libaws

i dunno. moving off heroku to another provider marking up aws or pretending to seems counterproductive. a go binary in a zip builds and uploads to lambda in 1 second. handle routing and everything else in binary, don’t use aws features. you don’t need em. lambda, s3, and dynamo all scale to zero with usage based billing. toss in rds if you really miss sql or dislike scale to zero. once this is too expensive, move to ovh metal, which sells significantly faster compute, ie epyc 4244p ddr5 5200. more importantly, they sell bandwidth for $0.50/TB instead of $0.10/GB, which is aws price before paas wrapper markup. the ovh price is after the 1Gbps unmetered you get for free with any server. most companies will never even need metal, and between lambda and metal is ec2 spot, which might be of use anyway for elasticity. ovh metal bills monthly, e

i used to write code like this[1]. now i write code like this[2]. mostly what changed is the way i read code. if err != nil is a friend now, not the abomination i first thought it was. 1. https://github.com/nathants/s4/blob/15eb67158cdc03ee1983d060... 2. https://github.com/nathants/libaws/blob/affb1d6002250e35c5ba...

i print the error along with file and line number every time i return it. clunky, but it works. in fact i print file and line with every log message. https://github.com/nathants/libaws/blob/87fb45b4cae20abd1bb1...

cloud is so good now it’s hard to justify not doing something bespoke. ec2 spot is insanely cheaper than turnkey cicd, and better in almost every way. i’m delighted to pay 30% over infra cost for convenience, but not 500%. and it better actually be convenient, not just have a good landing page and sales team. this month i learned localzones have even better spot prices. losangeles-1 is half the spot price of us-west-2. for a runner, do something like this, but react to an http call instead of a s3 put[1]. for a web ui do something like this[2]. s3, lambda, and ec2 spot are a perfect fit for cicd and a lot more. 1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/91b1c27fc947e067ed46... 2. https://github.com/nathants/aws-exec/tree/e68769126b5aae0e35...

too much maybe? yelling at clouds just feels so good sometimes. apologies. i do actually wish we could have nice things. this is how aws became easy and fun for me[1]. a similar interface could exist for any provider. heroku is right about picking the good parts and exposing only that as an interface. 1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

like linux, cloud is a lot to learn, but worth it. it adds capabilities you didn’t have before. like linux, cloud is best kept simple, or it can become brittle and confusing. like linux, cloud has a lot of cool things, think zfs, that should be appreciated but not used. like linux, using go makes your life easier. the aws go sdk is the documentation. like linux, you have to learn a lot and then find the core utility you actually care about. for me it is: https://github.com/nathants/libaws like linux, cloud is very stable. focus on core utility. would it be better if cloud wasn't the massive union of all customers needs with a bias toward large customers? sure. the good news is some subset of those needs are actually core utility, well implemented, and stable.

the core of aws is actually pretty good. it’s just wrapped in several layers of nutshells which aren’t needed except by the equally thick enterprise. aws is also inescapably imperative. it’s how the api and everything behind the scenes work. aws is gonna have a lot of nonsense best practices, both 1st and 3rd party, that you have to aggressively ignore. if you can come to peace with these three truths, aws is great. i use it like this: https://github.com/nathants/libaws for those trying to improve, the best aws docs are currently the go sdk and gopls.

the good new is, for the 95% of projects that can tolerate it, aws the good parts are actually both simple and easy[1]. it’s hard to find things you can’t build on s3, dynamo, lambda, and ec2. if either compliance or a 5% project demand it, complicated solutions should be explored. 1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

i also wanted a good cli for aws, and built one: https://github.com/nathants/libaws companies like fly are fantastic. they provide a good service, and they put market pressure on aws. a free tier isn’t important anymore. with usage based pricing for lambda/dynamo/s3, an app with usage approaching zero has no cost.

cool transition and fun writeup! for low, intermittent traffic sites, go on lambda might be a better comparison: https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/simp...

lambda + s3. add ec2 spot if you need it. just make sure you understand how billing works. mostly it’s just egress bandwidth expensive, alarms and monitoring good. also 2fa is non optional. do something like this: https://github.com/nathants/aws-gocljs or with less opinions: https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/simp... welcome to cloud, glhf!

aws ux for retaining both hair and sanity. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

build and scale systems with artificial load on aws! scaling the load testing will be just as interesting as scaling the system under test. start with low bottlenecks, ie a cluster of c6i.large ec2 spot. how fast can you do this? have fast can you scale that? ec2 and s3 is all you need to build anything. use ec2 spot, avoid network egress, avoid cross region/zone traffic, create and destroy ec2 instances as needed instead of letting them sit idle. you could grow system scaling intution for the price of your streaming subscriptions. start with something like this: https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/comp... maybe mess around with public datasets on aws, just make sure to be in the correct region to avoid data egress. welcome systems, friend. stay a while and contemplate. one accurate measurement is worth a thousand expe

on aws as scale to zero services. lambda, dynamo, s3, and ephemeral ec2 spot. when egress bandwidth is needed i use cloudflare workers + r2 just like i would use s3 presigned urls. services with no usage should have no cost. services with usage should bill based on usage. typically i start from a full project template[1][2]. sometimes i start from scratch[3]. 1. https://github.com/nathants/aws-gocljs 2. https://github.com/nathants/aws-exec 3. https://github.com/nathants/libaws