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The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation. Containerisation w

The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation. Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat. That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted by any crane onto any ship or truck. Amazon, Google, Microsoft - these people have sold vendor lock-in to the very segment of tech society that should have been fighting it tooth and nail. 20 years ago you ftp'd some PHP files and it just worked, now you have to figure out 20 IAM profiles and shit your files across buckets because everything must be 1000000x scalable out of the box. No joke I was building a static firebase site the other day and just wanted a simple way to password protect it (like http auth) for staging so my client could see it - of all the useless shit firebase tries to lock you into they can't even do something as simple as basic http auth without a shit show and spinning up a cloud run instance or something to check a static password. Yes we 100% need fix hosting, everything should be portable, simple, generic.

walrus01 10d ago
If you don't mind me asking a question to better understand your perspective: Are you old enough to have personally experienced and built self-hosted things before the advent of AWS, cloud hosted stuff, or is your text above (which I do not disagree with in any way) the point of view of a person who began working on this stuff in the "cloud-native" era, post-2012 or around then? I'm thinking from the "20 years ago" it is the first one, so your experience is even more valuable for those younger persons reading it because you've seen how things were before the vendor-lock-in era began. I ask because I've been seeing an increasing trend of people who've self-taught themselves Linux/BSD things, grew up in the cloud-native era, and have now become increasing dissatisfied with the "Do everything in one vendor cloud" operations model that they initially learned. Many are now going the opposite direction and deciding to self host their own projects at much lower cost and much less vendor lock-in.
- dgellow 10d ago
  Yeah, self-hosting is definitely having a come back. Lots of content creators who would have been evangelizing cloud solutions in the past have been instead going into the various self hosting rabbit holes. There is a bit of a pendulum swing. You now have access to so much information and tooling to host your own things, it’s pretty awesome compared to what we had before 2010. Not sure how much impact that will have for companies, that will likely stay more niche. Companies will still want to delegate much of the effort to a cloud provider, but with pressure to have less lock-in
  - jiaosdjf 10d ago
    I've worked for a corp that spent good money to mirror their entire Salesforce setup internally on the basis that Salesforce was expensive, slow, and had all their customer data and could bring the entire business to its knees. I've worked for another corp that spent insane amounts for a CMS that nobody understood and required a full time engineer on duty to "unlock" files for the content team - this company later built a simple CMS that just stored a title, body and image in a database because I shit you not: thats 90% of what they needed from a CMS and to do quick announcements/news in a mobile app would have taken weeks longer to develop if they had to integrate with the real CMS. This was a few years ago before LLMs btw, so I can only imagine how crazy it is today
  - huksley 10d ago
    Unfortunately it getting more expensive, as hosting companies started to rise prices because of memory costing more
    - walrus01 10d ago
      Kind of unavoidable now for hosting companies purchasing new hardware, much as diesel costs are affecting trucking companies. Let's say theoretically that a company decides to buy raw rack space+power colo and DIY your own router setup, upstream IP transit connections and buy their own server hardware... You're suffering equally from the increase in RAM costs buying your server hardware much the same as if you go with a dedicated bare metal hardware hosting company.
ezst 10d ago
That's why, every time a discussion comes up about decoupling from the US tech and cloud offering, and how supposedly the whole world is captive and incapable without it, I'm like "well, certainly we should give it a serious try, because we might love a bit too much what we encounter down the road in terms of complexity and costs savings."
figassis 10d ago
I think vendors will do what vendors will do, and you can choose to buy into that or not. Containers fullfilled their promise. You can today host anything yourself easily, with a single command. The problem comes when developers start building things without this in mind. I see simple site analytics apps in github, where the docker compose file is a web os services and the repo itself is full of init scripts and the sort. You have redis, mongo, an RDBMS container, an analytics db, kafka, all the kafka tooling like bookkeeper, then you have outsourced auth liek clerk or supabase (when the whole thing is not just some supabase chimera with edge functions and whatever else supabase is supposed to run outside your infra). And the repo description is: simple, anonymous wesbite analytics. The entire thing is more complex than the thin you want to do analytics for. So you bring that into a cloud, and instead of a container, you are now advised, but both AWS and your HN peers that you need to replace each component with it's cloud version, such as elasticache, AKS, cognito, firebase, whatever. All of these services as you set up, trap you into overprovisioning. Your DB needs to have 3 replicas or you have no guarantees, your auth needs an entire instance of something running somewhere or unicorns start dying. By the time you come out for sunlight your bill could pay your rent. So you don't self host, you signup for google analytics. Everytime I find a project on GitHub, the first thing that makes me close it immediately is whether it has a docker-compose.yaml and if it's a single, sane/dumb, low footprint deployment or a chimera. So self hosting is alive and well, whether your app is easy to self host, and whether you know how to use just what you need from cloud vendors are different questions.
- figassis 10d ago
  sorry for the typos, I didn't actually come back to grammar check and I'm cringing now
trueno 10d ago
