6 ms·

Most of these are what I'd call "cloud in name only" providers - everyone uses the term but you would have significant challenge moving a cloud workload that ma

by dgemm 2y ago

Most of these are what I'd call "cloud in name only" providers - everyone uses the term but you would have significant challenge moving a cloud workload that makes use of the higher layer abstractions to these.

rbanffy 2y ago
There are very few workloads that require more than what you can accomplish with a handful of VMs. Using tools like Terraform makes it a lot easier to abstract away the specialised services.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Yeah, you haven’t worked with any large companies if you think that. What’s the largest implementation you have been responsible for?
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    I work with a couple workloads that can’t even be completely deployed in cloud environments. Those aren’t common. The vast majority of companies can get along with a Google office license and a Wix website. Not everyone works at a company with hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users. I agree RDS, Aurora, Big Query, S3, load balancers, declarative security policies, artifact repositories, managed auto-scaling clusters and so on are very convenient, but they aren’t a requirement.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      You “worked with a couple of workloads” and that’s what makes you an expert on infrastructure and architecture at scale? Your LinkedIn profile is your HN profile. I see you have worked at some large well known companies. How can you possibly not have been exposed to some large deployments? These are three companies that you have worked at https://www.workday.com/en-us/company/partners/amazon-web-services.html https://www.workday.com/en-us/company/partners/amazon-web-se... https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/zendesk/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/zendesk/ https://www.spartasystems.com/resources/the-honeywell-life-sciences-applications-suite-leverages-the-power-of-aws-cloud-to-accelerate-innovation/ https://www.spartasystems.com/resources/the-honeywell-life-s...
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        And none of those is “the simple case” I alluded to. The vast majority of businesses need, perhaps, email, file sharing, instant messaging and, perhaps, a website. They won’t train their own ML models, nor have parallel sysplexes of mainframes spread across multiple datacenters.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        So, in the grand scheme of things, how much revenue do you think all of those small businesses combined make compared to just the combined business revenue and compute needs of just the large companies you have worked for? It surprises me that you have blinders on to an industry where you personally have worked for companies with large enough implementations that AWS has felt the need to brag about
        rbanffy 2y ago
        In what does that change my initial observation that the vast majority of companies don’t need more than the most basic cloud services?
        scarface_74 2y ago
        Who are these vast majority of companies? The second company I worked for between 2000-2008 that I spoke about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42985966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42985966 With 20-30 people on staff if I were responsible for that architecture today. I would need: A MySQL instance with read replicas (we had that back then onsite) SQL Server for a some legacy projects - we had those too. File Transfer family for FTP transfers and some automations around that. Web servers and load balancers. SQS and probably Lambda. Back then we used MSMQ and later MQSeries and a home grown application servers that took care of asynchronous message processing. Web servers - a couple of EC2 instances and a load balancer and these days because of how the internet is probably WAF. We would have needed something to orchestrate our ETL jobs. Back then we ran on 15 physical computers we would probably use something like AWS Batch today. And of course S3. You see how quickly your needs escalate once you are doing any real workloads? The next smallest company I worked for had 50-60 people this was between 2018-2020. We sold access to aggregated publicly available health care provider data as well as some other health care related data. Our micro services were used by large health care companies as the backend to their websites and mobile devices and one new customer could increase the load on services they subscribed to by 20%. Here we also needed multiple MySqL databases, CloudFront, WAF, Cognito, ElasticSearch, Redshift for large analytical loads, EC2 for some legacy software, S3, ECS for the microservices, Lambda/SQS and step functions for some ETL jobs that scaled from 0 to hundreds of thousands of transactions, Cognito for authentication, etc You might not remember. But around March 2020, health care providers websites were being hit hard because of a little virus that was going around, the scalability that we put in place came in handy then. Do you propose that we should have hosted all of that on some VMs?

by dgemm 2y ago

rbanffy 2y ago

There are very few workloads that require more than what you can accomplish with a handful of VMs. Using tools like Terraform makes it a lot easier to abstract away the specialised services.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
scarface_74 2y ago
Yeah, you haven’t worked with any large companies if you think that. What’s the largest implementation you have been responsible for?
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I work with a couple workloads that can’t even be completely deployed in cloud environments. Those aren’t common. The vast majority of companies can get along with a Google office license and a Wix website. Not everyone works at a company with hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users. I agree RDS, Aurora, Big Query, S3, load balancers, declarative security policies, artifact repositories, managed auto-scaling clusters and so on are very convenient, but they aren’t a requirement.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    You “worked with a couple of workloads” and that’s what makes you an expert on infrastructure and architecture at scale? Your LinkedIn profile is your HN profile. I see you have worked at some large well known companies. How can you possibly not have been exposed to some large deployments? These are three companies that you have worked at https://www.workday.com/en-us/company/partners/amazon-web-services.html https://www.workday.com/en-us/company/partners/amazon-web-se... https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/zendesk/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/zendesk/ https://www.spartasystems.com/resources/the-honeywell-life-sciences-applications-suite-leverages-the-power-of-aws-cloud-to-accelerate-innovation/ https://www.spartasystems.com/resources/the-honeywell-life-s...
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      And none of those is “the simple case” I alluded to. The vast majority of businesses need, perhaps, email, file sharing, instant messaging and, perhaps, a website. They won’t train their own ML models, nor have parallel sysplexes of mainframes spread across multiple datacenters.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        So, in the grand scheme of things, how much revenue do you think all of those small businesses combined make compared to just the combined business revenue and compute needs of just the large companies you have worked for? It surprises me that you have blinders on to an industry where you personally have worked for companies with large enough implementations that AWS has felt the need to brag about
        rbanffy 2y ago
        In what does that change my initial observation that the vast majority of companies don’t need more than the most basic cloud services?
        scarface_74 2y ago
        Who are these vast majority of companies? The second company I worked for between 2000-2008 that I spoke about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42985966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42985966 With 20-30 people on staff if I were responsible for that architecture today. I would need: A MySQL instance with read replicas (we had that back then onsite) SQL Server for a some legacy projects - we had those too. File Transfer family for FTP transfers and some automations around that. Web servers and load balancers. SQS and probably Lambda. Back then we used MSMQ and later MQSeries and a home grown application servers that took care of asynchronous message processing. Web servers - a couple of EC2 instances and a load balancer and these days because of how the internet is probably WAF. We would have needed something to orchestrate our ETL jobs. Back then we ran on 15 physical computers we would probably use something like AWS Batch today. And of course S3. You see how quickly your needs escalate once you are doing any real workloads? The next smallest company I worked for had 50-60 people this was between 2018-2020. We sold access to aggregated publicly available health care provider data as well as some other health care related data. Our micro services were used by large health care companies as the backend to their websites and mobile devices and one new customer could increase the load on services they subscribed to by 20%. Here we also needed multiple MySqL databases, CloudFront, WAF, Cognito, ElasticSearch, Redshift for large analytical loads, EC2 for some legacy software, S3, ECS for the microservices, Lambda/SQS and step functions for some ETL jobs that scaled from 0 to hundreds of thousands of transactions, Cognito for authentication, etc You might not remember. But around March 2020, health care providers websites were being hit hard because of a little virus that was going around, the scalability that we put in place came in handy then. Do you propose that we should have hosted all of that on some VMs?