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.
You make it redundant, I thought I didn’t need to say that…
I am specifically saying that redundancy doesn’t solve everything magically. Redundancy means coordination, more things that can also fail. A redundant system needs more care, more maintenance, more skills, more cost. If a company decides to use something more sophisticated without the corresponding effort, it’s making things worse. If a company with a 10 people department thinks that using Cloud it can have a resilient system like it could with 40 people building it, they are wrong, because they now have a system way more complex that they can handle, despite the fact that storage is replicated easily by clicking in the GUI.
Redundancy should be automatic. Raid5 for instance.
Plus cloud abstracts a lot of complexity. You can have an oracle (or postgres, or mongo) DB with multi region redundancy, encryption and backups with a click. Much, much simpler for a sysadmin (or an architect) than setting the simplest mysql on a VM. Unless you’re in the business of configuring databases, your developers should focus on writing insurance risk code, or telco optimization, or whatever brings money. Same with k8s, same with Kafka, same with cdn, same with kms, same with iam, same with object storage, same with logging and monitoring…
You can build a redundant system in a day like Legos, much better security and higher availability (hell, higher SLAs even) than anything a team of 5 can build in a week self-manging everything.
Yeah it should, but something needs to implement that. I mean, when distributed systems work redundancy is automatic, but they can also fail. We are talking about redundancy implemented via software, and software has bugs, always. I am not saying that it can’t be achieved, of course it can, but it has a cost.
I know, and if you don’t understand all that complexity you can still fuckup your postgres DB in a disastrous way. That’s the whole point of this thread. Also operators can do the same for you nowadays, but again, you need to know your systems.
Of course it is. You are paying someone else for that job. Not going to argue with that. In fact, that’s what makes it boring (which I talked about in the post).
This is a modern dogma that I simply disagree with. Building an infrastructure tailored around your needs (i.e., with all you need and nothing else) and cost effective does bring money, it does by saving costs and avoiding to spend an enormous amount of resources into renting all of that, forever, scaling with your business.
This is the marketing pitch. The reality is that companies still have huge teams, still have tons of incidents, still take long to deliver projects, still have security breaches, but they are spending 3, 5, 10 times as much and nothing of those money is capitalized.
I guess we fundamentally disagree, I envy you for what positive experiences you must have had!
That’s my whole point from the beginning, boring is good. Boring is repeatable, boring is reliable.
Of course they still have huge teams. The invention of the automobile made travel easier therefore there was more travel happening.