yea i also think it's weird that people who aren't doing work for organizations champion using aws/gcp/azure. we've all been around computers for a hot minute, we've seen stuff that is exciting and fun and easy to use, and stuff that is not. i occasionally do a bit of aws and azure deployments for work, everything is reduced to yaml hell, i think its the most over convoluted experience ever to do anything and opaque billing strategies, abstractions, it's just gross. its hard to be passionate about that stuff. i kind of laugh when people at my org talk about colocation and elastic strategies for some podunk reporting app, like the bare minimum sla 99.9999999% uptime and runs in regions close to the data and weeks of planning to have like a stupid crud app that maybe five people. use. everything has to neatly fit into this one size fits all cloud strategy the infra/devops team came up with and they could've just run multiple apps off a server rack in the office it's literally an internal tool. or hell they could've just came up with a desktop app deployment strategy to company devices and not used any cloud services. feels so boring feel like the field of "devops" just kinda threw their hands up got really weird this past decade, and like you said just kinda bought into the deployment strats aws/gcp/azure pulled out of their ass.
lijok 10d ago
This is just an incoherent bluster. Calm down. You can still ftp some PHP files and it will just work - there are plenty of services that offer that. You don't need to shit your files across buckets and provision 20 IAM profiles - noone's forcing you to do that and that is not how you host a web app. If you're fond of the ftp-based hosting days, those services are available and they will happily take your money.
- indigodaddy 10d ago
  Yep, shared hosting might go away one day (altho I doubt it), but it's not going to be anytime soon
- jiaosdjf 10d ago
  It's not that it has disappeared it's that vendor-specific cloud has become too normal. And for the record obviously I'm not advocating for going back to the dark ages, ftp / php / shared hosting also had massive issues, my point was that things were _designed_ to be simple and the model in your head was simple and close to the metal. If you're joining an existing project today, or like OP's problem/solution you just want to self-host something, maybe even just to evaluate it, it has become a headache. I've never actually seen a "real" containerised app, one that was 100% agnostic and simple to deploy without multiple exceptions for 3rd party services and so on.
awssuckss 10d ago
[dead]
CloudSuckss 10d ago
[dead]
- 0x457 10d ago
  Made up story? I have S3 bucket that still around from online communities that died down and cloud haters "backed up", one of these hates asks me for copy of a backup once a year because his copy keeps getting lost.
Crabber 10d ago
I think a lot of programmers in the industry just follow trends, they don't really understand the benefits and drawbacks of the technology they are using. I have coworkers who host personal projects for their own use and put them in docker, set up CI pipelines, host them on a cloud service, use an enterprise level database on the backend. One of my coworkers made a completely static portfolio website with a single page and used react. I don't mean this in a judgemental way, people are free to use whatever they like. But it does sadden me that instead of seeing tools and processes as having certain benefits and certain overheads it's now just "this is the tool we use for everything", and therefore "everything now has this overhead". Where the overhead is performance, time, complexity.
- ItsYan 10d ago
  I understand your viewpoint because but also have you considered that your approach adds nothing to the builder? I don't mean this in a judgemental way. In your scenario, I spend learning 50 different technologies that I will never use because they are not hired for. Whereas the colleague makes 50 different projects, gets comfortable with the technology and maybe hits an interesting edge case or two to talk about at their next interview, if they are lucky. I am saying this as someone, who has tried to think about complexity and what not in my projects. But it turns out that I get a lot more mileage from practicing deployment with k3s than know what Dokku and Kamal do and how to deploy the app directly as a process.
  - Crabber 10d ago
    > In your scenario, I spend learning 50 different technologies that I will never use because they are not hired for I'm actually saying the opposite of this. To learn react you also need to know html, css and javascript, so I am saying if you need to make a static website that is just a single page you may as well just write it in HTML. I am saying you should use less technology. Similarly to learn Docker you need to know bash so you already have the skills to just skip over docker and deploy your app directly by running bash commands on a linux server. The "50 different technologies" is how I see the flavour-of-the-month cloud platforms that take something that's relatively simple (copying code to a server and running a command to start it) and turning it into a proprietary cloud platform you now have to learn. Whereas you could have just learnt how to deploy software to a linux server instead and have a skill that was valuable 20 years ago, is still valuable, and will still be the way software is fundamentally run in 20 years time as well I am sure. Meanwhile I have no idea what Dokku and Kamal even are - I'm sure they won't last as long as linux and bash have.
tonymet 10d ago
I agree with part of your complaint, and many cloud services are deliberate vendor lock in (e.g. “serverless”). But all the cloud vendors offer containers as a service, where you build your image locally and run it in a region. Naturally there will be setup to access networking, IO, gpus etc. so i think you have some fair claims but you’re not making the best case here.
- bigfudge 10d ago
  Containers as a service are ludicrously expensive as a way to buy compute though. It’s just amazing how much a poxy 1cpu 1gb instance is on azure.
  - tonymet 10d ago
    Indeed. Convenience has a price. It’s the DoorDash of vcpu
kaydub 10d ago
We don't need to fix hosting. There's no such thing as "portable" or "generic" and there never will be. At a certain point you have to use an implementation of <thing> and that's going to lock you in.
zelphirkalt 10d ago
I mean, containers are working fine like that. Choose any hoster you want, either specifically supporting docker deployment or bare metal and host your containers. It's just that many tools come with bad images or bad documentation on how to configure things for your domains and needs. That's usually where it breaks down. Not the container tech in itself. That one's working fine mostly.

