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Comment by pech0rin | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that people seem to be trading short term gains with long term reliability and maintenance costs. This glut of 0-friction deploy services lull people into a nice false sense of security.

But in actuality you are wasting hours, days, weeks of time when they become unreliable, support is unresponsive, or something unexpected pops up.

There is a huge advantage (outside of amateur, low importance projects) for putting in place - at the beginning - an infrastructure that is dead simple and reliable. AWS, GCP may have some upfront complexity but provide advantages in terms of reliability, knowledgeable support, and proven track records.

I would never recommend these current platforms to be used for building a long term business on top of. I have been tempted by the siren song of one click deploys but in the long run so much extra time is wasted.

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> I find it interesting that people seem to be trading short term gains with long term reliability and maintenance costs. This glut of 0-friction deploy services lull people into a nice false sense of security.

I find it interesting as well. I agree that it's a false sense of security, and there is no real long-term gain from avoiding the one time paydown of deploying to a big 3 cloud services provider. Still, I think the impulse reflects something a very real pain, and something I find my team continuing to face as we try to manage a the operationally minimalistic stack we can get away with on AWS -- poor DX.

It does still boggle my mind that AWS still doesn't have a Heroku-esque happy path DX that lets you get started easily and then add in complexity on an as needed basis rather than forcing it to get the most basic thing running. It seems like every minor customization requires in AWS parlance spinning up a Lambda to do something that should be a first class feature in the platform by default. Will I migrate off the platform? No. Would I use a simpler, opinionated interface that let me focus on my application and not arcanae, if AWS made it avaiable? Absolutely.

The latest effort from AWS to address this seems to be copilot.

Azure actually had a nice Heroku-like service that served me well for a couple years. I forget what it’s called, but it’s probably the one reason I’d ever consider choosing Azure if that was ever my call to make.

This! Can't agree more, I think we share the same idea, that's what the tool we're making is about: https://github.com/mify-io/mify/. It generates backend service code in a scalable way from the beginning, so that you wouldn't have to rewrite and move services to some other platform.

It's better to have good architecture from the beginning, but I understand why people choose these platforms - they are saving a lot of time in the initial development, that helps them iterate quickly. What will happen next is that people spending time and resources to perform costly migrations, and some do this more that once.

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