Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://amazonlightsail.com/ <comment><USER3> Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. That's a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am answering it here.

One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling?

AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing). But they've never offered a hard "suspend my account" ceiling that a lot of people with limited budgets have asked for.

They claim this is a competitor for Digital Ocean, but with DO what they say they charge is what they actually charge. I'm already seeing looking through the FAQ various ways for this to exceed the supposed monthly charges listed on the homepage (and no way to stop that).

Why even offer a service like this if you cannot GUARANTEE that the $5 they say they charge is all you'll ever get charged? How is this different from AWS if a $5 VPS can cost $50, or $500?

That's what Amazon is missing. People want ironclad guarantees about how much this can cost under any and all circumstances. I'd welcome an account suspend instead of bill shock.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly it. 5-6 years ago (I think), I signed up for an aws account under the "free" or educational or something tier. AWS was newish at the time, and I wanted to learn about it.

Via some accidental clicking in the control panel (trying to get an IP address for the instance, I think?) I ended up getting a bill from them for over $100. Which, to me at the time, was a huge amount of money.

It put me off of AWS forever. I don't ever want something that tells me how much they're going to charge me _after_ I have already given them my credit card information.

edit: they did credit me back when I complained, but that doesn't matter. The risk to me wasn't/isn't worth it.

<comment><USER5> 100%. I can't stand it. It's _unlimited_ liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. If you were able to set hard caps, you could have set yours at like $5 or even $0 (free tier) and never run into that.

One of my services had a Google BigQuery "budget" set at $100. One of our test machines went haywire and continuously submitted a bunch of jobs. The "budget" turned out only to be an alarm, and even that they sent us _8 hours_ late, after $1600 of charges had been racked up. I responded in 20 minutes and shut it down. Google insisted we pay the full bill. After I wrote up a blog post on the situation and had the "publish" button warmed up, they finally relented and refunded us for the amount of time their alarm was delayed. Absolutely ridiculous that's not their policy to begin with...

<comment><USER6> Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there was no one-click 'suspend at x$'.

For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.

<comment><USER7> It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the accrual of further costs, or something in between?

There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3 buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon hitting a billing ceiling?

Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the behavior, it would be an _extremely_ dangerous feature to enable, and could lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for any serious user.

Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to settle the bill, and we're back to square one.

AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as shutting things down or deleting resources.

If you think all of this through, it's _really_ hard to come up with an approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.

<comment><USER8> It seems like a hard technical problem to shut down gracefully. But it's an easy product problem. Just suspend the account. AWS must do this already for some cases.

No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of billing alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has.

So, this is just the nuclear option for people's pet projects. It's not a bad thing to have but I wouldn't expect it to operate any differently than what would happen if you broke the TOS and they suspended your account.

<comment><USER9> > No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of > billing alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has.

I know startups that I could bankrupt with a few lines of code and a ~$60 server somewhere long before they'd be able to react to a billing alert if it wasn't for AWS being reasonably good about forgiving unexpected costs.

I'm not so sure no one running a "real business" would like a harder ceiling to avoid being at the mercy of how charitable AWS feels in those kinds of situations, or when a developer messes up a loop condition, or similar.

Perhaps not a 100% "stop everything costing money" option that'd involve deleting everything, but yes, some risks are existential enough that you want someone to figuratively pull the power plug out of your server on a seconds notice if you have the option.

<comment><USER8> I meant a business that makes significant revenue and has enough users that downtime or data loss would be unacceptable.

If you can't afford downtime you probably can afford to wait for the alert and choose your own mitigation strategy. A system that can't tolerate downtime probably has an on-call rotation and these triggers ought to be reasonably fast.

If you can't react or can't afford to react, you probably can afford some downtime / data loss.

So the system doesn't need to have granular user defined controls. Just two modes. That was my point.

I think I triggered people with the phrase "real business" and I apologize for that.

<comment><USER9> > If you can't afford downtime

Only a tiny fraction of businesses can't afford downtime. A lot of businesses _claim_ they can't afford downtime, yet don't insure against it, and don't invest enough in high availability to be able to reasonably claim they've put in a decent effort to avoid it.

In most cases I've seen of businesses that claim they "can't afford downtime", they quickly balk if you present them with estimates of what it'd cost to even bring them to four or five nines of availability.

> A system that can't tolerate downtime probably has an on-call rotation and > these triggers ought to be reasonably fast.

A lot of such systems can still run up large enough costs quickly enough that it's a major problem.

> If you can't react or can't afford to react, you probably can afford some > downtime / data loss.

I'd say it is the opposite: Those who can afford to react are generally those with deep enough pockets to be able to weather an unexpected large bill best. Those who can't afford to react are often those in the worst position to handle both the unexpected bill and the downtime / data loss. But of the two, the potential magnitude of the loss caused by downtime is often far better bounded than the potential loss from a crazily high bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, VULTR and Linode.

Of course all things are not equal (i.e. CPUs, SSDs, bandwidth, etc).

      Provider: RAM, CPU Cores, Storage, Transfer

      </comment><comment>----

      $5/mo

      LightSail: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB
      DO:        512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB
      VULTR:     768MB, 1, 15GB SSD, 1TB

      </comment><comment>----

      $10/mo

      LightSail: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB
      DO:        1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB
      VULTR:     1GB, 1, 20GB SSD, 2TB
      Linode:    2GB, 1, 24GB SSD, 2TB

      </comment><comment>----

      $20/mo

      LightSail: 2GB, 1,  40GB SSD, 3TB
      DO:        2GB, 2,  40GB SSD, 3TB
      VULTR:     2GB, 2,  45GB SSD, 3TB
      Linode:    4GB, 2,  48GB SSD, 3TB

      </comment><comment>----

      $40/mo

      LightSail: 4GB, 2,  60GB SSD, 4TB
      DO:        4GB, 2,  60GB SSD, 4TB
      VULTR:     4GB, 4,  45GB SSD, 4TB
      Linode:    8GB, 4,  96GB SSD, 4TB

      </comment><comment>----

      $80/mo

      LightSail: 8GB, 2,  80GB SSD, 5TB
      DO:        8GB, 4,  80GB SSD, 5TB
      VULTR:     8GB, 6, 150GB SSD, 5TB
      Linode:   12GB, 6, 192GB SSD, 8TB

In an easier to read gist: [https://gist.github.com/637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813](https://gist.github.com/637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813)

<comment><USER11> Curious, why don't you compare with known "non-cloud" hosting companies too, that provide vps services, like ovh, hetzner, leaseweb, etc.?

EDIT: Anyone cares to explain his reasons behind a downvote?

<comment><USER12> I expanded it with those companies:

 _Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net / Scaleway: _

$5/mo

        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | </comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---- | ----- | ----- | </comment><comment>---- | </comment><comment>-- |
        | LightSail              | 512MB |     1 |   20GB SSD |      1TB |
        | DO                     | 512MB |     1 |   20GB SSD |      1TB |
        | VULTR                  | 768MB |     1 |   15GB SSD |      1TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |   1GB |     1 |   25GB SSD |      2TB |
        | OVH                    |   2GB |     1 |   10GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (virtual)     |   2GB |     2 |   50GB SSD |      ∞TB |

$10/mo

        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---- | ----- | ----- | </comment><comment>---- | </comment><comment>-- |
        | LightSail              |   1GB |     1 |   30GB SSD |      2TB |
        | DO                     |   1GB |     1 |   30GB SSD |      2TB |
        | VULTR                  |   1GB |     1 |   20GB SSD |      2TB |
        | Linode                 |   2GB |     1 |   24GB SSD |      2TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |   2GB |     2 |   50GB SSD |      5TB |
        | OVH                    |   4GB |     1 |   20GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (virtual)     |   8GB |     8 |  200GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Online.net (dedicated) |   4GB |     2 |  120GB SSD |      ∞TB |

$20/mo

        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---- | ----- | ----- | </comment><comment>---- | </comment><comment>-- |
        | LightSail              |   2GB |     1 |   40GB SSD |      3TB |
        | DO                     |   2GB |     2 |   40GB SSD |      3TB |
        | VULTR                  |   2GB |     2 |   45GB SSD |      3TB |
        | Linode                 |   4GB |     2 |   48GB SSD |      3TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |   4GB |     2 |  100GB SSD |      8TB |
        | OVH                    |   8GB |     2 |   40GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (dedicated)   |  16GB |     8 |   50GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Online.net (dedicated) |  16GB |     8 |  250GB SSD |      ∞TB |

