Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

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My god, it finally all makes sense!

And this is why I've been developing all my modern web applications as essentially an S3 bucket of flat HTML with vanilla javascript and jquery sprinkled in sitting behind cloudfront, connected to a fast API built of cloud functions / lambdas written in crystal/rust/etc. I use a custom routing system (I have S3 set up to respond with a 200 at the index in the event of a 404, so I have unlimited control over pathing from within my js logic) and I never let node touch anything at all. And I'm super happy about it. Never has it been easier to get things done. I don't have to fight with any system because there is no system to get in my way.

This gives me:

1. 2-4 second deploys

2. full control over assets pipeline (I call html-minifier, etc., manually in my build script)

3. literally serverless -- S3 or lambda would have to go down for there to be an issue (ignoring db)

4. caching at the edge for everything because of cloudfront

5. zero headaches because I don't have to do battle with node or react or anyone's stupid packages

6. (surprisingly) compatibility with googlebot! It turns out that the googlebot will index js-created content if it is immediate (loaded from a js file that is generated by a lambda and included in the document head tag as an external script, for example)

7. full control over routing, so I don't have to follow some opinionated system's rules and can actually implement the requirements the project manager asks me to implement without making technical excuses.

This does not give me:

1. A magical database that has perfect automatic horizontal scaling. Right now there is no magic bullet for that yet. Some come close but eschew the transactional part of ACID, making themselves basically useless for many applications.

And the parent post exactly matches my usage of jQuery :D

Pricing aside (as it's almost unreasonably expansive if your app requires frequent db writes), firestore is indeed "A magical database that has perfect automatic horizontal scaling". But as you have your happy setup on aws it probably makes little sense to switch.

Yeah there are a few in that category also Google Cloud Spanner and the stuff by CitusData. All of them work, but are prohibitively expensive to get started. I've harangued them a number of times about how people aren't going to want to use something they can't scale up from $1/month to $10000/month without migrating any data (that's the whole point of an auto-scaling horizontal service imo), but so far no changes from them. Like why would you design potentially infinite auto-scaling, and then lock it up behind a $90/month minimum fee. They could have been making money all along on those $20/month or $40/month or $5/monthers, who vastly outnumber those who _need_ autoscaling, but what the peace of mind that auto-scaling provides.

> All of them work, but are prohibitively expensive to get started

Firestore has a free tier: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/quotas#free-quota

Hmm I wonder if spanner has more minimum hardware costs or something. Like if they have to provision you at least one standalone atomic clock to get started.

But like that's sort of my point. They could have data default to going into a tiny VPS slice that would be free-tier territory, and then automatically move it to whatever infrastructure spanner requires when the time comes. That could all be seamless. Why keep the seams in?

$90/month is really not that much, it's like an m5.large on AWS which is pretty much the minimum for a medium/high traffic website. Well, I guess the scene might have changed since they introduced t2 unlimited, but that would only take it down to $40/month. Support costs are still there for a $5/month user.

> But as you have your happy setup on aws it probably makes little sense to switch.

TBH I lean more towards google cloud services in general, so as long as they had very good ping times between each other, I'd consider it.

About your cloud functions / lambdas: do they return HTML content or "pure" data (as JSON for example)?

If your cloud functions return "pure" data, then the client-side JS is doing the rendering: do you manually create the DOM nodes or do you use some templating engine?

> perfect automatic horizontal scaling

Nothing is perfect, but aws aurora serverless auto scales compute and storage for MySQL https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

Last time I checked it has a large entry level cost. When will they learn.

Isn't there downtime involved in Aurora's auto scaling?

Does that than really fit the "auto" bit of the term?

DynamoDB now has ACID transactions across tables.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-dynamodb-transac...

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