A very interesting article, I have personal experience with:
> Coffee also affects the gastrointestinal tract. It increases stomach acidity and stimulates the release of hormones that aid digestion. Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee promote the contractility of ileal and colonic smooth muscle, helping prevent constipation
As the two times in my adult life I've tried to make an intended break from coffee, it has ended up with almost unbearable stomach pain caused by constipation.
It's good to know that this is not linked to caffeine as I thought, so I will try un-caffinated coffee instead now because I tend to think that my general "tiredness" comes from actual caffeine.
The more I get problems with different machinery (chainsaw, raider lawnmower, waterpump, powerwasher) I've really started thinking more and more how every piece of equipment should automatically come with a service manual included which would also have all the bits and pieces clearly stated and catalogued. I've seen some of these manuals not being a detailed as I hoped. For context, I'm in Europe.
For an example I needed new lifting chain for the raider lawnmower and it was an ordeal finding the correct chain and making it correct length without such manual. With manual I'd expect it to take 5 minutes to find the correct piece, it's size, lenght and required stress endurance level.
It's 2023, doesn't have to be physical (or could for some extra buck), but at least have one available on your website.
I'm thinking about starting to ask for it for everything I buy... Not really hoping to get it every time but still...
But it's not that simple, for an example I have older personal projects as well which I'm unable to run without doing considerable changes to the code after moving to M1 chip.
Just because I'm unable to run older versions of node and thus unable to run some of the dependencies and thus need to update the dependencies and then the code etcetc.
Yes, I could use docker and containers...
Yes, I could use Rosetta...
But to answer your questions:
1. It took around 1-2 months of experienced DevOps works (1-2 devops), this included testing and the actual switchover to new AWS infra.
2. We actually used outside contractors (actual k8s gurus) to do the work. But the decision was made in-house by myself. I'm no k8s guru, hell, I'm not even devops, but I have enough experience with the "big guys" so the choice was calculated from technical perspective, considering our growth needs and technical needs for now and for the future.
3. I haven't had any reasons to regret the decision, but I knew that before. I knew AWS offered the things we need and how to use them and what it's roughly going to cost, so this wasn't really a surprise. I did my due diligence.
4. Heroku bills were around 5$k/mon... AWS ones are in 5 digit, but it was expected because we started to use so much more services and resources than we did (or could) in Heroku. We also expanded into two new countries (one of the main reasons the switchover was done) so the costs are sadly not directly comparable. I can say that the new costs are in expected ranges and I'm happy with what we get for the money.
5. We run a eCommerce site with monthly GMV of 1m€+ and around 700k monthly unique visitors. Our stack is (per country) 3 nodejs services, PostgreSQL, redis and some frontend services. Main cost factors are the database(s) and CloudFront.
6. These decision have to made per use-case, per project and taking into consideration your actual infrastructure needs and budget limits. I don't think there isn't anything AWS can't do, but is the cheapest? Of course not. Hell, there have been plenty of topics on this very page about moving your infrastructure to your own bare metal and saving hundreds of thousands per month.
Think through what are the issues you are currently having (ie, for us it was the Herokus stack limitations, couldn't get http2, couldn't do custom monitoring / alerting, no access to LBs, no scalable DB hosting, the need to easily roll out new countries without having to do too much of manual work, weirdly high cost of some services, like redis for an example). If your problems are in the wallet, you need to consider this as your first priority and find a provider which will meet your technical needs with best price. All the big guys also have cost calculators available which will allow you to get an estimation on what you would be paying. Take time, this isn't an easy decision and it will affect you a lot in the future as well, so you don't want to get it wrong to be stuck with another set of issues.
But the whole point is that the UX of the website is perfect. It has nothing to do with what the webapage is built on.
It could be built on PHP, it could be Java, it could be node, it could ASP.NET but if it's fast and with perfect UX like Mcmaster.com, what's the difference?
It is definitely possible to build such a website using all the mentioned languages, they have happened to have chosen ASP.NET and have done it well, but I wouldn't blindly throw everything else under the bus with such a comment.
And they aren't clear of "fancy web shenanigans" as well, they use socket.io and their website is unusable without Javascript so there's a lot of going on and this isn't your typical static website anyway.
So I think your sarcasm is a bit out of place in this instance.
And yes, I'm biased as I've been node.JS developer for a long time but I don't agree that the languages are the ones building shitty UX webpages that are slow... it's the developers that do that.
We left Heroku last spring with a project consuming around 5k$/mo worth of Heroku services.
Main reason for the move was pretty simple, we just needed more control over our own infrastructure and Heroku wasn't able to offer that. Things like HTTP2 support, access to load balancer configurations, timeout settings, different auto-scaling options and better monitoring are first things that come to mind.
We are now using AWS directly (EKS, RDS, Lambda etc) and even though the move itself did cost a bit, I wouldn't say monthly costs went up too much (but it's bit hard to compare as we're using more services at AWS and scaled up right after migration).
Basically, we just grew out of Heroku.
And personally I wouldn't choose them again even if opportunity appeared.
> Coffee also affects the gastrointestinal tract. It increases stomach acidity and stimulates the release of hormones that aid digestion. Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee promote the contractility of ileal and colonic smooth muscle, helping prevent constipation
As the two times in my adult life I've tried to make an intended break from coffee, it has ended up with almost unbearable stomach pain caused by constipation.
It's good to know that this is not linked to caffeine as I thought, so I will try un-caffinated coffee instead now because I tend to think that my general "tiredness" comes from actual caffeine.