$40/mo

        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---- | ----- | ----- | </comment><comment>---- | </comment><comment>-- |
        | LightSail              |   4GB |     2 |   60GB SSD |      4TB |
        | DO                     |   4GB |     2 |   60GB SSD |      4TB |
        | VULTR                  |   4GB |     4 |   45GB SSD |      4TB |
        | Linode                 |   8GB |     4 |   96GB SSD |      4TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |  16GB |     4 |  400GB SSD |     20TB |
        | OVH                    |   8GB |     2 |   40GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (dedicated)   |  32GB |     8 |   50GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Online.net (dedicated) |  32GB |     8 |  750GB SSD |      ∞TB |

$80/mo

        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---- | ----- | ----- | </comment><comment>---- | </comment><comment>-- |
        | LightSail              |   8GB |     2 |   80GB SSD |      5TB |
        | DO                     |   8GB |     4 |   80GB SSD |      5TB |
        | VULTR                  |   8GB |     6 |  150GB SSD |      5TB |
        | Linode                 |  12GB |     6 |  192GB SSD |      8TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |  32GB |     8 |  600GB SSD |     30TB |
        | Hetzner (dedicated)    |  64GB |     8 | 1024GB SSD |     30TB |
        | OVH                    |   8GB |     2 |   40GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (dedicated)   |  32GB |     8 |   50GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Online.net (dedicated) |  64GB |     8 | 1500GB SSD |      ∞TB |

Gist available here: [https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...](https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae)

<comment><USER13> It's must be said Hetzner have much cheaper offers on their auction: [https://robot.your-server.de/order/market](https://robot.your- server.de/order/market)

There also have no setup cost for these dedicated servers.

<comment><USER14> They're also worryingly keen on non-ECC machines at the low end though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A compelling product. The dashboard looks great. They even replaced the confusing term "user data" with "launch script", but they fall back into it later. SSH in-browser is great too and can be bookmarked/opened in a fullscreen tab. Uploading (instead of pasting) your SSH pubkey is a bit annoying.

The docs appear to say you can add these to a VPC but I don't see how to do it.

They don't say the SSD storage is local, so I'm sure it's not.

A few runs with `fio` confirms this is EBS GP2 or slower:

The bench: "fio --name=randrw --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --rw=randrw --rwmixread=75 --gtod_reduce=1"

Lightsail $5:

      read : io=3071.7MB, bw=9199.7KB/s, iops=2299, runt=341902msec
      write: io=1024.4MB, bw=3067.1KB/s, iops=766, runt=341902msec

DigitalOcean $5:

      read : io=3071.7MB, bw=242700KB/s, iops=60674, runt= 12960msec
      write: io=1024.4MB, bw=80935KB/s, iops=20233, runt= 12960msec

More than an order of magnitude difference in the storage subsystems.

These appear to just be t2.nano instances (CPU perf is good, E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40 GHz, [http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/8164581](http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/8164581)).

For advanced users, there isn't much compelling here to make up for the administration overhead. It's a little cheaper than a similar-spec t2.nano (roughly $4.75 on-demand + $3 for a 30GB SSD). The real win is egress cost; you can transfer EC2->Lightsail for free. 1TB of egress would be nearly $90 on EC2, but is only $5 on Lightsail.

In other news, EC2 egress pricing is obviously ridiculous.

<comment><USER16> The terrible IOPS performance on AWS is the biggest downside for me.

All competitors seem to outstrip AWS on this. Do they have some legacy infrastructure that is just too big too upgrade to something more modern, or is this "on purpose"?

<comment><USER17> As @STRML said, the difference is that Amazon is using network attached (EBS) storage as the primary instance storage, instead of local SSD. This provides a ton of benefit to Amazon, and some benefit for the user as well: CoW backend allows for nearly instant snapshots and clones, multi server/rack redundancy with EC, ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS easily, etc.

The downside is that the access methods for blocks mean some operations are more computationally and bandwidth intensive, meaning you will get fewer IOPS and less sustained throughput without paying more money. In addition, there is always going to be a bit more latency when going over the network versus a SAS RAID card.

As with all things in life, it's a tradeoff. If you look at other large providers' (GCE, DO at least) network storage offering, you'll also see a significant performance regression from local SSD.

<comment><USER18> > CoW backend allows for nearly instant snapshots and clones

LOL => A 80GB EBS SSD snapshot takes more than 1 hour.

Subsequent snapshots are incremental and will be less slow.

> multi server/rack redundancy with EC

You can move drive manually after you stop an instance, if that's what you call redundancy.

> ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS

Nope. You need to unmount, clone the existing EBS volume to a new EBS volume with different specs, and mount the new volume. You can't change anything on the fly.

The last time we had to change a 1TB drive from a database, we tried it on a smaller volume... then we announced that it would be a 14-hours-of-downtime- maintenance-operations (if we do it this way) :D

<comment><USER14> > Subsequent snapshots are incremental and will be less slow.

Depends how much they've been written to since last snapshot. Heavy writes and it can be just as slow again.

<comment><USER18> Hence why I say "less slow" and not faster. There is nothing fast when it comes to EBS volumes :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Let me get this straight, right now AWS is billing me $270/mo for 3TB of bandwidth on my autoscaling web servers. With LightSail, I can get that same bandwidth, plus storage and instances for $15/mo?

In total, I'm spending about $15,000/yr on AWS, and someone spending $5/mo gets their bandwidth 18x cheaper than me? Shouldn't it be the other way around, and I should be the one with the discount?

I get enough headaches dealing with reserved instances, and trying to buy them at the correct time of the year to line up with price drops. Now, I need to consider dumping my autoscaling groups, EC2 web servers, and moving them to LightSail? Why not just give us a fair price on bandwidth, instead of more complications?

<comment><USER20> From [https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/](https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/)

> Data transfer OUT from a Lightsail instance to another Lightsail instance or > AWS resource is also free while the private IP address of the instance is > used.

It could even be worth it to set Lightsail up as reverse proxy and profit off of very cheap(for AWS) traffic e.g. for S3. I can't really believe they would allow this. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER21> my thought exactly.... set up a cluster of reverse proxies on lightsail in front of your web tier in the real aws account (making sure to reverse proxy over private IPs, assuming that's possible), build some automation to replace lightsail instances when they get to their bandwidth quota.... profit?

<comment><USER22> > If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data > transfer allowance is shared between the two instances. Data transfer > overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB.

I think you would still be charged. I think it would just be better to upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm amused by the model they have in their banner: a bearded, tattooed man wearing what appears to be a .. cape? We've come a long way since the stock photos of 'smiling super-normal people wearing ties, huddled around a computer'.

<comment><USER24> Programming while sitting on a motorcycle?

[https://amazonlightsail.com/features/](https://amazonlightsail.com/features/)

<comment><USER25> Reminds me of Snow Crash.

> _Because shortly after he gets into Port Sherman, the wheels on his > motorcycle lock up - the spokes become rigid - and the ride gets very bumpy. > A couple of seconds after that, the entire bike goes dead, becomes an inert > chunk of metal. Not even the engine works. He looks down into the flat > screen on top of the fuel tank, wanting to get a status report, but it 's > just showing snow. The bios has crashed. Asherah's possessed his bike._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a non-starter without IPv6. I know some of you will be tempted to jump ship from DO and Vultr, but please remember that by doing so you will continue enabling Amazon to hold back progress. While ignoring AWS is not really an option, as it offers some very unique features that are quite useful, this thing does not.

DO is not great in this regard as their butcher their allocations, but Vultr gives each VPS a proper /64\. Scaleway has partial IPv6 support (not for their bare metal could, but their VPS's do support it).

I urge you to vote with your wallets, unless you really like paying $1/month or more per IP for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER27> > enabling Amazon to hold back progress

what do you mean?

<comment><USER28> We're running out of IPv4 addresses and need to move to 100% IPv6 ASAP or else we're going to end up with a system where it's NAT all the way down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here is a comparison of $20 instances across DO, Linode and LightSail

All have 3TB transfer

Linode(Best): 4GB RAM, 2 Core, 48 GB SSD

DO: 2GB RAM, 2 Core, 40 GB SSD

LightSail(Worst): 2GB RAM, 1 Core, 40 GB SSD

I use this exact instance on Linode for my site [https://dictanote.co;](https://dictanote.co;) that one extra core makes a lot of difference when you want to take a backup of db or something intensive like that.

<comment> old-gregg Such comparisons are nearly meaningless.

