand as it has a lock on the whole database when writing.

Queuing works most of the time, does it not?

Queuing and retry works most of the time. Only time I truly get "database is locked" is when I open the shell while other processes are accessing the DB

Are all writes blocked during database migrations?

ALTER TABLE is quite limited in SQLite (for example there is no DROP COLUMN). Have you missed this?

All writes are blocked during database migrations, so there is potential offline time. For example, when I added the index, I needed to be offline. Fortunately, my application is only needed during business hours.

Yes I miss proper ALTER TABLE a lot when it would have been useful. But my experience shows me that I can design software pretty well following YAGNI and the occasional instances of when I need missing functionality is more than made up for the ease of use otherwise.

Thanks for sharing your experience with SQLite :-)

What are the advantages, in your own experience, of using SQLite instead of something like PostgreSQL? With PostgreSQL, you could run database migrations during business hours and use a proper ALTER TABLE.

Main reason is that SQLite is embedded with my application. There isn't a second, third or fourth "microservice" to spin up. I know Terraform/Docker, love them, but the gymnastics I need to orchestrate for my particular situation is not worth it. So for the tradeoff of complexity for functionality, SQLite hits a very good sweet spot for me.

Where do you queue: in memory? on disk? in a dedicated queue server (Redis, Kafka, ActiveMQ, etc.)? in another SQLite database?

So far, haven't needed queuing outside of a single thread in the application (I know, what happens if it crashes!) Hasn't happened in ~8 years. Won't cry if it does.

I have an app that uses an in-memory queue too in one thread :-)

I'm curious: why do you queue instead of directly writing to the database?

At the moment, I queue to batch insert real time data at ~5 second intervals. It seems less wasteful of resources, but quite frankly is probably not needed.

To be fair I have only really used SQLite for early development stages so haven't investigated workarounds in much detail.

How do you access remotely, from your workstation, to the SQLite database on your server, while it is still serving requests?

  ssh user@server
  sqlite file://$PWD/db.sqlite?mode=ro

Yes, this will work of course :-)

I was thinking of something more "graphical", similar to pgAdmin or SequelPro, when you need to navigate in a dataset.

I use https://sqlitebrowser.org/ if I need to but primarily Jupyter w/ Pandas to explore and understand the data and prototype new queries.

Regarding SQLiteBrowser, I guess you have to download a copy of the database on your local workstation?

Correct. I use it rarely.

Just ran it using X remotely, so that's an option too.

There's https://sqlitebrowser.org,

But I suppose you'll have to string up something if you want it to access a remote db.

There is also https://www.phpliteadmin.org, but I'm not a fan of the user interface.

Whatever exists specifically for sqlite, sshfs is your friend too.

... Fuck debuggablity. Fuck performance. Fuck understanding what is actually going on....

(Sure, managed solutions can satisfy all of those. But not without understanding a few orders of magnitude more complexity than a simpler solution, and you'll never get there if your attitude is "I'll pay Amazon to do that for me." Amazon doesn't care whether you succeed.)

> Amazon doesn't care whether you succeed.

Wait, what? Why wouldn't they? Successful companies will spend money with them; defunct companies can't.

> My goal is to be totally unable to SSH into everything that powers my app. I'm not saying that I want a stack where I don't have to. I'm saying that I literally cannot, even if I wanted to real bad.

So you want technology that prevents you from doing something you might want to do, real badly?

If the main reason for your switch from sql to dynamo is that it is managed why not use aws aurora, aurora serverless, or any other more managed sql solution?

Now when many sql databases support json I don’t quite understand why you would use a documentdb for anything else then for actual unstructured data, or key value pairs that needs specific performance.

I used mongodb for a while now I’m 100% back in sql. Document dbs really increased my love for sql. But I’m also long from being a nosql expert and I never have to deal with data above a TB.

Serverless is not a panacea, actually most of the times is true the opposite. You will spend much more time dealing with configuration, deployments, managing cold starts, orchestrating everything. Sure, for some use cases is perfect, but I can tell you almost certainly that the future won’t be on AWS lambda &co.

Its moving complexity from the application layer to the deployment layer.

which is awesome. Application complexity is harder to solve than deployment/infrastructure complexity. And more often the cloud providers would solve the deployment complexities over time.

