I hope this won’t be counted as some form of self-promotion, even though I am sharing a post from my own blog.
As a tech worker who works in a Cloud shop, I wanted to elaborate the many reasons why I find working with Clouds terrible, from multiple points of view.
I tried to organize my thoughts in a (relatively long) post, in which both technical aspects and political aspects (which are very related) are covered.
I am sure many people will have different perspectives, and this could be potentially also a nice prompt for a discussion.
Haha that’s great. Took me a second to notice.
I was really hoping this was going to be a rant about clouds in the sky.
As someone who burns with the faintest touch of stellar light, I love clouds in the sky.
Great post, a quick nitpick if you don’t mind, introduce or use an abbreviation’s full words before using its abbreviated form
Granted that the article is geared towards sysadmins and cloud developers, others who may want to read it may have a hard time doing so. As an example, reading through the first technical point, I saw “IAMs” and “Network ACL”, I don’t understand what those abbrs mean
Thanks, that is a very good observation! I will try to sneak an edit later today where I can add some appendix about acronyms and abbreviations.
Edit:
While it might not look great, I have added at the bottom an Appendix with all (hopefully, I might have missed some) acronyms and abbreviations. Thanks for the suggestion!
How do u feel about cotton candy
Pink or Blue?
Pink of course
I’m immensely disappointed!
Not kidding: when I first saw the post title, I was fully convinced that I’ll read the post of a crazy person, rambling about (rain) clouds.
I am sorry! As an amateur landscape photographer I actually like very much those clouds. There are a few r-word posts about people hating those clouds though, but I checked and they are nowhere near as long as you would expect a proper rant to be
I’m sorry, but this started like a recipe article and I lost all interest. I don’t care about your life story, I clicked the link to read your opinions, and you spent the first several paragraphs avoiding them.
Tell me you don’t read often without telling me you don’t read often:
The cloud is just someone else’s computer
With a lot of stuff on top!
I hate websites with low contrast text.
How do you get this? Anything that tries to force a light mode?
This is how the site is supposed to look like (there is no light/dark theme selection):
I was reading the site on Android, and it looked dark, but after seeing this comment, I tried disabling Android system wide dark mode, and sure enough it became white like in the screenshot! For the record, I tried with both Firefox and a Chromium-based browser.
Thanks! I went and tried on my phone and indeed setting Firefox to light mode indeed causes that horrendous and unreadable result. I will need to figure out way, eventually, and provide an alternative light scheme.
I get the same white background on Windows, Chromium and Firefox. Checking settings, I see FF is set to “Automatic” light/dark mode. When I manually select Dark mode, I see the dark background.
Thanks for the feedback, and same to @ilmagico@lemmy.world and @jg1i@lemmy.world. I fixed the configuration of the site and now the site should be readable even in light mode.
You’re welcome! And yes, I can confirm it works in light mode as well :)
Anything that requires a fancy buzzword is usually stupid but a good way to make money for someone. The “cloud” has always existed as offsite hosting. Off-site shared servers, VPSs, whatever. It’s no different than running CPanel on an LAMP VPS in 2003.
But calling it “the cloud” gave all the business majors a hard on and then the accounts department realized they could manipulate share pricing by reducing the amount of assets a company holds. It’s the same stupid reason many companies don’t own their corporate headquarters or remote centers. They lease the, even if from themselves through another holding. It looks better on paper so the share price goes up. It’s all mind boggling stupid.
The cloud today significantly different than the 2003 cpanel LAMP server. It’s a whole new landscape. Complex, highly-available architectures that cannot be replicated in an on-prem environment are easily built from code in minutes on AWS.
Those capabilities come with a steep learning curve on how to operate them in a secure and effective manor, but that’s always going to be the case in this industry. The people that can grow and learn will.
I’m fully aware of the few buzzword and marketing pitches that cloud hosting uses. I’m forced to use both GCP and AWS for different contracts and I’m good at it.
The real truth is that most websites and internet services do not need scale. They do not need all this crap. A Pentium 3 could host all the data for most of these businesses and services. You don’t need serverless lambda functions to handle an api when an actual endpoint does the same thing to pull some info. The few companies that need such distributed computing and power, will need a big on-site or off-site implementation. It makes sense for that sometimes. But most times, it doesn’t even then. You’re just outsourcing your engineering and paying a premium.
I have seen so many startups spin up cloud accounts costing thousands of dollars a month when they’re in “private beta stealth”. Literally a $500 laptop could host all of their services just as quickly with no monthly fee. But as long as the VCs are paying, just flush that cash down.
I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.
I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.
It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.
Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.
Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.
Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.