      - What kind of SSD?
      - What kind of "core"?
      - How much are you over-provisioned on the physical hardware?

People are treating cloud resources like they're commodity, but they are not (cloud service providers make it very hard to compare apples to apples). You can have first-class PCIe SSDs on RAID 10 underneath that virtualized storage, or you can have consumer-grade non-RAIDed SATA, but it's all "40GB SSD" to you, the customer.

vCPUs are even worse. Buy a 20-core Xeon box, split it across 60 tenants, each with 2 vCPUs each, or via 40 tenants with 1 vCPU?

<comment><USER30> Luckily, the prices are low enough that you can just test your workload on each.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there anything preventing me from using these servers as proxies with incredibly cheap bandwidth? I assume it stacks? When we reach transfer limits I can just spin up an additional $5 instance to add another 1TB?

$5/mo per 1TB of bandwidth = $5.00 / 1024 = $0.0049/GB compared to EC2's normal $0.09/GB -- That's a 91-95% discount on egress data!

<comment><USER32> Sort of. Lightsail service limits:

"You can currently create up to 20 Lightsail instances, 5 static IPs, and 3 DNS domain zones in a Lightsail account."

So obviously there's a hard cap within one account. The $80 account comes with 5tb, so one would have to be burning a bit of bandwidth - 100tb - to cap it out. Frankly though, at $1600, Amazon is still printing a massive profit margin on that 100tb of transfer.

These seem like they'd be good front-end servers hooked up to RDS etc.

<comment><USER33> Transfer is how they really make money. If you use a lot of services (especially spot pricing) and only pay 10% of bandwidth charges it will likely hurt them, so not sure if they'll allow it if many people start doing that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Meanwhile, in France: [https://www.scaleway.com/](https://www.scaleway.com/)

Same thing with OVH, you can get a powerful dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth for the price of a medium EC2 instance. I hope they will open their datacenter in California soon.

<comment><USER35> I don't understand how they can live on those prices.

I have their 3 euro arm server and have no problem pushing more than a 100 megabit a second from it.

<comment><USER36> It's two fold. Amazon bandwidth is, I assume, premium tier 1. Where as ovh and scaleway are probably lower tier. Lower tier bandwidth is dirt cheap, like below $0.25 per mbps.

Edit: 3 things, it's also shared among a lot of users that don't use what they can. For everyone using 100mbps there's probably 20 who use less then 1mbps.

<comment><USER33> OVH has a pretty solid network and are very transparent about peering and utilization.[1] The network is definitely much smaller than Amazon, but never had any problems with their peering, the network seems to have ample capacity (whereas Hetzner had less reliable peering). I have several servers in the OVH network in Europe and I get consistently high speeds for Europe&US, independent of the time I test (don't have much traffic from Asia so can't really test that).

They will offer you better peering if you pay extra, but even then you're paying much less than at AWS for high traffic.

I suspect that AWS makes most profit with bandwidth while other services run with a very low margin.

[1] [http://weathermap.ovh.net/](http://weathermap.ovh.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think a million VPS hosting companies just cried out in terror.

The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated. This seems to be just as simple as DO or a million other VPS hosts, with the added benefit that it's easy to hook up to Amazon's other services if you need to.

<comment><USER38> Smaller hosts will make a decent margin on managed services. That's just not a game Amazon want to get into.

<comment><USER39> There's a lot of managed services on AWS and it's growing rapidly. But they're delivered through partners, not AWS directly. I didn't write down the numbers from this segment of the Re:Invent Global Partner keynote yesterday but, as I recall, "next generation managed service providers" was highlighted as a big growth opportunity.

<comment><USER40> I think the point was that Amazon's customer service is awful, compared to smaller, much more nimble companies where you can get a technical person on the line and get much more personalized service from someone in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is the first cheap bandwidth option I've seen on AWS. Transferring 1TB out of S3 or EC2 is costs about $90, but is included in a $5 server with Lightsail.

<comment><USER42> Looks like you can spin up three of these instances as a proxy and pay $15 for 3 TB of bandwidth from AWS.

<comment> mark-wagner Where do you see that? To me it looks like bandwidth is plan-wide. For example, from the FAQ: "If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data transfer allowance is shared between the two instances."

<comment><USER42> Full quote from FAQ : "How does my data transfer allowance work?

Beyond the free data transfer IN and between instances, every single Lightsail plan also includes a healthy amount of free data transfer OUT. For example, using the cheapest Lightsail bundle you can send up to 1 TB of data to the Internet within the month, at no extra charge. Your data transfer allowance resets every month, and you can consume it whenever you need within the month.

If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data transfer allowance is shared between the two instances. Data transfer overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB. "

I assumed that each light sail instance would get the 1 TB bandwidth. But, the FAQ seem to suggest that each plan gets 1 TB. I can't tell if I can provision one VM of each plan and proxy bandwidth through. Say for $5 + $10 VM costs, I get 1 TB + 2 TB bandwidths..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Worth noting: $0.09 per GB for bandwidth overages. So, your $5 server with 1TB out becomes a $95 if you have 2TB out.

<comment><USER15> Yet, this is the same cost on EC2 for the first 10TB, except you don't get 1TB for free with EC2.

So essentially you're getting $90 worth of egress traffic for $5. It's even more obvious now that EC2 egress pricing is ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Not terribly impressed. It's like Digital Ocean and Vultr but with no IPv6 and no direct network interface.

What I love about VPSes as opposed to AWS, Azure, or Google is that you get a completely a la carte box with a direct interface right to the Internet and both IPv4 and an IPv6 /64\. You can instantly provision "servers" that you can do anything you want with -- you can treat them like "pets" to run a personal blog or a legacy app, or you can herd them like "cattle" with your favorite management and provisioning tools. The pricing is great and the infrastructure is mix and match.

Many VPS providers (Vultr and I think DO as well) will even let you upload and install an ISO directly onto the KVM instance over the web. That means you can install OpenBSD or even weird OSes. I've heard of people putting wacky stuff like OS/2 in the cloud this way. Some even allow nested virtualization.

A VPS is ideal for a large number of common work loads, but not all. For things where I want to make extensive use of AWS's managed services or where I want to have something more akin to a private data center, EC2 and similar offerings from Microsoft and Google are great. But for those I want the whole enchilada. If I'm going _there_ I want everything the EC2 management console and API gives me including full-blown VPC, etc.

This seems to occupy an uncanny valley. Without IPv6, direct networking, etc. it's a crummy VPS, but it's not as rich as EC2. The only pluses I see are direct access to AWS services (but if I want that I probably want EC2) and AWS's security and uptime "guarantees."

Problem with the latter is that it's largely marketing. I've routinely clocked 300-day-plus uptimes on Digital Ocean and I've also had EC2 instances mysterious die or go into a coma. They might have something to say on security, but I've never seen any real _proof_ that AWS security is intrinsically superior to their competition. Neither DO nor Vultr has had a recent major breach AFIAK and they all seem to use the same virtualization tech.

</comment><comment><USER45> Noob question. How's this different from an EC2 instance in a VPC?

<comment><USER3> It isn't meant to be different, it is just "packaged" to make setting up a working AWS instance cheap and easy.

If you're familiar with AWS then you can get a similar offering directly, particularly using reserved instance pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Just announced on AWS Reinvent Keynote.

It's nicely packaged their existing products (EC2, VPC, ...). So you can get Digital Ocean like experience on AWS. You can still tune the underlying services.

<comment><USER47> It's already too expensive compared to DigitalOcean and Linode. An $80/month instance only gives you 2 CPU cores. For the same money you can get 4 @ DigitalOcean and 6 @ Linode.

<comment><USER33> Still don't understand why people use $80 vps. You can get at least 2 dedicated servers with each way more performance for that. Vps make sense if you need low performance or quick resizing, but I doubt that's what most $80 instances are used for. Don't see how they make sense financially..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It just dumps you into a revamped, less intimidating AWS console so I wouldn't be too concerned about this for now.

The thing that keeps me away from AWS services is the depth of the service - <USER2> need to be an expert in AWS on top of knowing how to configure my servers, which for now is maybe a non starter.

It does show you the power of packaging: with a simple domain and thrown together marketing page, you too can target another market segment.

</comment><comment><USER49> My guess is Amazon wants to rope people into their ecosystem, and they've recognized that many startups have opted for the cheaper VPS providers in their bootstrap days.

This is an intriguing move and one that I'm sure DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr have been fearing may happen.

