Well AWS has been quite clever, using both Xen originally and also now KVM VMs, but everything else is based on that yeah. But that's gotten really complex over the years. They now use a container execution environment called firecracker or something that is open sourced and might be totally separate from their virtualized environment - or at least on top of it where they do let you just run little jams. Cloud isn't bad, I just mean you do have to transfer octets somehow from exec to exec. There are more and less efficient ways of doing it, and also more and less secure ways too - and abstract ways. Not all bad.
Think the point is that as I am writing software, I don’t care about any of that. I expected an opinionated environment when I first heard the word cloud 2 or so decades ago; I wanted to put my code in cvs (git now) and that’s it; I don’t want to think of anything outside that. Especially security or scaling.
I ran 1000s of physical Linux servers over the decades using chroots when it was not fashionable to have containers yet with db clusters because I don’t want my laptop to be different than my servers and I don’t want to think or worry about scaling.
We have aws Lambda now, but it is too expensive and, for me, not trivial enough. It actually requires too much thinking (architecting) to make something complex with it and a lot of that is about money; you can stumble into bills that require at least a kidney to settle.
So I still run my own servers, these days with openfaas. With many scripts, it is almost painless and costs almost nothing (we provide for millions of users for a less than 200$ a month in total). But it still is not the dream: I still cannot just forget about everything hosting and abstractions still leak enough but at least I don’t spend more than a few hours a year on it and I don’t go bankrupt like can happen with Lambda.
We are building our own language and runtime (lisp like with types) to fix this: after 40 years of programming, I am pretty much fed up with having computing power and loving programming but having to deal with all this pointless (for programmers!) stuff around it: we went backwards, at least somewhat.
I like it for many reasons, but especially the helpful community, founder and everything just works. We use it with Istio at the moment. We switched from Cockroach (did not like the license and we had a few perf issues) to Yugabyte en Scylla recently for micro service and Monolith scaling to use with openfaas and it is really scaling to anything we need. Of course different situations have different needs, but this works very well for us.
