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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

From my point of view after doing this for 20 years, it's like seeing the past 12 years of the "put everything in the cloud" era, of new different people repeating exactly the same mistake over and over again.

It's like if you lived near a public park with particularly aggressive geese that return every year, and watched new ignorant groups of people get chased by the geese every spring.

It's not callous - it's the perspective of the people who are responsible for the hypervisors that run underneath the VMs and services that cause some of these massive billing outrages.

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I quite agree with everything you've said in this and your other post.

My development environment? : My own dual-booting Windows/Linux PC with 32G RAM and a few TB of SSD. Not to mention the Nvidia RTX graphics card for gaming...

I either spin up a VM to test stuff, or spin up a Python virtualenv. Postgresql also running on this machine. Whatever's needed. Need to emulate Stuff Happening From Different Servers? Why just spin up another few VM's - assign them the minimum resources required to get them doing what they need to do, set up your VM network etc. Any decently specced desktop machine can do that, never mind a noisy rack system - considering they're way better and vastly more powerful then the PC's we had 2-5 years before that, which themselves were vastly more powerful than the ones before them, and so on...

Result? Can develop at home to my heart's content, then when it comes to deployment spin up a remote VM on e.g. DigitalOcean and take it from there.

At the end of the day, "sErVeRlEsS" (I just don't like that term, for some reason it rubs me up the wrong way, perhaps because of...) just means "running stuff on someone else's kit" - the same as "tHe ClOuD", so if I'm going to be developing some system & software, I'd rather be doing it locally, setting up whatever's needed to get it running, and once satisfied, deploying it.

Like you, I see either the same people, or new people, simply Not Learning From The Past. There are many good reasons why things were done like they were - developing on a system you own, for example, rather than spinning up all sorts of Cloudy Things or "serverlessy things" right from the start.

Hardware is cheap - you don't need a supercomputer to run the beginnings of your latest Supah Scalable System[tm], you just develop and run it on a reasonably up to date box, and, sure, when you get to the stage where you need more space/bandwidth/whatever, that's the point where you deploy to some Cloudy Thing or SeRvErLeSs Thing.

My personal home office development environment at the moment, done on an ultra low budget, is a dell precision t5600 mid tower workstation PC (dual xeon, e5-2630) that I got for $350 with 64GB of RAM in it, upgraded it to 128GB, and put a $150 Samsung SATA3 SSD in. It's small and relatively quiet and sits under my desk tucked in a back corner with just a power cable and a few ethernet cables plugged into it.

Maybe some time in the near future I'll add a 2TB HDD that I have sitting around into it so that I can create VMs that have a 'fast' boot/root disk, and also give them some lvm partitions on a big slow disk.

It's running debian stable amd64 and is set up as a xen dom0 hypervisor, with 768MB of RAM assigned to the dom0 and the rest available for VMs.

The amount of capacity that's available there to create random PV or HVM VMs with as much RAM as I could want, is more than sufficient for my personal needs. If I need anything bigger I'll make it a more formal process and put it on a machine at work.

FaaS is what they call Serverless I guess, anyway, that seems a step backward to me, like going from FastCGI back to CGI, and somehow they market it as "progress".

At least, they could be using OpenFaaS or something, or even free software like firebase such as kuzzle.io or Mozilla Kinto.

> It's like if you lived near a public park with particularly aggressive geese that return every year, and watched new ignorant groups of people get chased by the geese every spring.

You're not really helping your argument here. Particularly if people have been attacked for over a decade and no one has put up a "aggressive geese" sign

Quite literally in my specific area, the former is true, and also it's a fact the city government has put up a number of signs in the nesting area. Still happens.

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