The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space.

<comment><USER50> > The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space.

Linode offers the double of the RAM for the same price for $10, $20 and $40 VPSs.

<comment><USER3> A lot of people, myself included, don't seriously consider Linode anymore given their security problems (March 2012, 2013) and infrastructure problems (Dec-Jan 2015-16).

<comment><USER51> The biggest show stopper for me is the lack of block storage, while both DO and Vultr have it.

<comment><USER52> They do, however, offer over 2x disk space in some of their plans. 80GB in LightSale and DO vs 192GB in Linode

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I hate to deviate from the topic, but... is the guy on the front page wearing a red cape?

<comment><USER54> Are you saying you _don 't_ wear a superhero outfit when you're coding??

<comment><USER55> I wear a supervillain outfit. Goatee, white lab coat, menacing laugh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> A quick look at the pricing shows these are plagued by the same problems as DO's offerings: only RAM scales linearly with price, while CPU, storage, and data transfer do not.

Linode and OVH, while not as prestigious as AWS and DO, offer much more fair pricing when you need more resources.

</comment><comment><USER57> Keep in mind if you are a current EC2 customer and are excited about a cheaper VPS in your region, the VPSs are only available in Virginia. I was pretty excited about a cheaper VPS I could provision in the Sydney area, but these are restricted to a single datacenter.

<comment><USER58> Damn! I got excited at the prospects of cheap VPSes in Sydney :(

<comment><USER59> What about Vultr?

<comment><USER57> How is Vultr compared to EC2? Latency is my biggest concern since I do all of my dev work over ssh typically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> It's funny to me that Amazon has looped all the way back around to this, while a bunch of smaller providers who've been doing this for over a decade have been trying to catch up with AWS on all the other fronts. But, realistically, for a _lot_ of users, AWS is a stupidly complex beast just to get a website up and running. I've written a bunch of code that interacts with AWS APIs in two languages, and I still require a couple of hours to spin up anything new there.

But, as others note, the variable cost factor seems to still be a sticking point. I can setup a Digital Ocean droplet, or Linode, or one of a dozen other low-cost VPS providers, for $5 or $10 a month, and I know it will never cost more than that. Maybe I'll bump into memory, disk, or bandwidth limits...but, AWS is a _killer_ if you aren't careful. I used to maintain (and pay for, out of pocket) a non-profit's website on AWS, and the price ballooned while I wasn't paying attention, due to automated backups to S3 and some other stuff, and by the time I noticed was costing me $183/month, for a website that could _easily_ run on a cheap VPS. My fault for not paying closer attention, not setting up cost alerts, etc., but I moved the site off of AWS and onto one of my own web servers, where it literally costs me single digit dollars to run (it has many GBs of email but otherwise is a small site with very low traffic).

So...unless they're giving me some reason to think I won't end up with a massive bill one month because of a popular post, or something, I probably still won't think "I know, I'll use AWS!", unless it's a situation where I need the scaling capabilities of AWS.

</comment><comment><USER61> When I started out webdev, I was told that I should use AWS. But not having known how private/pubkeys work, or how ssh workds, how servers worked, it felt a lot like being thrown in the deep end of the pool.

Then I used digitalocean because of the free 1 year server time github gave me and everything was a breeze. They had tutorials for a lot of stuff, like how pubkeys and privatekeys worked, how to use ssh, how a server works, how to use nginx/apache, and even node.js stuff. I got up and running quickly even though it was my first time using a VPS. It was super easy, and the best part was with my knowledge gained from DigitalOcean, I was able to start using AWS with relative ease.

I think Lightsail is a good competitor to DigitalOcean, good for newbies who can't exactly figure out how much their server will use and charge them. But imo, with the same stats and stuff as DigitalOcean as a newbie I'd stick with DigitalOcean just because of how helpful their tutorials are in general and how helpful their interface is.

</comment><comment><USER62> I can almost feel the pucker over at DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. It may not be a better product, but that doesn't necessarily matter, given the brand power.

<comment><USER63> Agreed. Everything else equal, I'd personally go with the more stable IaaS provider as opposed to fringe ones that can go out of business or be acquired out of existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I just ran speedtest.net on a $5/mo 512MB DigitalOcean droplet in the San Francisco (SFO1) datacenter.

        ~ speedtest-cli
        Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
        Testing from DigitalOcean (220.127.116.11)...
        Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
        Selecting best server based on ping...
        Hosted by Monkey Brains (San Francisco, CA) [5.93 km]: 2.132 ms
        Testing download
        Download: 921.09 Mbit/s
        Testing upload
        Upload: 705.31 Mbit/s

Can anybody run speedtest-cli[1] on a 512MB LightSail instance to compare network throughput?

[1] [https://github.com/sivel/speedtest- cli](https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli)

<comment><USER33> The problem with speedtest-cli is that the servers are set up to test domestic accounts, not other servers. You can be lucky and get ~1GBs bandwidth, but just because you don't doesn't mean that it's the fault of the provider. The server specs and speedtest only require a 1Gbit/s port, so you will probably not get higher results than yours anyway.

Network speed should generally not be the issue with AWS, it's disk iops where the non-local SSDs will make a major impact.

<comment><USER64> Agree speedtest-cli is not perfect, but you can see from my test I got near the 1Gbps that DigitalOcean advertises. I am curious if AWS LightSail even breaks 100Mbps.

In terms of network speed not being important, that's not true. Lots of workloads are network bound not i/o bound (load balancers, web servers, etc).

<comment><USER33> That's what I meant. The results show that the DO box is fast enough, but a slow result doesn't indicate that you can't saturate traffic. It's really hard to test without real-world traffic, haven't found a reliable way to do so yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does- digita...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digital- ocean-come-with-a-cape-and-a-motorcycle-like-amazon-lightsail)

</comment><comment><USER66> What I was hoping for was a bare-metal (not-run through VMs) container runtime like Joyent Triton[0] but with more pay-for-what-you-use pricing.

Unlike VMs, which statically allocate mem whether you use it or not, containers have the chance to grow and reduce mem as workfloads go up and down, which means you could pay for GB/h of mem usage on the right-sized # of vCPU base.

Not sure if any IaaS/PaaS is doing this.

Joyent pricing[1] is still for static resource allocation and not cheap compared to these larger players.

[0] [https://www.joyent.com/triton](https://www.joyent.com/triton) [1] [https://www.joyent.com/pricing](https://www.joyent.com/pricing)

</comment><comment><USER67> The more you pay the worse performance (per $) you get. Pretty much a "take 2 pay for 3" kind of deal. No matter if it's a good price or not I would feel like a schmuck if I went for any other option than the 5$ one.

</comment><comment><USER68> Just ran a bench on then, and the Disk per is bad.

[https://gist.github.com/xfalcox/3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc...](https://gist.github.com/xfalcox/3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc45f3)

<comment><USER69> What Amazon doesn't advertise is that their "block" volumes are files on NFS NAS storage.

<comment><USER52> Just for the record, I did the same on one of my small azure machines:

      CPU model:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz
      Number of cores: 1
      CPU frequency:  2394.441 MHz
      Total amount of RAM: 3439 MB
      Total amount of swap:  MB
      System uptime:   6 days, 15:49,
      I/O speed:  20.1 MB/s
      Bzip 25MB: 4.27s
      Download 100MB file: 6.15MB/s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Interesting. Pricing is worse than Digital Ocean here. Looks like Linode is still best bang for buck strictly for price to power.

Random thoughts from shameless noob:

\- I like Digital Ocean's OS/app images for speed / smaller projects. Looks like Lightsail offers this with Bitnami. Not sure how complicated that is in their console.

\- Amazon IAM comes with a bit too much overhead for noobies like myself. Glad this doesn't require you to set that up when you just want a quick and dirty VPS.

\- Bah. Resizing/upgrading requires you to do it through API currently. That kind of sucks.

\- Nice! 30 day free trial.

</comment><comment><USER71> Lightsail: $5/mo 512 MB, 1 core, 20 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $3.2/mo 2 GB memory, 2 cores, 50 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.

Lightsail 2: $10/mo 1 GB memory, 1 core, 30 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $10/mo 8 GB memory, 6 cores, 200 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.

OVH virtual servers have also always been cheaper than Lightsail, and bandwidth is of course unmetered: [https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps- ssd.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml)

<comment><USER72> It looks like OVH doesn't charge hourly for those.

<comment><USER73> The OVH public cloud offers hourly instances (50% discount if monthly).

