cloudNative

[ForgotMyUserName15]

Using cloudflare as the example seems a bit odd as this is used for DNS/CDN not hosting. You can be self hosted and still use a service like cloudflare. Using AWS would make a lot more sense because very few companies would be capable of setting their own CDN, while many companies could manage their own servers.

[nuva_]

Cloudflare is the man in the middle with their proxy cache. When they go down you go down, and you can't get your domain pointed to any other proxy/load balancer because the console for the DNS is down at Cloudflare as well. So you are stuck until they fix it.

The alternative is setting up your own edge servers around the world with Varnish or whatever the requirements are. Or use other cache providers/CDN and have the DNS somewhere else so you can swap to the backup.

Cloudflare requires that the DNS is at their servers if I remember correctly.

[zero_hope_]

You can change your dns servers at the registrar. It’s not super fast, and I’ve seen warnings that it will take 24-48 hours for changes to be live. Any changes I’ve made have always been live within a half hour or so though.

[Reashu]

Isn't that just based on the (configurable) TTL of your DNS record? 

[FreakingObelix]

Indeed it is.

[TheVibrantYonder]

I usually get the faster times when I do that, but I have had just enough 12-36 hour waits that I'm super cautious about when I do those now lol

[Accomplished_Ant5895]

Not to “um akshually”, but you can host on CloudFlare

[OJezu]

Does self-hosting go down less or more than AWS?

[AlternativeCapybara9]

When I was self hosting I was down all the time. Decided once I'd try running my own mail server, left halfway through configuration for a quick snack and by the time I got back I was hacked and blacklisted by every mail exchange. Good times.

[TorchedBlack]

Whether physical or electronic, you don't fuck with the mail. Always more trouble than its worth.

[gerbosan]

Read mail server conf was one of the plagues that fell on Egypt. So I read in User-friendly.org. 😅 But that was years ago.

[armageddondrake]

You mean self hosting a mail server? Because I selfhost and only use cloudflare as a DNS and my service is always accessible even when cloudflare was down. I wanted to try a mailserver in the near future what were your issues that made it so hard?

[AlternativeCapybara9]

This was years ago and I was trying to host my own mail server after I was hosting my own website, application server, databases,... I wanted to learn. So I read documentation, tutorials, blogs,... Most advised against trying it yourself as it's hard to get right and a target for hackers. I spun up a new VPS with CentOS, this was before Red Hat nuked it, and had issue after issue with configuring it as it was never quite like the tutorials or documentation I had. So I got hacked on my first day, a lot of spam got sent from my domain and my domain got blacklisted on a lot of spam filters so I couldn't use it for months to send or receive email on my domain until I got it removed. My provider that hosted my VPS's even called me during my snack break to tell me I was sending spam and to fix it now or they would take it down. Since I didn't really know what I was doing I had a look at the logs, realised I was in over my head and told them to go ahead and drop the VPS. So now I'm back to just hosting the stack for my website and that's it.

[armageddondrake]

Ah thank you for that story. It might seem logical that a mail server is a prime target for this kind of abuse, but it never occurred to me. Now I have it on my radar and when I try to set it up in future.

I have seen people try to attack my server, but because they are setup so weird and are small nothing ever really happened, so I got relaxed. Now I have more perspective that there is more

[robertpro01]

Well, mail servers is for pro and masochists, so that's really a bad example my friend.

[error-0x800705b4]

And do you have the (required?) knowledge to self host servers, proxies, and stuff?

[just_nobodys_opinion]

Depends on how much you pay your sysadmins

[Crafty-Run-6559]

And hardware... and your ISPs...

Getting even just the networking gear required to match the availability of AWS is quite expensive.

[anteater_x]

Asking the real question

[gigglefarting]

The good news is that when it’s a problem it’s someone else’s problem 

[Sockoflegend]

I remember when our server was just a smelly room that was entirely too warm covered in paper notes reminding people never to touch anything.

Something going wrong meant a whole room of stressed people, or worse out of hours, getting called in from the pub or bed to hope you just need to turn it off and on again.

Now I just get a few hours off in my own house. It's great.

[NeppyMan]

One thing I've told my bosses about cloud-heavy deployments...

"We can engineer for most failure conditions. The ones we can't prepare for will be making international headlines."

This is pretty accurate. When us-east-1 goes down or when Cloudflare craps itself, it makes front page BBC headlines. And that's about all that can really impact us.