walrus01 10d ago

If you don't mind me asking a question to better understand your perspective: Are you old enough to have personally experienced and built self-hosted things before the advent of AWS, cloud hosted stuff, or is your text above (which I do not disagree with in any way) the point of view of a person who began working on this stuff in the "cloud-native" era, post-2012 or around then? I'm thinking from the "20 years ago" it is the first one, so your experience is even more valuable for those younger persons reading it because you've seen how things were before the vendor-lock-in era began. I ask because I've been seeing an increasing trend of people who've self-taught themselves Linux/BSD things, grew up in the cloud-native era, and have now become increasing dissatisfied with the "Do everything in one vendor cloud" operations model that they initially learned. Many are now going the opposite direction and deciding to self host their own projects at much lower cost and much less vendor lock-in.

dgellow 10d ago
Yeah, self-hosting is definitely having a come back. Lots of content creators who would have been evangelizing cloud solutions in the past have been instead going into the various self hosting rabbit holes. There is a bit of a pendulum swing. You now have access to so much information and tooling to host your own things, it’s pretty awesome compared to what we had before 2010. Not sure how much impact that will have for companies, that will likely stay more niche. Companies will still want to delegate much of the effort to a cloud provider, but with pressure to have less lock-in
- jiaosdjf 10d ago
  I've worked for a corp that spent good money to mirror their entire Salesforce setup internally on the basis that Salesforce was expensive, slow, and had all their customer data and could bring the entire business to its knees. I've worked for another corp that spent insane amounts for a CMS that nobody understood and required a full time engineer on duty to "unlock" files for the content team - this company later built a simple CMS that just stored a title, body and image in a database because I shit you not: thats 90% of what they needed from a CMS and to do quick announcements/news in a mobile app would have taken weeks longer to develop if they had to integrate with the real CMS. This was a few years ago before LLMs btw, so I can only imagine how crazy it is today
- huksley 10d ago
  Unfortunately it getting more expensive, as hosting companies started to rise prices because of memory costing more
  - walrus01 10d ago
    Kind of unavoidable now for hosting companies purchasing new hardware, much as diesel costs are affecting trucking companies. Let's say theoretically that a company decides to buy raw rack space+power colo and DIY your own router setup, upstream IP transit connections and buy their own server hardware... You're suffering equally from the increase in RAM costs buying your server hardware much the same as if you go with a dedicated bare metal hardware hosting company.