[https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/instances/prices.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/instances/prices.xml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> The FAQ is extremely unclear, but if I'm understanding it right, doesn't this make transfer out to Internet significantly cheaper if you insist on using AWS? Instead of paying $0.09/GB, transfer to Lightsail for $0.02/GB then transfer out for $5/1000 GB=$0.005/GB. You do have to deal with changing IP, but you get a 1.26 order of magnitude decrease in price, and that's assuming you don't bother actually using the extra compute.

<comment><USER75> The "transfer to Lightsail" step (from another AWS resource) is free, as long as you use the private IP.

<comment><USER76> No, unless you setup VPC peering between the shadow lightsail VPC and your AWS VPC, otherwise you'll be charged at least the $0.01/GB on egress, and maybe the $0.01/GB on ingress into lightsail too (not sure, the wording makes it ambiguous, one would have to try it.)

<comment><USER33> There are no ingress charges on lightsail, so the cost should max. be $0.01/GB. Still cheaper than paying egress on AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Nice: a much needed simplification of the AWS product surface area. While their plethora of functions and features are tremendously useful for big shops, but are a pretty high bar newer entrants.

Now if they could just get to the point where $5 gets you a running Docker container running on the equivalent of the Lightsail VPS (without setting up the backing EC2 infrastructure like ECS), I suspect that's closer to the platform that many users really want to have ...

</comment><comment><USER78> This is going to be a hard blow for DigitalOcean.

I don't have huge hopes for their business going forward.

</comment><comment><USER79> This seems like a great option for a utility server for existing AWS customers. With VPC peering you get free and fast transfer between one of these and your existing AWS infrastructure, but in a nice one-price VPS.

I also wouldn't be too surprised to see some people using these as middle-man boxes to reduce transfer costs associated with EC2 - $5 for 1TB is darned cheap for AWS. Using one of these to back up data from some EC2 hosts would be a win.

</comment><comment><USER80> Any word on if this includes IPv6 addresses?

<comment><USER68> No IPV6

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I'm a little confused. How is this different from EC2?

<comment><USER82> As far as I can tell, it's "just" the relevant AWS services, repackaged in a more non-expert-friendly frontend, simplified for a DigitalOcean-like usecase.

Doesn't expose the full, intimidating complexity of the AWS management console and workflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> This is very appealing to me just because of the amount of bandwidth that is included. I currently serve 20TB/month of static assets for only $160 spread among Softlayer, Digital Ocean and Linode VPSs. If I can host my static assets on the same network as AWS for the same price then that is a huge win, especially since all new Softlayer VPSs only come with a measly amount of bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER84> Still isn't enough for me to pull my sites off DO. Plus, DO don't have a reputation for treating staff like absolute dogshit.

<comment><USER61> And DO has a nice established UI too, plus the plethora of tutorials for newbies on how to setup postgresql, nginx, node, etc.

<comment><USER85> Not to mention...

\- no regions outside U.S. \- no floating IPs \- no Debian images

DO appears to have a considerably better offering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I'd love to give this a try for my mail server that is currently hosted on Linode. Half the price would be great.

Does anyone have experience with how "clean" the AWS IP addresses are? I'd hate to switch to Lightsail and have to deal with deliverability and spam blacklist issues. I've been fortunate to have had zero issues on Linode.

<comment><USER87> I think your IP address issue can be an issue to any hosting provider. I have experienced that issue with a VPS from SiteGround. May I know what mail server do you install on Linode server?

<comment><USER86> postfix with dovecot, dspam, and postgrey

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I have a growing list of cloud / vps providers I like to kick the tires on. I'll be adding this to the list as well.

<comment><USER89> What are your thoughts on Vultr?

<comment><USER90> Support isn't the best. I was attempting to restore a very large database and they shut down my instance for using excessive disk and CPU. I didn't get any response of what sort of limits to stick under.

Otherwise they are very similar to DO but with more data centres. The only complaint otherwise is their instances start a little slower. The API is very easy to use though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Why are people comparing CPU Core and Transfers? Come on, this is HN. What CPU, What Speed? KVM / Xen? What SSD? IOPS? etc.

It used to be Linode had the better of everything comparing to DO. Faster CPU even if they are same core count. SSD had much faster IOPS. Less oversold therefore bandwidth were good. And there is no point giving you 100TB transfer per month if you are limited to 10Mbps port speed. Linode ran on _shared_ 40Gbps Port and peak bandwidth were great ( for its price ). Then there is the quality of the Network, ping time between different ISP and Exchanges. Linode has consistently been better then DO. And not it offer double the memory.

But many are worried about Linode's security issues and therefore would not even touch them with a ten foot pole.

I have yet to see quality VPS that offer a whole package better then Linode. Vultr, OVH, Online.net and Scaleway included.

I am hoping Lightsail bring some competition here.

</comment><comment><USER92> Hopefully Google Computer Engine will also compete at this price now. Even though it seems to be cheaper than AWS in addition to having a good interface, it'd be good to get a bunch of cheaper servers to do the small projects and also give it out to developers in situations where static ips are a requirement.

</comment><comment><USER93> I use AWS for a bunch of things, but the console has always been immensely painful to use, especially to create a no frills simple VPS for a fiver. For that reason alone, I use DigitalOcean and fiddle with AWS authentication if I need to use some of its services there.

Lightsail looks excellent since the setup is just a gazillion times more user friendly than the standard EC2. A single page affair, a launch script, authentication, it's all there. Once launched, I get all the info and metrics I need.

I kinda wish they streamlined their usual console to this level, but this way it's fine as well. I don't tend to use S3 and EC2 as much as I'd like given its non-existent UX, but this gives me hope that Amazon is taking user experience seriously.

Sure, it may be underpowered compared to DO or Linode, but having all services under one roof is worth it to me. I'm happy.

</comment><comment><USER71> Price breakdown LightSail vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net / Scaleway: [https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...](https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae)

</comment><comment><USER94> This puts DigitalOcean in a tough spot. They aren't going after the top-tier get your hands dirty customers AWS usually caters to, and they aren't going after the no-tech skills audience of godaddy/bluehost/dreamhost etc. So now it becomes a marketing battle for the middle.

</comment><comment><USER95> Quick feedback for the AWS team:

* First, this is great. The simplified interface vs EC2 is terrific. This is the direction EC2 (and RDS and S3 and basically everything) needs to be going.

* Instances you start in LightSail don't show up in your EC2 console. I would expect there to be some kind of data sharing there.

* Similarly, creating a "static IP address" doesn't show up in your elastic IP list. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but to manage two different views of products that you're billing me for is... troublesome.

* Last, if I could migrate elastic IPs from EC2 to LightSail I'd be migrating all of my instances immediately. The bandwidth savings are _massive_. (Related: when is the 2TB limit for a t2.small going to be migrated over to EC2?)

</comment><comment><USER64> I am the only one interested in performance? Do these perform like t2 instances ([http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instan...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instances.html)) which are burstable and capped? What's are the network limits? Are the disks physical or using EBS?

I don't understand why everybody on this thread is complaining about overages? If you use more than the allocated amount you pay overages, simple idea. Why in the world, would you want your server to just shut down when you reach a limit?

</comment><comment><USER96> While on this topic, does anyone have any experience with DreamCompute ([https://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/computing](https://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/computing))? I was thinking about trying them out, but could not find any reviews/thoughts about them. They seem to offer a lot, for very low prices. Here's more -- [https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en- us/articles/217744568-What-...](https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en- us/articles/217744568-What-is-DreamCompute-Predictable-Bill)

</comment><comment><USER97> Wow, what perfect timing. I just got approved for AWS Educate and was prepared to do the work to batch auto-provision EC2 instances for my students, but this is much easier to deal with. And at $5 a month for the cheapest machine, it's about what I would have paid to set up a t2-nano instance (~$4.70). I didn't need anything fancy, just wanted students to have their own machine to deploy public-facing code (e.g. APIs).

The in-browser SSH also deals with the problem of students who are on Windows machine. You haven't hated PuTTY until you've tried walking a student through it on their Surface Pro.

</comment><comment><USER64> I just created two 512MB Ubuntu instances and here are my thoughts. (+ indicates positive, - indicates negative, ? question)

        + You can use private networking for cross-instance communication.
        + You can even communicate with other AWS services by using VPC peering.
        + Hourly billing.
        - The firewall rules are not shared. You can't create a single rule and attach to multiple instances.
        ? What are the network throughput caps? Can't find it anywhere?
        ? Are the disk physical or using EBS?
        ? Can you snapshot a running instance, or does it have to stopped?