To your point, when I often see the "shell script" solution it's often missing basic things you'd want like version control or any kind of bread crumb trail (I find myself sshing in and "grep -r" trying to find things). That works if you're cobbling something together, but doesn't scale beyond 1 person.

It's tough to get the correct level because you can ansible > docker > install an rpm or just change the file in place. Both have their place and "hacky" solutions can work just fine for many years.

> That's why serverless is the future;

Future of what exactly?

The future of the pit they will dump money into.

The future of maintenance problems, where the split between developers and deployments makes it a pain in the arse to work out what has gone wrong.

The future of making nouns out of adjectives, apparently.

Future of server ?

Future of server is serverless? :P

Serverless is just somebody else's server.

No, "cloud" is somebody else's server. Serverless is somebody else's server that scales your services seamlessly (and usually opaguely).

I was riffing off of the phrase, "The cloud is just someone else's computer".

Serverless is the cloud?

Oh, I didn't realize we were doing trick questions.

What's the safest way to go skiing? Don't ski.

Before we make a technology choice, we should be clear what those choices are. SQL is a query language and DynamoDB is a database. "NoSQL" technologies can be fronted with SQL interfaces. Relational databases can vary a lot too in their ACID compliance ("I" being the component with maximum variance).

The choice of technology should first be based on the problem and not whether it is serverless. Choosing DynamoDB when your application demands strict serializability would be totally wrong. I hope more people think about the semantic specifications of their applications (especially under concurrency).

Well, if all you want is managed, per request hosting of SQL, use Aurora serverless! It's a game changer. As for Dynamo vs SQL -- you really cannot substitute one for the other. They're different tools for different jobs. Dynamo is extremely low latency and great for that purpose, while SQL is great for being a store of record, and if you use it as long as you can get away with it for as many things as possible, it's usually not a bad idea.

Issue is, this works only for very simple systems. With complexity comes maintenance and operations. You also cannot build anything innovative in case of heavy load systems because you cannot embbed your custom highly performant solutions (cloud provider simply does not support them ootb).

Serverless sounds great for "some" kind of systems but in other cases its a complete missfire. Our job is to know which tool to use.

N gets to be a big number my friend. I love aws but I can’t get over the number of startups I’ve seen with $100k MRR and $35k MRC allocated to AWS.

>"why are you using Dynamo, just use SQL"

On the other hand, I find it frustrating how many developers either don't know basic SQL or try to get cute and use the flat side of an axe to smack down nails instead of just using the well-known, industry-standard beauty of a hammer that SQL.

If everyone did this, in the limiting case, no one has the ability to investigate and repair actual bugs until the point where the application can only crash every 10 ms and does nothing but get continually restarted.

>SQL can be managed with, say, RDS. Sure. But it's not the same level of managed as Dynamo (or Firebase or something like that).

It's managed at every shared hosting in the world.

Not at the same level, hardly anywhere. Replication, auto-scaling, failover and point-in-time backups are typically not managed for you. AWS and GCP have decent solutions now, but they're not nearly as hands-off in terms of management.

What specific managed services do you use, if I may inquire?

>> My goal is to be totally unable to SSH

Great goal. I guess you never had any use case to login to a production server to investigate a business critical issue.

I have had to SSH into prod boxes many times to debug emergent issues. Now I'm using all serverless, and I get a happy fuzzy feeling whenever I think about how I never ever have to do that again.

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair." -- Douglas Adams

It's more likely that parent has had to do that a lot of times, or perhaps has managed people who have. That would be a sign of organizational dysfunction, and fixing that is a good goal to have.

I recommend heroku and heroku postgres

Using Dynamo is the worst thing we've done for productivity and costs in our product. It introduces onboarding overhead, unnecessary implementation time overhead, costs a lot, and is always a bottleneck in every operation. Using DAX requires paying for VPC which already costs more than a server that could power many small to mid-sized products. Resizing table throughputs requires lots of manual work to keep it cost effective, because the default settings are designed to nickel and dime you to death. If we just used a simple SQL or MongoDB server attached as a container we'd save literally months of development time and thousands of dollars per month.

This sounds beyond painful. We have similar problems at work with expensive system that I believe we could reimplement with traditional technology, but we don't.

If you don't care about cost and don't care about someone else having all of your data, that is probably a fine route.

I see that HN now steps into the gutter of reddit-like language and can damn all professional decorum.

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