This writing style where every section has multiple paragraphs of preamble, prolepsis, cold openers for cold openers, and tangents is infuriating. Get on to the point already.
My first serious programming job was at a start up and the owner asked me this question. I was caught off guard, of course I wouldn’t! I couldn’t really explain why at the time, but it essentially revolved around the fact that I was young and optimistic. 25 years later, I’m not so sure. Now, said optimism has almost vanished and there are days pushing seems like the path to least suffering, but I also feel it’s unethical for one person to decide for everyone else.
I mean this sincerely, not as an insult: consider that the problem is with your mind or personal life, not with the world, and you should look for a way to address that if you haven't already.
Suggesting that the wholesale suffering wrought by humanity unto itself and all other life on this planet throughout its entire history is merely in my mind or a problem with my personal life is actually incredibly insulting on top of being willfully ignorant.
“For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have a unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
What would you call a person who, when presented with new information, refuses to change their mind? Dogmatic? Religious? An Idiot? I'm sure there's some self-serving reason the guy wants to go to the moon. What we don't know is if he's had that in mind the entire time.
A whole bunch of this stuff that people are fawning over as life changing and it leaves me honestly wondering: how have some of you survived this long at all?
When I see these types of posts I wonder what those people do all day long that is so important, to the point they can't dedicate 30 minutes to plan and execute some chores.
to be fair, i distinctly remember reading a newspaper article asking what was wrong with taking the time to use the card catalog at the library. There were trying to understand the popularity of google.com
This is generally true, volume and low cost situations exacerbate it, but it’s not limited to Chinese manufacturing. You see it everywhere. As a completely unrelated example: home remodeling. The guy I contracted did wonderful work and charged a completely fair price, but there were many parts that I hand waved at “he knows best” “he’ll pick the most sensible approach that matches the quality of the rest of project”. Wrong. Cheapest, fastest thing, using materials on hand if possible every time. The economics are obvious and it doesn’t matter to him insofar as I acquiesce or don’t notice. Why should it be any different for low cost mass manufacturing?
Also where is this idea that it takes days to ship Python in CDK coming from?
Edit: great, getting downvoted for daring to ask the author to explain a claim. I’m noticing other people asking questions getting downvoted, too. Brigading isn’t a good look.
Stelvio's main selling point here is that you can use our higher-level components for different services and have them automatically configured.
So, you don't have to configure IAM roles, or Env vars manually, as this is handled for you through a concept called linking. https://stelvio.dev/concepts/linking/
In our experience, that alone adds a lot of productivity gains for teams.
Higher level CDK constructs do the same thing. But honestly, IAC is one of the easiest thing for LLMs to do and there is plenty of documentation to troubleshoot. There is no reason to introduce this into a company instead of using the official CDK.
But coincidentally Stelvio was born out of frustration with CDK which I'm using at my day job for 4 years at this point:
- slow deployment: CDK is layer on top of cloud formation, it first translates to CF which is then moved to AWS and resolved/deployed there. Process is quite slow and if something goes wrong it's hard to debug, rollbacks take ages, sometimes they block due to inter-stack dependencies
- CDK is still quite low level and focused on infra. You just can't create say api gateway with 3 routes each using 3 different lambdas with permission to use dynamo table in 4 lines - you an with stelvio
- whatever code change you need to test you need to deploy it first which is probably slowest with CDK(compared e.g. to pulumi) then even if you run it you can't really debug it or just see prints, you need to just go thru cloudwath or other services - stelvio allows you to run lambdas in "dev mode" so you don't need to redeploy and run your lambdas locally for instant feedback and even debugging support
Having said that CDK is good tool and I'm happy that it exists as I like it much better than CF itself or Terraform. Stelvio just tries to be even better and focused on developers.
Regarding LLMs sure, problem with LLMs is not they can't generate the code but if you're willing to read and understand all of it. Stelvio is less code with higher abstractions so it's easier to comprehend.
And what assurances are there that you will be around for five years? Or that you will support new services features when they come out?
And I always “disable rollbacks” this has been a feature in CloudFormation, CDK and SAM for years.
Running lambdas locally with SAM has been a feature for at least 5 or six years as with the CDK. But these days you really should be packaging lambdas as Docker containers - those are really easy to test locally without any special infrastructure
We still believe to have a more flexible solution that also adds some features, including combining multiple cloud providers which at the moment we use to enable cloudflare DNS in front of AWS infra. Feel free to give it a try!
Just to make it explicit, I (author) did not downvoted you.
Both me and sebst (co-author) tried to answer everybody and did so politely.
We respect other opinions and Stelvio (as any other thing) might and is not for everybody.
Regarding your question. Well, it depends on the size of the project. Small enough you can do anything fast. I'm working on bigger mostly serverless system on AWS and it did take lot of time to to setup everything with CDK, certainly days.
I believe it would be faster with stelvio as it offers higher level abstractions than CDK - Stelvio was born out of my frustraction with CDK, I was doing lot of things again and again, waiting long for deployments etc.
If someone is happy with CDK, then they should use CDK, it's good too, even for me much better than CF or Terraform.
But if you feel things could be even less cumbersome, with less code and faster, maybe you could give Stelvio a try.
We're not claiming we'll do everything for everybody, we have our opinions and Stelvio is opinionated - shamefully focusing on (app) developers rather than on infrastracture focused people. https://stelvio.dev/blog/why-i-am-building-stelvio/
Thank you for your comment and wish you a good day.
Thanks for the response. So Stelvo’s sell is through its opinionated approach regarding architecture and defaults. I realize elevator pitches are tough especially when there are lots of competing solutions, but maybe some sort of short and sweet “us vs them” comparison on the home page would make that sell easier. Like many of my peers I’m sure, I’ll admit I have little time and patience to click through to get to the obligatory question of “why us”.
Anyways, not sure who went on the downvote spree or why (it wasn’t one account), and I admit it didn’t seem likely your team would be doing it since you folks were actively discussing, but I couldn’t think of why someone else would do it either. Anyways, sorry and thanks for your time.
> but maybe some sort of short and sweet “us vs them” comparison on the home page would make that sell easier.
You're totally right and we will fix that and improve website and readme to answer most common questions raised here including setlvio vs. cdk/pulumi/terraform
I still use my dad’s old HP 15C. Form factor is good, aesthetically it’s very appealing, it feels efficient to use, I like the tactile feel of the buttons, and I like thinking of my dad when I use it.
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