<comment><USER98> The FAQs mention that the disks are EBS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Very expensive. The 40$/mo plan on Linode, gives and you 4 cores and 8GB ram.

<comment><USER100> It depends on the processors the machines use and the actual sharing of these processors. I agree it looks more expensive but it might not be upon further analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> People focusing just on pricing miss the point. The key factor here is that it is easy to get started but if you need to scale you have the full power of AWS offering and ecosystem that cannot be matched by VPS providers

</comment><comment><USER102> Very smart move from Amazon.

The main advantage of Amazon LightSail over DigitalOcean are: built-in firewall (instead of messing with iptables), managed database with AWS RDS, and using S3 with a low latency and no networking cost.

<comment><USER64> DigitalOcean must implement a centralized firewall. This is the missing piece for them.

<comment><USER103> The best way to thing about security groups is that they are switch based firewall rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> I still don't get the VPS craze. For similar prices from OVH, online.net, Hetzner, etc. you've got vastly more powerful physical servers with vastly larger storage... What's the point really?

<comment><USER90> Infrastructure as code. Use the API the build machines from scratch on demand.

It can be a very powerful model if done well, or done poorly cost a lot for less performance.

I use Hetzner myself for my large projects but the machines were configured using the same scripts I practiced over and over again on DO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> How much of a threat is this to Digital Ocean, Linode, and others?

<comment><USER106> Customers (non-tech guys) trust Amazon more than others.

<comment><USER107> Tech guys too. Linode is a joke and Digital Ocean isn't a whole lot better. I wouldn't trust either one to host a serious business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Hardly a Linode or DO killer yet but could become interesting if/when they:

1). support more linux distros (hint: Debian)

2). let you place instances in other AWS regions

3). let you pool bandwidth quotas across instances

4). improve the cpu/memory competitiveness of their $20+ plans

Also, don't like the firewall being configured via the dashboard (reminds me of the same crappy approach used by scaleway). Alarming too that their SSH console auto logs you in (even if you started an instance with your own public key rather than Amazon's).

</comment><comment><USER109> tl;dr Only available in us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

<comment><USER110> Wish this was more obvious. Signed up only to find out during creation that this was the case. Was hoping to see how the Seoul location routing was as I'm looking for a cheap VPS with low Asia-EU latency (ie not across the US).

<comment><USER33> OVH has good connections in that direction. Don't have a lot of data to back this up (not much traffic from the region), but the tests I ran looked good. And it's certainly cheaper than lightsail

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> I could see the appeal of some of the lower range hardware plans, but especially the higher tiers seem way off in terms of pricing. Can someone clarify why a 2 core/8GB machine costs 80$, where other IaaS providers charge far less for such rigs? (DigitalOcean gets you 4 cores for 80$/m, TransIP gets you 4 cores, 8GB and 300GB SSD for <55$/m...)

<comment><USER37> Speculation, but DO may be overselling their servers at a higher rate than AWS. I know for a fact that lots of other VPS providers do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> Small print: Some types of data transfer in excess of data transfer included in your plan is subject to overage charges.

</comment><comment><USER113> This is how aws trying to re:invent ...a lot of stuffs from them this year is trying to crash those smaller saas provider and the open source world like chalice... It seems like they are reinvent the wheel and try hard to grab every single tiny piece of market. I am moving to gcp...at least they handle oos better

</comment><comment><USER114> Given the long term strategy of DigitalOcean and how vastly different it is from what AWS seems to be executing on, I don't think this announcement actually changes things for DO that much. There is a mass consolidation about to happen in the IaaS space and it's smart for AWS to capture some amount of that.

</comment><comment><USER115> It seems that you can only create instances in Virginia and you can only choose between Ubuntu 16.04 and Amazon Linux.

</comment><comment><USER116> With how versatile the AWS ecosystem is and the quality of the Amazon brand this has the potential to absolutely demolish most of the small time VPS providers. Unless you provide a niche such as DDoS protection or PCI/HIPAA compliant hosting I do not see how you can compete for legitimate customers.

</comment><comment><USER117> I meant to say that it was about time someone comes up with something like this, but seems that in the details AWS complexity can still bite you.

Is there a service, that you know of, that would simplify AWS so that we can just use it with predictable expenses and ability to grow? Maybe I am asking for too much.

<comment><USER118> Heroku? They've basically just a usability shell on top of AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> This is exciting. In case any AWS folks are reading this, are there any plans to support Debian 8 as Bare OS?

</comment><comment><USER120> I don't see anything disruptive here. I already have roughly the same cost/benefit with Linode.

<comment><USER121> Correction, you see a piss poor attempt at competing with Linode/DO/Vultr with no guarantees you won't piss away thousands by mistake or suffer magical and impossible to understand performance issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> If you read the fine print, the price and performance isn't actually as good as Digital Ocean and a few other similar services, so unless you actually are using AWS services AND need your VM to be in the same VPC or data center as the services, then it doesn't make sense.

</comment><comment><USER122> This is pretty good. I'm currently paying about $3.50/mo for my existing t2.nano-based reserved VPS, and this provides a lot more space and bandwidth for not much more money. If they offered it with a reserved-instance discount, it would be even more compelling.

</comment><comment><USER123> i'm still using linode. been using it for 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER35> Strange, I can't seem to find the price of bandwidth when you exceed the included 1 TB.

<comment><USER69> $0.09/ GB ($90/TB). Good luck if you host a service which then gets HN or Reddit hugged!

<comment><USER64> I've been on the front page of HN multiple times, you won't even come close to the $5 limit of 1 TB. This is ridiculous.

<comment><USER33> Different if you're on the front page of reddit, or on some popular subreddit. If you don't have all static files on a CDN you can easily exceed 1TB within a few days. Assuming it's a side project that you're not constantly monitoring and you're away for a few days, you could find a hefty bill when you come back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> One day their pricing and performance might actually be competitive. Today is not that day.

</comment><comment><USER124> This is certainly more in my price range for personal stuff (family sites, etc). Definitely going to take advantage of the free 30 days to kick the tires. Curious to see what sort of server monitoring is included.

</comment><comment><USER125> I guess this service might prevent people from migrating off Amazon services to DigitalOcean (or other VPS providers), but I don't really see a compelling reason to use this service instead of DigitalOcean.

<comment><USER17> I think this could quickly change in the 6 month to 1 year horizon as Amazon (potentially) adds onto this product with other AWS services built into this product.

Imagine if you could easily spin up DB instances and create LBs within LightSail - they would offer more features than DigitalOcean (or any other "VPS Provider"), while being price and usability competitive.

I would definitely be nervous if I was DigitalOcean - there are still advantages (support, tutorials, etc), but this closed the gap significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> So, it is basically the EC2 "t" family with a simpler (but almost equal) pricing and simpler administration.

      t2.nano = $5
      t2.micro = $10
      t2.small = $20
      t2.medium = $40
      t2.large = $80

</comment><comment><USER126> Digital Ocean still has a better pricing, for example for $20 on Digital Ocean you are getting 2 CPU server vs 1 cpu on amazon. Also $80 Digital Ocean offers 4CPU server while Amazon gives you only 2CPU.

</comment><comment><USER127> Confirmed that LightSail works with ServerPilot ([https://serverpilot.io/](https://serverpilot.io/)).

LightSail's default firewall opens ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP) but has 443 (HTTPS) closed. That seems like a terrible default for making a developer- friendly service. Hopefully they fix that and open 443 by default. Otherwise, a lot of wasted time is going to be spent by developers who have configured SSL on their sites and don't know why it isn't working.

LightSail feels very similar to DreamCompute that DreamHost launched, including the approach of only allowing SSH public key auth without any option of using password auth. So, they're intentionally leaving out some users with that approach.

</comment><comment><USER128> It seems to me the exact same service existed already, by picking a stack on Bitnami's website, and single-click-launching it on AWS. The price structure is clearer on Lightsail though.

<comment><USER101> Lightsail also uses Bitnami stacks underneath, so it is very similar indeed. It is an easier way to get started with AWS but with the potential to graduate to the full offering

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> Why would I use that? With Hosteurope I get 4 vCores, 6 GByte guranteed memory (burst to 12), 200 GByte SSD, traffic flat (but only 100 MBity/sec), monthly cacelable for 20 euros.

</comment><comment><USER130> Having upper ceilings in charging is a big deal for me.

