[HN Gopher] Forget CDK and AWS's insane costs. Pulumi and Digita...
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       Forget CDK and AWS's insane costs. Pulumi and DigitalOcean to the
       rescue
        
       Author : mavdi
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2024-11-06 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | mavdi wrote:
       | Hi everyone,
       | 
       | We've gone through a lot of pain to get this blueprint working
       | since our AWS costs were getting out of hand but we didn't want
       | to part ways with CDK.
       | 
       | We've now got the same stack structure going with Pulumi and
       | Digital ocean, having the same ease of development with at least
       | 60% cost reduction.
        
         | vundercind wrote:
         | Keep an eye on reachability and performance. I've seen DO
         | consistently perform terribly and/or drop connections for
         | months (that is, didn't look like some brief routing glitch
         | somewhere) for some US and Canadian routes (not, like, Sri
         | Lanka or something) on excellent Internet connections. The fix
         | was moving to AWS, problem gone. It _felt like_ a shitty-
         | peering-agreements issue.
        
           | nostrebored wrote:
           | People will pretend that this quality difference doesn't
           | exist in networking, uptime, server quality.
           | 
           | It's not a drop in replacement. It might be worth it
           | depending on what you're doing.
        
             | vundercind wrote:
             | Frustratingly, it's also something that doesn't
             | meaningfully appear on any features list or comparison
             | sheet.
        
       | mise_en_place wrote:
       | EKS has become a clusterf*ck to manage and provision. This looks
       | very useful. Bare metal k8s, even running on EC2, might be
       | another option.
        
         | GauntletWizard wrote:
         | You don't choose EKS because it's easy to manage. You choose it
         | because you intend to use the bevy of other AWS hosted
         | services. The clusterfuck of management is directly related to
         | that.
         | 
         | The alternative, which I feel is far too common (and I say this
         | as someone who directly benefits from it): You choose AWS
         | because it's a "Safe" choice and your incubator gets you a
         | bunch of free credits for a year or two. You pay nothing for
         | compute for the first year, but instead pay a devops guy a
         | bunch to do all the setup - In the end it's about a wash
         | because you have to pay a devops guy to handle your CI and
         | deploy anyway, you're just paying a little more in the latter.
        
         | trallnag wrote:
         | What's your issue with EKS? I operate several very simple and
         | small single-tenant clusters, and I have to touch the
         | infrastructure only once a year for updates
        
       | petcat wrote:
       | Kubernetes no thanks. Terraform + Kamal [1] on Digital Ocean is
       | the way I deploy/run apps now.
       | 
       | [1] https://kamal-deploy.org/
        
         | mati365 wrote:
         | Plain Podman systemd integration is way more powerful and
         | secure, as it does not mess with firewall and allows to run
         | rootless containers using services. It's even possible to run
         | healthchecks and enforce building images just before starting
         | service making on-demand containers using systemd-proxyd
         | possible. Check example: https://github.com/Mati365/hetzner-
         | podman-bunjs-deploy
        
           | petcat wrote:
           | > way more powerful and secure
           | 
           | I don't care about powerful. That's the opposite of what I
           | want. I could just use k8s if I cared about that.
        
             | mati365 wrote:
             | It looks like you don't even care about opening
             | documentation before pressing reply. Podman is a simple
             | hammer without any moving parts, that used properly can be
             | used to build fancy stuff without much knowledge.
        
               | petcat wrote:
               | I'm aware of what Podman and Systemd are. Apparently you
               | are not aware of what Kamal is. Open documentation, then
               | press reply.
        
           | ngrilly wrote:
           | Does it support zero downtime deploys?
        
             | mati365 wrote:
             | Why not? Install trafeik or any other load balancer, setup
             | two services, and restart one after one.
        
         | stackskipton wrote:
         | I've looked into Kamal but it feels so "It's as complex as
         | Kubernetes but isn't so support is going to be nightmarish."
         | 
         | Why is this better then Ansible + Docker Compose?
        
           | petcat wrote:
           | You could certainly implement Kamal just with Ansible and
           | Docker Compose. It's just an abstraction that does it for you
           | and handles all the edge-cases. (Kamal doesn't use Ansible,
           | it has its own SSH lib).
        
         | mplewis wrote:
         | Kamal is simply NIH K8s made by an unreliable company with poor
         | leadership. No thanks, not for my prod infra!
        
       | lysace wrote:
       | Pulumi is very neat with straight AWS, too. I suspect this is the
       | primary use case.
        
       | pmarreck wrote:
       | Anyone use Garnix? https://garnix.io/
        
         | mplewis wrote:
         | This looks too experimental for me to trust with production
         | deployments.
        
       | turtlebits wrote:
       | I wish CDK was fully baked enough to actually use. It's _still_
       | missing coverage for some AWS services (sometimes you have to do
       | things in cloudformation, which sucks) and integrating existing
       | infra doesn 't work consistently. Oh and it creates
       | cloudformation stacks behind the scenes and makes for
       | troubleshooting hell.
        
         | Aeolun wrote:
         | > sometimes you have to do things in cloudformation, which
         | sucks
         | 
         | All of CDK does things in cloudformation, which made the whole
         | thing stillborn as far as I'm concerned.
         | 
         | The CDK team goes to some lengths to make it better, but it's
         | all lambda based kludges.
        
       | Aeolun wrote:
       | I don't think Digital Ocean is all that much better for pricing,
       | but using Pulumi over CDK is a pure win as far as I'm concerned.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-06 23:00 UTC)