Nov. 22, 2021
Read time: 3 minutes and 34 seconds.
tags:Cloud platforms promise the world, showering you with credits and the allure of endless possibilities. But once you’re in the console, it’s an avalanche of confusing products and jargon. You’re left scratching your head, wondering if you even need half this stuff. It’s an enticing dream state that leaves you wanting to consume every possible freebie without the concerns about breaking the free-tier. 😈
It’s that nice surprise that kicks the crap out of your credit card… which reminds me.. I need to pay it soon. lol
You just signed up for your cloud account and you’re getting showered with features and these cute free badges. Now it’s time to put it into practice and you want to put your software in the cloud. But little did they tell you about the steep learning curve that feels like you’re walking up the Matterhorn.
Trying to set up a simple API? Prepare to be bombarded with terms like “OAuth 2,” “consent screen,” and endless validation stages. All you wanted to do was make a cool API that gives you unlimited supplies of memes. But it’s not that easy or nice. The amount of steps involved, especially if it’s your first time, will kick you so hard in the pants, you’ll wish you stuck to local development.
You’ll want to review the documentation, and as you load the console, it’s like drinking from a firehouse. Tutorials with CLIs and dependencies that take you hours at a time to make them available on your localhost.
def wtf(docs,brain):
while brain.wtf():
[brain.append(doc.read()) for doc in docs]
if brain.understand(): break;
It’s this onslaught of crap that goes through your brain and you’re going down the rabbit hole trying to understand, but it’s not really sinking in and there’s a new episode of… well anything that will get you away from these dry docs or tutorials.
Most of us will only ever use a tiny fraction of what cloud platforms offer. In fact, this is why simplified services like WordPress and DigitalOcean exist. They save you from the headache of managing everything yourself. At the low (or high price) of $20-$30/month? Don’t mind if I do.
The issue sometimes is that we want to go and do this awesome thing of migrating to the cloud to be able to tell our friends about how smart and cool we are. When we are really looking for validation with friends, we are simultaneously losing our hair just to get our cat memes API to be self hosted in a container.
Cloud definitely serves a purpose, and I won’t completely discredit it. Especially when you know how to work within the boundaries of the free tiers. Don’t put things in the cloud just for bragging rights however. Like, really ask yourself: Does this need to be in the cloud? Is it for external access, scheduling, or a client requirement?
Sometimes, in development, …be grateful that it runs. Don’t just break it so that it can finally run in the cloud for brownie points. Sometimes we want to push the boundaries of our thinking by creating a container and CI/CD framework. However, maybe a simple virtual machine might be a better solution than a complex cloud setup only to have to spin it down once the free tier breaks.
If it is for work, then it is a good idea to work with your IT department. You can probably skip a lot of the upstart required in learning about security, VPCs and elements that probably would not have mattered to you before. I speak from experience when I tried to spin up a Platform-as-a-Service just so I can host my dashboards. What a nightmare. Besides doing my work, I also took on the ambitious goal of spinning up this system and trying to secure it. You can make friends or enemies of your IT person by asking them, “hey, how would I put this into the cloud?”
I definitely made some people unhappy just because I wanted to spin up this massive server in the cloud that would allow me to deploy containers and maintain products for our data practice. I mean, yeah, cool solution. But it created a lot of work with some folks who probably would have preferred doing things they know themselves rather than reworking some of the garbage I implemented.
Cloud can be incredibly powerful, but it’s also a minefield of complexity. Be strategic, assess your actual needs, and don’t be afraid to keep it simple. Don’t decide alone, decide with people who are realistic.