For this I prefer [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/)

</comment><comment><USER131> OVH is still cheaper, with half the disk space but 4 time the RAM.

</comment><comment><USER132> Why are a full half of the front-page stories about Amazon?

<comment><USER17> AWS re:Invent is currently happening, they're announcing all of these products right now (and they are summarily posted to HN)

<comment><USER132> Thanks! It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't so many duplicates :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER133> Just created a "Magento" instance and attached a static IP. It still unreachable with a browser after a few hours. What did I do wrong?

</comment><comment><USER134> Am I understanding this correctly?

DO and LightSail are close (if not) exactly the same spec wise?

All that's I've read so far essentially states that.

</comment><comment> St-Clock They advertise a 99.95% EC2 SLA. Does that mean that an instance in a single AZ can go down anytime for any length of time?

<comment><USER135> Anytime but not any length of time.

99.95% SLA means the following amount of downtime: Daily: 43.2s Weekly: 5m 2.4s Monthly: 21m 54.9s Yearly: 4h 22m 58.5s

<comment> St-Clock But in the context of ec2, downtime must occur in two AZ at the same time to count IIRC. There is no single AZ SLA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER136> This is super awesome... Lesser devops requirement particularly in early stages trying to validate an idea.

</comment><comment><USER137> No nonsense predictable pricing is what drove me to Rackspace years ago. Good for Amazon figuring this out.

</comment><comment><USER138> meh the pricing fails in comparison to say linode.com's offerings. [https://www.linode.com/pricing](https://www.linode.com/pricing)

granted with AWS you probably get access to other AWS products so there's that...

</comment><comment><USER139> Sigh. US-only. That kills it for me.

</comment><comment><USER140> I really like the web based firewall configuration feature. Hope Linode and DO adopte it.

</comment><comment><USER141> Really wanted to get more information on this, but all of their Docs links currently 404.

</comment><comment><USER142> What is this service? I can't figure out how different it is from Linux on EC2.

</comment><comment><USER143> I pay ~25$ for 8 gb - 1tb - unlimited bw From online.net.. 80$ is ridiculous

<comment><USER144> European data centers only though, correct?

<comment><USER33> OVH has similar prices with a dc in Canada. Worth looking at. Latency will still be high to the west coast, but lightsail is also us-east only, so no real difference there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER145> Is there a way to quickly/easily migrate EC2 instances to LightSail??

</comment><comment><USER146> This is extremely, really, amazingly, exciting news! Except for the potential charge gotchas in the FAQ which seems to fly in the face of the banner text on the main page but still...very exciting!

</comment><comment><USER147> Wow I didn't know Amazon bought DigitalOcean ;-)

</comment><comment><USER148> The performance of DO is far superior compared to Lightsail. Disk speed is a joke, network seems to be limited to 50MB/s (which is not that bad) and who knows how much they throttle the CPU.

</comment><comment><USER149> This site can't be reached

I guess I google virtual private servers

</comment><comment><USER150> Seems like a play to compete with Digital Ocean.

</comment><comment><USER151> PSA: The chap in the photo is wearing a cape.

</comment><comment><USER152> Wow they're going after digital ocean

</comment><comment><USER153> No Windows Server? Surprising.

</comment><comment><USER154> Digital Ocean is in trouble!

<comment><USER33> Don't think so. Not for any disk-heavy or bandwidth-heavy users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER155> The pricing/specs are suspiciously very similar to one of the largest VPS provider.

</comment><comment><USER156> Time to move from DigitalOcean finally

</comment><comment><USER157> Fbdnnd

</comment><comment><USER158> What a day for AWS on HN. 8 AWS products made it to front page. I've learned new AWS product like Cognito today just from the comments (ironically in the "Google is Challenging AWS" thread).

I feel as excited as I was for Azure's Build 2016. Now I'm feeling pulled to AWS. This is great for AWS, not so much for Google Cloud which further fades into obscurity in my mind. I'd love to see that change, more competition in the cloud space = more options for us developers = more conditions in our favour.

Amazon LightSail just killed digitalocean for me which has been steadily getting more expensive (for instance I can't downsize to a less expensive plan once I resize my image, meaning I forked out $100/month for something that would work for $5/month + multiple DO images now cost monthly fee.

$5/month + tight integration with AWS products is enough for me to move completely off DO. If only AWS had DO's community style documentation, I'd definitely question DO's future viability.

Now a killer IDE from AWS that lets me deploy and configure AWS without leaving the IDE, that's a checkmate move, which I think will be very difficult for me to switch to another cloud provider. Right now things are in flux but I think an in-browser/desktop IDE like Cloud 9 with one click deploy to AWS would be the end game for other cloud providers.

<comment><USER159> Their yearly conference, Re:Invent, is going on this week, so there will probably be more announcements to come.

<comment><USER160> Yep, there's two keynotes at AWS, one Wednesday by the AWS CEO, and one tomorrow/Thursday by the AWS CTO Werner Vogels. I'm expecting quite a few more announcements during the Vogels keynote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER161> Can I migrate EC2 instances?

</comment><comment><USER162> [http://imgur.com/4iGafDz](http://imgur.com/4iGafDz)

<comment><USER163> When I saw the $5/mo price, I know it's targeting lowendvps customers from Digital Ocean. But if the management UI of LightSail is still the EC2 one, I will give up. Their UI feels laggy and less intuitive.</comment></comment>


Writing a DSL with Python - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fmeyer.org/entry/writing_a_domain_specific_language_dsl_with_python <comment><USER2> I would recommend pyparsing for this. There was an excellent article on it in Python Magazine a few months ago.

Some links:

1\. O'Reilly mini-book on pyparsing (probably best single ref) <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514235/>

2\. Quick example of pyparsing <http://eikke.com/pyparsing-introduction-bnf- to-code/>

3\. Main pyparsing page (i know it's _not_ very aesthetically pleasing. The code is much better, I promise) <http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/>

4\. Links to more on pyparsing here <http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/Publications>

Python Magazine is excellent, by the way. Definitely worth the purchase price as they include a zip file with code. (Mandatory disclaimer: I have no stake in it at all. Just found it very useful, that's all).

</comment><comment><USER3> Note that there is a world of difference between an in-language DSL and one with its own syntax that must be parsed, so much difference that they really should have different names. The former can effortlessly exchange data with and enjoy all the features of the host language. I'm convinced that the latter will one day be an artifact of less enlightened times.

<comment><USER4> By convention the in-language form is called an internal DSL, the other an external ditto.

<comment><USER5> Or embedded.

<comment><USER6> or Pidgin ;-)

ref: <http://www.bofh.org.uk/2007/08/08/domain-specific-pidgin>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A very interesting DSL for network packet manipulation is Scapy(<http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/>).

It uses python itself as a DSL to make things like packet forging easy:

      >>> Ether()/IP()/TCP()/"GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n"
      <Ether type=0x800 |IP frag=0 proto=TCP |<TCP |<Raw load='GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' |>>>>

Here the / operator was overloaded to stack layers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow. If you ever wanted curly braces or multi-line lambdas in Python this looks like the way to do it.

<comment><USER9> What exactly would people do with multi-line lambdas? I would definitely refactor any lambda with statements or more than one expression in it, give it a name, or use a list comprehension, so I've never seen a problem with them. Can anybody give me an example of a piece of code they think would look better if python had multi-line lambdas?

<comment><USER10> If you give something a name, yet still only use it once, what's the point? It is just semantic clutter to do that (unless, of course, you can't use multiline lambdas...).

<comment><USER11> There is no big harm in giving something a name. Giving a name also helps if you find a need to reuse it later. Plus a name can give a hint to what this code is for.

<comment><USER10> Yet, if you look in functional programming code (e.g. Haskell, Scheme), you'll find many anonymous lambdas (that in python would be > 1 line). Why would good coders bother doing that?

<comment><USER5> If something is small and enough to be anonymous, it's usually simply enough to be expressed without binding a variable.

(See point-free style.)

<comment><USER10> Obviously. Show us how to do point-free style in Python. We're talking about Python's lame implementation of anonymous functions, not something that it doesn't have any implementation of.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I thought you were talking about programmers' habits in Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> antlr, antlr, antlr

<comment><USER13> Maybe provide a link next time?

<http://www.antlr.org/></comment></comment>


Java's Original Sin (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2009/05/original-sin.html <comment><USER2> There is the project Valhalla now, [https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/valhalla/Main](https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/valhalla/Main), aiming to bring value types and eventually generic specialization and reification.

