Is cloud really worth it?
Cloud is awesome to hyper scale and all but I think it also has its side effects. I would like to see how many of us feel the same.
Cloud is awesome to hyper scale and all but I think it also has its side effects. I would like to see how many of us feel the same.
I work extensively in AWS, and costs are difficult to manage. It's hard to "know" that use of service X might be free, but you need service Y to take advantage of X - and Y isn't free. You do need to educate yourself on how to architect and tag your services so that you can monitor costs.
I don't think any of these are valid concerns. Almost all cloud vendors has strong controls for data security and privacy.
Oh by privacy I meant user privacy/complying with privacy laws. Data security I agree with you but some told me they worry about cheaper ones
I agree with you as it's valid concerns for many. A lot of companies distrust clouds, and many customers told us they are not interested because we host data in the cloud...
So if they don't want their data to be hosted on the cloud, they want to use their on-prem clusters?
Yes, ideally they want to use servers they control.
Yes it is worth it. No concerns.
The legal aspect are a bit of a nightmare currently with the "privacy shield" being voided.
The cloud is dirt cheap until it isn't. AFAIK at least AWS has nothing more than a "budget alarm". There are enough horror stories out there.
The tooling and documentation is often so bad - it can become a time sink.
The lock-in sucks - but is no major concern.
But you still gain so much by not having to worry about OPS, it still makes it worth for most projects. In a way that's a pretty good and sad situation at the same time.
I would like to know more about the cases where pricing exploded. Is it because of sudden surge in users increasing the usage costs?
Sorry, don't have the links anymore.
I vaguely remember one case where a corner case in the code caused a constant trigger loop and bounced very fast between two services. And the person only realized when the bill was already substantial.
I guess in this case you could blame the person for not monitoring better, or making the error in the first place. But well - sh*t happens.
Some other cases where people weren't really aware they were still paying for resources they thought they canceled. Here I blame the shitty UX for pretty much all the cloud consoles I know.
And the complex pricing doesn't really help with predicting your costs.
Anyway - you better search for the details.
Twitter might be a good place to look.
I don't thing they are that expensive, but I worry ending up with a bill I cannot pay. I try to stay away from cloud services to avoid vendor lock-in as well.
I think most indie hackers here would be fine with one or a couple cloud instances (like Digital Ocean droplets).
When you say they are not expensive then why would you need to deal with such a bill? Is it because of surge pricing or user quota?
I meant that EC2 instance is not necessarily more expensive, but people buying the whole cloud experience easily end up with many services with various pricing. In the end, they have no idea how big the bill can be. There were many people in the past making mistakes getting huge bills they couldn't afford to.
Ahh I understand now. So if you don't use platform specific services, you write your own implementations? That would be challenging for things like ML needing lots of moving parts
I only use things that are transferable to other providers.
As someone who is pretty savvy with deploying, yet still not 100%, I find AWS so difficult to operate. I simply wanted to setup a cluster for the staging environment of my software - boy was that a mistake. The setup for something which should be simple, was just not. Even using services such as Elastic Beanstalk which is meant to do it for you just took so long I ended up opting for another option until I can hire a DevOps.
Not the mention the costs, it is a lot more - and it's hardly "managed" for you so not quite justified.