ezst 10d ago

That's why, every time a discussion comes up about decoupling from the US tech and cloud offering, and how supposedly the whole world is captive and incapable without it, I'm like "well, certainly we should give it a serious try, because we might love a bit too much what we encounter down the road in terms of complexity and costs savings."

figassis 10d ago

I think vendors will do what vendors will do, and you can choose to buy into that or not. Containers fullfilled their promise. You can today host anything yourself easily, with a single command. The problem comes when developers start building things without this in mind. I see simple site analytics apps in github, where the docker compose file is a web os services and the repo itself is full of init scripts and the sort. You have redis, mongo, an RDBMS container, an analytics db, kafka, all the kafka tooling like bookkeeper, then you have outsourced auth liek clerk or supabase (when the whole thing is not just some supabase chimera with edge functions and whatever else supabase is supposed to run outside your infra). And the repo description is: simple, anonymous wesbite analytics. The entire thing is more complex than the thin you want to do analytics for. So you bring that into a cloud, and instead of a container, you are now advised, but both AWS and your HN peers that you need to replace each component with it's cloud version, such as elasticache, AKS, cognito, firebase, whatever. All of these services as you set up, trap you into overprovisioning. Your DB needs to have 3 replicas or you have no guarantees, your auth needs an entire instance of something running somewhere or unicorns start dying. By the time you come out for sunlight your bill could pay your rent. So you don't self host, you signup for google analytics. Everytime I find a project on GitHub, the first thing that makes me close it immediately is whether it has a docker-compose.yaml and if it's a single, sane/dumb, low footprint deployment or a chimera. So self hosting is alive and well, whether your app is easy to self host, and whether you know how to use just what you need from cloud vendors are different questions.

figassis 10d ago
sorry for the typos, I didn't actually come back to grammar check and I'm cringing now

trueno 10d ago

yea i also think it's weird that people who aren't doing work for organizations champion using aws/gcp/azure. we've all been around computers for a hot minute, we've seen stuff that is exciting and fun and easy to use, and stuff that is not. i occasionally do a bit of aws and azure deployments for work, everything is reduced to yaml hell, i think its the most over convoluted experience ever to do anything and opaque billing strategies, abstractions, it's just gross. its hard to be passionate about that stuff. i kind of laugh when people at my org talk about colocation and elastic strategies for some podunk reporting app, like the bare minimum sla 99.9999999% uptime and runs in regions close to the data and weeks of planning to have like a stupid crud app that maybe five people. use. everything has to neatly fit into this one size fits all cloud strategy the infra/devops team came up with and they could've just run multiple apps off a server rack in the office it's literally an internal tool. or hell they could've just came up with a desktop app deployment strategy to company devices and not used any cloud services. feels so boring feel like the field of "devops" just kinda threw their hands up got really weird this past decade, and like you said just kinda bought into the deployment strats aws/gcp/azure pulled out of their ass.

lijok 10d ago

This is just an incoherent bluster. Calm down. You can still ftp some PHP files and it will just work - there are plenty of services that offer that. You don't need to shit your files across buckets and provision 20 IAM profiles - noone's forcing you to do that and that is not how you host a web app. If you're fond of the ftp-based hosting days, those services are available and they will happily take your money.

