Use One Big Server (2022)

I’ve found that it’s hard to even hire engineers who aren’t all in on cloud and who even know how to build without it.

Even the ones who do know have been conditioned to tremble with fear at the thought of administrating things like a database or storage. These are people who can code cryptography kernels and network protocols and kernel modules, but the thought of running a K8S cluster or Postgres fills them with terror.

“But what if we have downtime!” That would be a good argument if the cloud didn’t have downtime, but it does. Most of our downtime in previous years has been the cloud, not us.

“What if we have to scale!” If we are big enough to outgrow a 256 core database with terabytes of SSD, we can afford to hire a full time DBA or two and have them babysit a cluster. It’ll still be cheaper.

“What if we lose data?” Ever heard of backups? Streaming backups? Hot spares? Multiple concurrent backup systems? None of this is complex.

“But admin is hard!” So is administrating cloud. I’ve seen the horror of Terraform and Helm and all that shit. Cloud doesn’t make admin easy, just different. It promised simplicity and did not deliver.

… and so on.

So we pay about 1000X what we should pay for hosting.

Every time I look at the numbers I curse myself for letting the camel get its nose under the tent.

If I had it to do over again I’d forbid use of big cloud from day one, no exceptions, no argument, use it and you’re fired. Put it in the articles of incorporation and bylaws.

I have also found this happening. It's actually really funny because I think even I'm less inclined to run postgres myself these days, when I used to run literally hundreds of instances with not much more than PG_DUMP, cron and two read only replicas.

These days probably the best way of getting these 'cloudy' engineers on board is just to tell them its Kubernetes and run all of your servers as K3s.

I’m convinced that cloud companies have been intentionally shaping dev culture. Microservices in particular seem like a pattern designed to push managed cloud lock in. It’s not that you have to have cloud to use them, but it creates a lot of opportunities to reach for managed services like event queues to replace what used to be a simple function call or queue.

Dev culture is totally fad driven and devs are sheep, so this works.

Yeah I think that's fair. I'm very pro containers though, that's a genuine step forward from deploy scrips or vm images.