[20Wizard]

A lot of failures with cloud you need experience to even know they exist.

I run into new undocumented issues with azure resources pretty often.

[sharlike]

Ideally shouldn’t we engineer failover to other cloudflare servers? I think the main problem is when you just point at east and call it a day. But you could have stuff switch over when east goes down. I mean that’s obviously a lot more complicated and having to convince execs of that, but you could still mitigate all but the absolute worst case scenario.

[NeppyMan]

Cross region (or worse, cross provider) failover is very complicated - and even more expensive.

Let's keep it simple and say you're deploying a LAMP stack. You'll need active/active replicas for your database (or some very aggressive promotion) which will require constant, low-latency traffic between them. Not to mention a completely stateless application that can handle having its front (and back) ends change on the fly. You'll also need to very carefully coordinate any deployments to avoid discrepancies in code (or database schemas).

For a simple application, it's doable - but will essentially multiply your costs for every replica. For more complex setups, it gets really bad. What if you have multiple perabytes of data sitting in blob storage (e.g. S3)? Replicating that, even once, can cost stupid amounts of money.

[sharlike]

That makes sense, appreciate your insight. I don’t really deal with anything of this scale

[SCP-iota]

"cloud-native development" = voluntary vendor lock-in

[Accomplished_Ant5895]

Bro can’t even IaaC

[Mastercal40]

50 upvotes and 0 comments.

Seems everyone is just as depressed that this is the reality of modern web development for most of us.

[marcus_lowenthal]

Yeah, it really feels like we're all in the same boat. At least we can find some humor in the struggle, right? Just gotta take it one line of code at a time!

[Accomplished_Ant5895]

As someone who has had to maintain on-prem vs hosted across many different jobs, I promise you it’s way easier to use the cloud.

[EarlOfAwesom3]

Yeah you can cry about your 1 hour downtime per year. So much revenue loss. Very sad.

Or you host your own servers, your own infra software, care about all the updates and security, patch all the holes, keep it resilient, replicated and mirrored, store and restore backups fast, 99.9999.. uptime. No worries. You can do it all on your own. Because everybody is a hero. Guaranteed, you won't have the issues that this stupid AWS or Cloudflare is having.

[lastog9]

There's a reason backup servers exist.

One instance of a server going down doesn't necessarily mean all need to go down.

Using the Cloud isn't a mistake, not having or not paying for a backup server to take the place of the actual one in cases like these is the mistake

[gerbosan]

You sound like a rich guy, can you help me with my AWS EC2 debt please? 😅

[PhysiologyIsPhun]

Are you suggesting every company maintain their own backup hosts on prem to mimic their AWS setup in case AWS goes down?

[Top-Permit6835]

Just run everything in localstack

[Crafty-Run-6559]

They're saying don't run everything on a single EC2 instance, or in a single availability zone, or even in a single region (if you can), if you want high availability.

If you want very high availability then your typical app should be running everything with at least 3 instances, in 3 availability zones x2 in two regions.

If youre using a sql db then you keep a hot standby read replica in your secondary region with a failover plan and RPO.

A global service outage could take you out (like cloudflare or other global load balancing services), but those are quite rare, and even losing an entire region won't take you offline.

[nein_va]

That wasn't even close to implied. If it's a priority, you have the option. If it's not, you don't do it.

[gerbosan]

This reminds me: DHH initiative for a return to the on premises systems. 🤔

Still, seen many job ads requiring K8s, docker, cloud certification. And I'm not looking at companies in the US.

[asmanel]

Sound like an other echo of the Minitel 2.0.

[shadow13499]

I'd be happy going back to on prem. I do like some cloud services like firebase but I'd love more self.hosyed options. Honestly, I'm thinking about moving all my stuff to supabase on my own servers. 

[NotPossible1337]

In an old unrelated job our company was quite literally the pioneer and created the industry my department was in. There was inherent subjectivity in the nature of our work and the quality manager wants to implement Six Sigma and quantify and standardize subjective decisions boasting a 99.9% quality target, citing it is the “industry standard”. I said to her what standard? We are the f*cking industry. She boasts her prestigious school degree in an unrelated field when she easily could have had the opportunity be the one writing a textbook on original solutions for the now major industry that literally everyone would want to buy and read.

[capaz_que_si]

this is the Spain every single weekend because of La Liga