Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

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This may have better named "you don't need the cloud for high performance". Hetzner is awesome (I'm a huge fan) but what they're offering you is relatively low level and you need to know how to use it properly. As with most things it's a balance -- maybe you don't need the latest 5-10 AWS services that have been launched, but it's pretty reasonable to want to use them if the pricing was reasonable.

What people need is the reasonable set of well-managed services, and competition on the provider side to drive down price and produce better solutions (not just complicated ones). There's truth to the fact that AWS is "too much" in many ways, but having every single dev that exists know how to properly configure NGINX, properly lock down a server, or run postgres is a mis-allocation of skills.

The cloud landscape needs ubiquitous lower level managed cloud services for prices that don't make people tear their hair out and write articles like this. 99% of profitable CRUD-y apps out there would be fine with the usual app + redis + postgres stack and they'd be able to move faster if they didn't have to run it themselves.

Shameless plug for something I'm working on -- Nimbus Web Services[0]. I'm trying to run the managed service layer on providers like Hetzner so others can keep their focus elsewhere.

[0]: https://nimbusws.com

> but having every single dev that exists know how to properly configure NGINX, properly lock down a server, or run postgres is a mis-allocation of skills.

1. Why would "every single dev that exists" need to know this? You need a handful of people per company, depending on size maybe as few as one sysadmin and a backup guy, and you're set.

2. The alternative is that every single dev that exists needs to know about whatever the cloud-solution-du-jour may be, because suddenly the product has to be written with the architecture in mind (eg. to not get surprised by huge bills)

3. As a dev who learned all how to configure apache and nginx, manage containers, setup, harden and supervise systems (aka. "sysadmin stuff") I can say its doable, and even fun to learn.

Sorry I should have explained that statement more -- that's the extreme case of the you-must-be-your-own-sysadmin, basically it represents an increase in ramp up time/time cost for everyone who is NOT in an organization. I was going with a bit of a universalist stance there, but it's overblown, you're right.

That said, even having everyone on the ops team (let's say it's 1 or 2 people) be good sysadmins is still non-trivial effort. It takes time and more likely some misconfigurations and mistakes -- and that talent must be paid for (people are usually more expensive than servers).

I do want to make it clear that I agree with all your points, I immensely enjoy learning it as well! For many companies it seems like it's still reasonable to pay $xxxx a month early on while finding product market fit (often offset by free credits), and lean in to all the dev talent that already knows how to do simple stuff on AWS. Much more a VC style playbook, but it'll probably be what people do till it gets prohibitively expensive.

As a dev that is looking to do the same any recommendations for materials?

Not the commenter but companies like Digital Ocean has a veritable treasure trove of material that's well put together:

- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials

- https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials

For example:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/ufw-essenti...

Learning how all these things fit together, when to use what, etc is much harder of course. Wisdom like that often requires time, effort and persistence.

Depends a lot on where you currently are in your knowledge about Systems administration and what kind of learning materials you prefer. For me, as someone who started learning about it from the ground up (zero prior experience as a sysadmin", and learns best from books

    "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook"

was the starting point back then.

I’m also interested.

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