Ask HN: What does it take to dodge the cloud?

3•zwnow•2mo ago

I am not a infrastructure person and had a talk with some senior software developers about what it takes to be a senior in their view.

One of these opinions included how to work with "the cloud" quickly, reasoning it made the engineer capable of reading API docs.

I am extremely opposed to this idea, as much so that I thought I'll never strive for becoming a senior if that entails knowing how to use things like AWS. To keep it simple, I will never use a product that utilizes a "pay as you go" pricing model making my bills unpredictable.

I know that using things like AWS simplifies the deployment part a lot. But I also know that cloud performance is not as good as people think.

Point is, I am trying to grow as an engineer but not by throwing money at a bunch of companies and call it a day.

To dodge the cloud, I'd need physical infrastructure. How far can I get with this? Especially on the lower end of budgets? Ill never run a global scale application. I'd be surprised if any of my apps would ever have more than 10k users. This seems extremely doable with physical hardware.

Comments

abdrehman•2mo ago

If you have bench marked your applications and setup the off site backup properly. I think its pretty much doable.

Can you please give some more context? Like whats the tech-stack of your Applications? Is it Monolith or Microservice? ETC...

zwnow•2mo ago

I can choose whatever stack I see fitting. Our current app runs on an old Laravel version and an old Vue version. Its a monolith. Privately I have built microservices too, but this architecture only really makes sense with bigger teams. I have spent about 70% if 2025 learning Elixir and I'd love building some real life things with it.

ggeorgovassilis•2mo ago

The company I currently work for employs several mid-level software developers who've never worked with "the cloud". Their focus is software design, not operations (which is what the cloud is mostly about). The contact point with operations is container technologies. Their applications do REST, connect to databases etc. like they would do in a bare metal data centre. I occasionally need to remind them of low instance uptime guarantees, the need to plan for horizontal scaling, data replication and disaster recovery (I basically have to design the application architecture for them) but apart from that there's no friction in the day-to-day work.

A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.

zwnow•2mo ago

> A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.

I am a solo developer at a startup and at some point I'd like to be able to develop a full software product on my own, that entails code and infrastructure. My apps right now were all B2B apps which worked perfectly fine. The "biggest" app I've built was a cashless app for a festival with ~6k visitors and that went perfectly fine with a single server.

I never worked in an environment where infrastructure was handled by a dedicated person.

Ill take this advice to heart once I work for bigger companies again though.

ggeorgovassilis•2mo ago

tbh you can go pretty far with just cloud VMs and virtual networks.

tobbob•1mo ago

It's true that (these days) typically, a senior dev will be handy with AWS. It's certainly not true that a senior dev is defined by being good with AWS. I bet Linus Torvalds isn't a big AWS guy.

I share your scepticism of the cloud, particularly AWS. They create this hugely complex system, charge the earth, and then rather than bend over backwards to help people learn, they have the audacity to charge more money for the training and certifications.

Rather than set up your own physical infra, I think it's reasonable to pay for a VPS. To me that's not 'the cloud'. Get a barebones linux environment, and you can do whatever you like.

My whole mantra is making fast and lightweight apps. Being able to create apps and services without needing the cloud, I think, is an equally valid characteristic that you might expect a senior dev to have.

zwnow•1mo ago

I see, I go the VPS route as well atm. I was just wondering about apps that might outscale a VPS but probably I can just connect application nodes via multiple VPS, afaik Elixir makes that pretty manageable.

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