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Comment by dopylitty | Hacker News Reader

I like the dig at "first generation" clouds.

There really is a wide gulf between the services provided by the older cloud providers (AWS, Azure) and the newer ones (fly.io, CloudFlare etc).

AWS/Azure provide very leaky abstractions (VMs, VPCs) on top of very old and badly designed protocols/systems (IP, Windows, Linux) . That's fine for people who want to spend all their time janitoring VMs, operating systems, and networks but for developers who just want to write code that provides a service it's much better to be able to say to the cloud provider "Here's my code, you make sure it's running somewhere" and let the cloud provider deal with the headaches. Even the older providers' PaaS services have too many knobs to deal with (I don't want to think about putting a load balancer in front of ECS or whatever)

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This undersells the fact that there’s a lot more to infrastructure management than “janitoring”. You and many others may want to just say “here’s my code, ship it”, but there’s also a massive market of people that _need_ the customization and deep control over things like load balancers, because they’re pumping petabytes of data through it and using a cloud-managed LB is leaving money and performance on the table. Or there are companies that _need_ the strong isolation between regions for legal and security reasons, even if it comes with added complexity.

A lot of developers get frustrated at AWS or Azure because they want to deploy their hobby app on it and realize it’s too difficult dealing with stuff like IAM - it’s like trying to dig a small hole in your garden and someone suggests you go buy a Caterpillar Excavator, when all you needed was a hand trowel. The reason this persists is because AWS doesn’t target the hobby developer - it targets the massive enterprise that does need the customization and power it provides, despite the complexity. There are, thankfully, other companies that have come in to serve up cloud hand trowels.

There is no “one size fits all” cloud. There probably never will be. They’re all going to coexist for the foreseeable future.

Hn now clearly are swarmed by grandiose novice techs.

10 years ago, no such superficial assessment would appear on first page.

This set of words bear little substance and engineering facts.

> AWS/Azure provide very leaky abstractions (VMs, VPCs) on top of very old and badly designed protocols/systems (IP, Windows, Linux) .

AWS cannot be made parallel, they themselves are 2 gens

AWS gen1

Azure gcp gen 2

Gen1 is on vm, ecs ebs s3, for web2 era

Gen2 is on cluster computing which was enable by vm

The then "leaky abstraction" is the mandated abstraction at the time

And GPUs today is about 70s's CPU

For example, you don't have any form of abstracted runtime on GPU, it's like running dos system

It's more leaky than 00s ' vm

Amazon has had serverless functions for a long time now. I built an iOS app with a backend in AWS and it was as you say, “here’s my code, you make sure it’s running somewhere.” I uploaded my Typescript code, set up an API gateway to call the lambda function and… that’s it. No load balancer, no ECS management. It’s been running for years and I haven’t to do anything other than pay the bill every month.

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