indigodaddy 10d ago
Yep, shared hosting might go away one day (altho I doubt it), but it's not going to be anytime soon
jiaosdjf 10d ago
It's not that it has disappeared it's that vendor-specific cloud has become too normal. And for the record obviously I'm not advocating for going back to the dark ages, ftp / php / shared hosting also had massive issues, my point was that things were _designed_ to be simple and the model in your head was simple and close to the metal. If you're joining an existing project today, or like OP's problem/solution you just want to self-host something, maybe even just to evaluate it, it has become a headache. I've never actually seen a "real" containerised app, one that was 100% agnostic and simple to deploy without multiple exceptions for 3rd party services and so on.

awssuckss 10d ago

[dead]

CloudSuckss 10d ago

[dead]

0x457 10d ago
Made up story? I have S3 bucket that still around from online communities that died down and cloud haters "backed up", one of these hates asks me for copy of a backup once a year because his copy keeps getting lost.

Crabber 10d ago

I think a lot of programmers in the industry just follow trends, they don't really understand the benefits and drawbacks of the technology they are using. I have coworkers who host personal projects for their own use and put them in docker, set up CI pipelines, host them on a cloud service, use an enterprise level database on the backend. One of my coworkers made a completely static portfolio website with a single page and used react. I don't mean this in a judgemental way, people are free to use whatever they like. But it does sadden me that instead of seeing tools and processes as having certain benefits and certain overheads it's now just "this is the tool we use for everything", and therefore "everything now has this overhead". Where the overhead is performance, time, complexity.

ItsYan 10d ago
I understand your viewpoint because but also have you considered that your approach adds nothing to the builder? I don't mean this in a judgemental way. In your scenario, I spend learning 50 different technologies that I will never use because they are not hired for. Whereas the colleague makes 50 different projects, gets comfortable with the technology and maybe hits an interesting edge case or two to talk about at their next interview, if they are lucky. I am saying this as someone, who has tried to think about complexity and what not in my projects. But it turns out that I get a lot more mileage from practicing deployment with k3s than know what Dokku and Kamal do and how to deploy the app directly as a process.
- Crabber 10d ago
  > In your scenario, I spend learning 50 different technologies that I will never use because they are not hired for I'm actually saying the opposite of this. To learn react you also need to know html, css and javascript, so I am saying if you need to make a static website that is just a single page you may as well just write it in HTML. I am saying you should use less technology. Similarly to learn Docker you need to know bash so you already have the skills to just skip over docker and deploy your app directly by running bash commands on a linux server. The "50 different technologies" is how I see the flavour-of-the-month cloud platforms that take something that's relatively simple (copying code to a server and running a command to start it) and turning it into a proprietary cloud platform you now have to learn. Whereas you could have just learnt how to deploy software to a linux server instead and have a skill that was valuable 20 years ago, is still valuable, and will still be the way software is fundamentally run in 20 years time as well I am sure. Meanwhile I have no idea what Dokku and Kamal even are - I'm sure they won't last as long as linux and bash have.

tonymet 10d ago

I agree with part of your complaint, and many cloud services are deliberate vendor lock in (e.g. “serverless”). But all the cloud vendors offer containers as a service, where you build your image locally and run it in a region. Naturally there will be setup to access networking, IO, gpus etc. so i think you have some fair claims but you’re not making the best case here.

bigfudge 10d ago
Containers as a service are ludicrously expensive as a way to buy compute though. It’s just amazing how much a poxy 1cpu 1gb instance is on azure.
- tonymet 10d ago
  Indeed. Convenience has a price. It’s the DoorDash of vcpu

kaydub 10d ago

We don't need to fix hosting. There's no such thing as "portable" or "generic" and there never will be. At a certain point you have to use an implementation of <thing> and that's going to lock you in.

zelphirkalt 10d ago

I mean, containers are working fine like that. Choose any hoster you want, either specifically supporting docker deployment or bare metal and host your containers. It's just that many tools come with bad images or bad documentation on how to configure things for your domains and needs. That's usually where it breaks down. Not the container tech in itself. That one's working fine mostly.