The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own.

If it makes things difficult, you shouldn't be using it.

It is overhyped and it sucks for most use case.

I'm sorry, what's the advantage to the cloud again?

This just reminds me why I just run (my personal) web apps on the server in my basement: it's actually simpler.

I really think the worst part of programming is dealing with the development environment.

Website is unreadable on mobile

>To be honest, give me the developer experience of the 90s. I want to make a change, and I want to be able to test this change either interactively or through a unit test within milliseconds, and I want to do this while sitting in an airplane with no WiFi, okay? (we didn't have WiFi in the 90s).

I'm going to make an impossible request and ask that any readers ignore everything else they know about "crypto", but...this is one of the things that feels right in EVM development compared with normal cloud applications. Especially with frameworks like Foundry, unit tests for distributed applications run very quickly on local copies of the whole production environment. It's a lot more fun than anything which touches AWS.

Obviously, there are some major downsides (such as Ethereum being comparable to a late 70s microcomputer in computing power). But the model of a single well specified execution + storage protocol might be worth porting over to non-financialized cloud application development.

> It doesn't make sense that every time I want to execute code inside an AWS Lambda function, I have to understand that it needs to be bundled with tree-shaken dependencies, uploaded as a zip file to S3 and deployed through Terraform. Or that in order to be able to publish a message to SNS, my IAM policy must have a statement that allows the sns:Publish action on the topic's ARN. And does every developer need to understand what ARNs are at all?

The Terraform AWS provider is a very thin abstraction. If your needs are not too specific, there are probably a few higher level abstractions out there that you can use. This is one of the main reasons PaaS are so popular.

If you want easy and simple, use Render, fly.io, etc. Those cover 90% of the cases K8s be damned.

Sorry but I’m struggling to read with the 20 characters per line formatting on mobile

[dead]

[flagged]

"Cloud is too difficult, you have to learn tons of stuff to use it!"

"BTW here's the new product I'm selling which requires you to learn a new cloud-oriented programming language and has its own CLI and has diagrams like [this](https://docs.winglang.io/assets/images/arch-f803472c761aa198...) on its introduction page!"

The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming...

The complexity of the cloud exists because the cloud vendors allows a user to do advanced things if the user understands how. Using AWS, GCP, and Azure as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) means that there's no easy mode.

If you want easy (or easier) mode, you'll have to use a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

The major cloud vendors might have problems with quirky designs and poor documentation, but beyond that is necessary complexity.

You want a high-availability website allows user-uploaded files and does asynchronous task processing? You're probably going to have to get familiar with servers, load balancers, queues, and object storage, at a minimum.

You want it all to be secure? You're going to have to configure network rules/firewalls and set up lots of access policies.

There's no free lunch.

I would love something like networking-as-a-service. My ignorant ass do not understand the specifics related to it. I would love to option to specify that service A should be able to call service B irregardless of IP schemes, peering, firewalls, service discovery and 1000 other layers.

I agree so much with the article about cloud being to complicated and fast feedback being import. I wish them the best of luck.

PaaS solutions and not IaaS is also a solution for many.

No code / low cose beeing a solution for someone else.

It's not to many days since my solution was on HN. Windmill.dev is really something special.

And by mine i do not mean that i has any affiliation with windmill, just that it solves my problem. quick iterations including ui building.

But it's not a low code plaform either. I would call it a code platform for developers

Utilizing an infinite amount of computing resources is probably always going to be an inherently difficult thing. It's a task made more difficult by all he snake oil salesman promising perfect easy solutions. The only workable solution is to find out what works for everyone else and, even if it doesn't fit your needs perfectly, figure out how to make it work for you. Never underestimate the power of strength in numbers. If the entire industry is utilizing a technology or paradigm you can either get on board or get left behind.

I don't understand what that solution brings when you have Terraform? Also linking your code with you infra code, who thought this was a good idea?

Last question how actually the simluator works, is it one of those case where it try to emulate some high level concept but then your prod code break because the simulator was 40% accurate?

This thought hits home for me:

> When I started programming, I used Borland C++. It used to take about 100ms to compile and run a program on an IBM PC AT machine (TURBO ON). An average iteration cycle in the cloud takes minutes. Minutes! Sometimes dozens of minutes!

I'm a fast-feedback fan myself, and my weapons of choice in refuge from a dark decade of c++ are the Python notebook and Clojure REPL. With that as it is, the lurching tedium of cloud development (infrastructure especially) makes me want to pull my skin off.

What is so galling about it is that, for dev purposes, almost none of these SaaSes and cloud services are really so 'big' that they couldn't be run on a beefy local workstation for development. The galling reason that I have to wait N minutes for terraform or cdk or whatever to rebuild some junk and deploy it to a bunch of neigh un-remote-debuggerable-without-firewall-shenanigans lambdas and docker containers is commercial moat-keeping for the services.

At least Azure and GCP put some token effort into local emulators of their services. AWS work has to rely on the valiant but incomplete efforts of LocalStack if they want a fast and disposable way to test infra.

I don't understand why there's so much negativity here. From my cursory perusal of the docs this looks like a simplified, vendor agnostic re-imaging of something like CDK, with cool tooling including visualisations and out-of-the-box support for local dev. Where's the beef?

You think cloud is too expensive or unnecessary? Fair enough, this tool is not for you.

You think cloud infra is necessarily complex because you need to support <insert use case here>. You're right! This tool is not for you (yet?).

You don't need this because you already know <CDK / Terraform / whatever abstraction is already in your repertoire>? I agree, the juice is probably not worth the squeeze to learn yet another tool.

Are you approaching cloud for the first time or have been managing existing simple infra (buckets, queues, lambdas) via ClickOps and want to explore a feature constrained (hence easy to grok) Infrastructure as Code solution? Maybe give this a look.

While it's still early days, I suspect there will be many who will find this useful, and congratulate the authors for their efforts!

The difficulty with cloud is Joel's rule: "All non-trivial abstractions are leaky" they just abstract complexity and eventually the abstraction breaks and you actually need to know some amount of linux, networking, security, or distributed system engineering to fix it.

The easiest way to not get bitten by this is to avoid the abstractions and keep it simple as long as possible. Most apps can probably do fine with a single beefy box and a local sqlite database - this can likely scale vertically indefinitely with moore's law and still probably have less downtime than if you relied on all the fancy cloud technology.

The part I don't get is why in 2023 AWS still pushes me to VPC and NAT my servers like it's 1990.

It's just so unnecessary. Greybeards moved to the cloud but never changed.

The annoying thing about using cloud infra is finding that all your skills and knowledge have to be relearned N times over for N different cloud vendors for a huge array of their services, mostly to do basic things that you already know how to do anyway in traditional environments.

The fact they all offer similar but subtly different versions of every type of product and that cross platform tools like Terraform etc have some ability to paper over these only makes it worse. (Your google cloud bucket is just like your S3 bucket right? Until it's not). When I rant about platform independence people think I have a philosophical objection to lockin, but its really much more basic than that. I just don't have time to learn thousands of vendor specific APIs, bugs, constraints etc on top of the perfectly good built up knowledge I have from 25 years of working with software systems already. I am busy using all that time and brainspace trying to keep up with the fundamental knowledge that is actually important.

I hate to say this, but this is straight up rediscovering monads.

They have a notion of phases of execution which are different execution contexts with an ordering. And yes most languages don’t have a decent facility for expressing this or staged computation. Let alone a notion of computation phases that map to distributed systems state.