I just want to know about so called managed services and your experience with them.
I think the term “managed service” is not a good one since there are a lot of different levels that a service can be managed for you.
Some do a lot (S3) you don’t need to do much at all, some do almost nothing except provisioning but you have to configure everything else (Aws elastic search back a few years ago).
What is your experience with managed services?
What would you think is a good managed service?
What is almost not managed from your experience?
Curious about the experience from other DevOps, system engineer, systems architect, etc folks.
Sounds like linode or aws. I’ve seen most people on this forum self hosting servers/homelabs. Linode I heard was good before they were bought by akami. Also linode was the server host for the L1 minecraft server for devember
I vaguely remember wendell or louis rossmann ranting about how aws designs moats to make it a pain to switch providers. I also remember wendell doing a video on aws
Have pretty extensive use with massive clients running in AWS.
Overall I would grade the manage service use with an A-.
Services like S3 are incredible for what it is, experience of 1+ PB and 6 years running without issue.
Fargate ECS/EKS limit what options are available to engineers, so you need the proper research of what management overhead or development requirements necessitate.
We have found the edge case 3 times over 5 years where AWS’s backend automation broke, tanking our services, and we alerted AWS of the issue before their internal engineers knew
Make sure your DR&backups are good. One AZ or one Region deployments are dangerous, but that is purely based on the risk acceptance of your client/company.
Evaluate cloud services like buying a car - you (should) never buy the first model year of a new line. Give it some time for them to work out the kinks and everything be production tested by somebody else.
Only other advice would be to watch for vendor lock-in by using / developing for a certain service(s).
I agree with S3. It is brain-dead simple in a really good way.
I would argue almost the same for AWS EFS, their NFS. It is a bit more involved to figure out the performance needs and capabilities, but other than that it was great.
No opinion on ECS, never used it.
EKS: I was among the first beta testers while working a lot with AWS a few years back.
Boy was this rough.
I think it has improved a lot.
However, I think it is still a really complex product. Not only because of the nature of Kubernetes.
You need to have an appropriate vpc, subnet setup before you can even start.
So I would argue, it is a bit less managed because you have to do a bit more.
There are other providers that allow to create you a cluster with 1 click and that is it.
I would argue that is more managed since you do not have to do the work.
(Disclosure, I work at a cloud provider offering simple k8s paas. I do not think either is superior to the other. It is just a different target audience. You can do way more complex setups with AWS than with our k8s.)
I know that we have a lot of homelabers here.
But I would also argue that a few folks here are professionals as well and therefore understand the pros and cons of said managed services.
(I myself transitioned from hobby/homelab to professional)
I specifically am interested in experience.
Something where you saw a managed service and yeah it was amazingly simple.
Or you saw a managed service and you had still to do A LOT of work.
