'you couldn't live with your own failure, where did that bring you? back to me' 🫰
I think I dislike the cloud ⛈.
Don’t get me wrong, SAAS and PAAS have their place in the world, but I think I have a severe soft spot for statically generated blogs. Maybe it feeds into my penchant for static typed programming languages.
We have a cloud SQL Instance and Data Warehouse / Transformation layer at work. It’s not our primary system, but it provides 30% of our warehouse footprint. On the cloud, it costs in the region of £350-400 excl VAT per month. Our IT department do not recost server infrastructure to us. Our cloud ETL takes in the region of 90-120 minutes per morning. Our on prem trnsformations are complete within 30-45 minutes.
On Google Compute Engine, my initial experiment to build a PHP blog were actually free. I didn’t use any kind of frameworks, rather I stuck to vanilla PHP and postgresql. This obviously made things much cheaper to run, but it relied on my ability as a developer to ensure the system was secure and stable. I don’t trust that ability. I switched to Ruby on Rails and relied heavily on pre-built libraries and frameworks. Costs increased and I ended up exceeding the gratuity limits for Google Compute Engine, averaging between £0.01 and £0.02 per calendar month.
This obviously doesn’t sound like much, but I’d put this site behind a cached cloudflare instance, and had even gone as far as installing redis (just in case).
I think I confused the mercy of work cost wise with what I was willing to afford myself. This blog gets very few hits (hi mum), but it could, or it could get interest from someone who wants to cost-bomb me. For now, whilst it was a fun experiment, I think it’s best to leave the costs to GitHub Pages.
Asides
At work I’ve managed to deploy a webapp using an open source front-end to provide a front-door for our department. I built it in C# and I’m very proud of it.
My little one started school and I’m very proud of her.