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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Reminds of something that was on the HN frontpage some month ago, where readers are not sure if it's a parody or not, because of the architecture you're required to deploy yourself to use this new "Perspective" product. Direct link to the architecture, that in the end serves the use case of generating a diagram of your AWS resources: https://d1.awsstatic.com/Solutions/Solutions%20Category%20Te...

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-perspec...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552779

(regarding costs, this setup ends up being +$500/month, again, to draw graphs of your architecture https://twitter.com/der_rehan/status/1308242717307174912)

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Reading this made me remember that back in the day the AWS selling point was "here you can create virtual machines with few clicks and have it instantly instead of waiting 30 min for you colocated server to be ready" but now it seems to be "here is a bunch of random expensive tools, please, produce as much stuff as possible and share the word that having servers is bad™".

This field used to be inspiring, but now I see the ideia of having a server being sold as the plague and lots of negativity towards people who are good at servers. They are not seen as another human being but the "other".

Also I can't understand why one would prefer to pay that much for such complexity.

It seems unsustainable for me, not to mention the new generation being spoon fed that that is way to go makes me concerned about the future of open computing.

Your response made me smile. Glad to see there are still reasonable folks out there. Working for a startup without a "resume-driven-development" CTO gave me the freedom to go "servermore" architecture with max flexibility.

For all the talk about resume driven development, I am hiring now, and will say that people who have solved their problems by learning more about Linux and such sound way more impressive than those who list out passing familiarity with a bunch of high level services. The first style of resume really stands out. The second is a dime a dozen.

To make an analogy, it's like hiring a carpenter based on the number of tools they have. NO. Show me your skill with a hammer and chisel, and I'll assume you can figure out the rest.

"Also I can't understand why one would prefer to pay that much for such complexity."

If there is one thing that dealing with AWS reps has taught me, it's that this was 100% by customers. I swear to god, AWS doesn't do anything without customers asking for it.

If you are wondering why products are build in AWS, it's because people wanted to give them money for this. Say what you want, but this isn't something are pushing on us. This is something "we" push on them to provide.

"pay that much for such complexity"... FWIW, we shaved 50%+ off our compute bill and lowered complexity by moving from servers to serverless.

Just because it doesn't work for your situation doesn't mean it doesn't work at all.

The opposite is also true: just because it works for your situation doesn't mean it works for all of them.

It's a tool in your toolbox.

absolutely agreed! we still have ec2 stances and workload, but for some stuff it was the perfect solution.

> not to mention the new generation being spoon fed that that is way to go

The new generation is always joining one cargo cult or another, that's why competent technical leadership is important. Remember when noSQL was the best thing since sliced bread?

Serverless can be a good option if you have large and unpredictable transient loads.

Like any architectural choice, you need to consider the tradeoffs and suitability for your use case. A TODO app probably doesn't need to be built with a serverless SOA.

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