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Comment by web3-is-a-scam | Hacker News Reader

We also went from - click around in the gui -> automate everything -> click around in the gui. Zero regrets.

We went even further than that and ditched kubernetes, and containers altogether and moved everything to just EC2/elastic beanstalk.

Took us 2 months to write everything in terraform initially. Took 2 days to shift everything back and maintenance is just so much easier for us. Much easier to find people that can manage infra this way too.

To this day I struggle to find a tangible benefit to the old stack. Everything is just “better” now and half the cost.

YMMV of course.

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When you have 10 boxes to manage doing it manually is within the realm of 1 person doing it and maybe even correctly! When you have 500... You will want consistency and repeatability. To this day I am still 'fixing' things someone did in the 10 machine area. 'oh yeah that machine is set up this way and the others are that way'. But I can not get rid of those 10 boxes because they became key infrastructure.

we use elastic beanstalk which is functionally not that different than elastic container service/Fargate. It’s basically Heroku when all is said and done.

Everything sits behind application load balancer and API gateway, all basic stuff

We have about 100 boxes, but basically only 3 “environments” for our distributed monolith. Every box in a distinct environment is provisioned and configured in exactly the same way.

need to change some config? It’s at most a few extra clicks to do it in multiple environments. Then EB handles the rolling deployments and health check failover stuff. It’s very hands off, with another small benefit of not needing to bother with fudging around with terraform state, wasting compute on building containers and paying for registry storage.

I don't know much about Elastic Beanstalk but bare EC2 instances connected to the Internet should fill anyone with dread. Securing the O/S and the network is not trivial and AWS will gladly let you do the wrong thing out of the box.

IaC doesn't magically solve any of those problems but if you make a mistake once you can fix it once instead of fixing it N times.

We stopped hosting our website and send real post by horse carriage and, when weather is good, post pigeons. Zero regrets here too!

At least you get less SEO spam emails than I do!

And those savings. A bunch of pigeons instead of SREs! It’s a steal!

It’s a good thing we have tons of server cattle to feed all that straw to

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