The work on that project has been impressive, and there is now an experimental EA build called LW2 where you can play with value types: [https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/valhalla/LW2](https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/valhalla/LW2)

Will this solve everything? No. The char type is hosed. But there will be an opportunity to e.g. get a new Character.

<comment><USER3> To anyone looking: it seems as if the project is dead since 2015, but the prototype is in active development. Thanks for the link!

<comment><USER2> Thank you, I updated the link in my post to point to the up-to-date and frequently updated wikui page for Valhalla information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Now, if characters were objects, their representation would be encapsulated, > and nobody would very much affected how many bits are needed.

Making characters objects doesn't seem like it magics away this issue. You'd need APIs to get and set raw values somewhere, and those APIs would have become the problem.

<comment><USER5> > Making characters objects doesn't seem like it magics away this issue. You'd > need APIs to get and set raw values somewhere, and those APIs would have > become the problem.

You never need to "get and set raw values". You need APIs to do the things that are sensible to do with characters, such as "test whether it has this property" or "encode as UTF-16 byte sequence", but all those things have much clearer semantics than "access raw value".

<comment><USER6> You need raw values for serialization over the wire and to files. And for any kind of compression. And for searching (it's hard to build indexes in Unicode because of uneven symbol widths).

You could convert to a different character format but at some point you need raw values. If you want to be able to read text created by something else (text editor, browser, different OS) you have to expose raw access.

<comment><USER5> > You need raw values for serialization over the wire and to files. And for > any kind of compression.

You need to encode as bytes with a particular encoding. That's not the same thing as "getting the raw value".

> And for searching (it's hard to build indexes in Unicode because of uneven > symbol widths).

It may be hard but it's important to do it right. If searching for "café" doesn't find "caf◌́e" then you've got a problem.

> You could convert to a different character format but at some point you need > raw values. If you want to be able to read text created by something else > (text editor, browser, different OS) you have to expose raw access.

Again, no. You need to be able to decode byte sequences that have particular encodings into strings of characters. That doesn't mean you need to expose the internal representation of those strings/characters.

<comment><USER6> > Again, no. You need to be able to decode byte sequences that have particular > encodings into strings of characters.

You keep reiterating this, but it's not feasible. To avoid exposing the raw values, the language would need to support all possible encodings.

<comment><USER5> Nonsense. What is it that you can do with a "raw value" that you can't do with the representation in a particular encoding? I mean, if you wanted to import a character that doesn't have a unicode codepoint then you couldn't decode that character from UTF-8 - but if the language is built with no support for non- unicode characters then even if you did have access to the internal representation of a character, that wouldn't help you (e.g. the language's built-in character functions for things like checking the case of the character won't handle a non-unicode character properly).

<comment><USER6> In Java at least, you can write your own Charset implementation then the language will support it normally. This uses the byte raw access I'm ranting about to work

<comment><USER5> Yes and no - a Java Charset is something that can convert from a buffer of bytes to a buffer of utf16 code units. In Java that happens to be the internal representation of a String, but it doesn't have to be - you just need built in support for encoding/decoding a string as utf16.

A simple proof of this is that you can write custom character sets in Python too, even though there's no way to have raw byte access to a Python character (because it's different on different platforms/builds).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=636307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=636307)

<comment><USER8> This would be a nice feature for HN. Any links which have been previously discussed show up as a link with the total number of comments/votes also shown next to the link.

Edit: I noticed the 'past' link, but that takes you to the search engine. I'd prefer something more direct like what @dang just posted.

<comment><USER9> I use the "Refined Hacker News" extension, and it adds links to previous discussions at the bottom of the page

<comment><USER8> Very nice, I currently use a hacked up version of HNES, but it isn't updated anymore so I'll give this one a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read a long time ago that Java had primitive data types like char to be compatible with migrating C code to Java.

Remember this decision was made in early 90's and getting users onto the language was imperative. Target audience was most likely using C at the time.

</comment><comment><USER11> when I read an article like this and come to different conclusions, it makes me question if I understood it correctly.

I have been bitten more than most by the 16-bit char. I completely agree with the modern popular opinion that strings should be made from grapheme clusters, or failing that, codepoints.

But I get confused when the author uses the example of int, and then we run into problems. One confusion I have is how the author says that a method naming scheme is not operator overloading, when actually that's how it is always done in the languages I can name. Another confusion I have is that if primitive int and Integer merge into Int, then we have problems with null?

I've been a bit involved with the Mill CPU effort, and lets not go off on a tangent about that, but one thing in there that is a thing of beauty is the Not-A-Result/None approach. Values have special meta-data to say if they are an error or not. So, say, dividing by zero returns a value, but that value is tagged as an error, rather than an exception being thrown. If you use this value in subsequent computation, then the error propagates. Only if you then try and do something externally visible will the error throw. 'None' is a special type of error that doesn't throw when it becomes invisible, but instead becomes a no-store. This model is excellent for the speculation inside CPUs, but I posit that it would also be a really awesome model for higher level languages too.

Imagine modelling null as 'None'; a function returns a number, except it returns None instead. This None is then used in subsequent math, and the Noneness propogates. When you try and do something with it, it just silently does nothing. Another time a function returns an overflow error, or something like that, and when you eventually try and write that to a member variable where it becomes visible to other code, there's an error thrown. I know first hand that when you internalize this, lots of error handling and checking evaporates and its a nice zen.

Personally, I wish I had a faster and statically typed Python. I love Python's infinite integers and its string handling (which I had no problem with in python2 either, so ymmv). My biggest gripe with Python in production is that it isn't statically typed.

<comment><USER12> > Another confusion I have is that if primitive int and Integer merge into > Int, then we have problems with null?

The author isn't suggesting that this would be a design change that would be compatible with the current semantics of Java, so behaviour for null would change.

<comment><USER11> Yeap.

I can think of two main uses for Integer: when you have type polymorphism (e.g. my own code often has maps of Object) or nullness.

I go on to describe a different approach to nullness that suites ints, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Frankly I think Java's original sin was being sold to Oracle, and like the sin mentioned in the original post we're all still paying for it.

<comment><USER14> It's certainly led to plenty of problems, but, having happened closer to now than to the birth of Java, it's not really a candidate for "original".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You'd also have to disallow null as a value for any of these boxed types.

It's disconcerting and astonishing to check for true / false and get a NPE, to say the least.

One nice thing about Go is that strings are values and cannot be null.

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't this basically the Python data model? Especially so in Python 3, where strings are strings of unicode codepoints rather than bytes ("runes" like Go would be even better but codepoints are halfway there).

Edit: In Python, equality, addition, even attribute setting can all be overridden by implementing certain "magic" methods on a class. Much of Python syntax is effectively syntactic sugar for calling these methods.

<comment><USER17> > "runes" like Go would be even better but codepoints are halfway there

Go runes are codepoints.

I think Swift is interesting, a "character" in Swift is actually a grapheme cluster.

<comment><USER18> Swift probably inherits that from NeXT/OpenSTEP/Cocoa which was very unusual at the time in its degree of unicode support. For example it used something like unicode equivalence in string comparisons.

(You'd see objective-c benchmarks suffer because of this)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Java is a wildly successful language, and I find the title to be rather clickbait-y in that it attempts to be polarizing for no reason. Original sin implies a failure, and the author (of the blog) discusses a nuanced design choice of the language. It is one the most successful languages I know in terms of adoption and scale (alongside Javascript, C++, and Python).

By what measure, if not this one, can we truly compare languages?

<comment><USER20> The author was involved in the creation of Java. I don't think he's shitting on java per se.

<comment><USER18> He also guided the evolution of java from 1997 until 2006, so from 1.1 to 1.6, a very significant period in java's development.

He's also one of the team behind Dart. Hrm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Clickbait in some respects. "Java should have been a different language from what it was, more pure in OO terms, and without the characteristics that made it understandable & popular for developers from C and similar backgrounds."

While the ideas are (somewhat) valid, it would have been a quite different language from the language that gathered traction and became popular as Java.

<comment><USER22> > While the ideas are (somewhat) valid, it would have been a quite different > language from the language that gathered traction and became popular as > Java.

Yep. Practicality beats purity when coding in industry, and the Java ecosystem has almost always chosen practical solutions over ideal ones.

This is the intentional result of prioritizing practicality and usefulness and portability.

People who write articles complaining about Java seem to think Java should have different priorities, but Java has been one of the most popular languages in industry for a long time because its priorities make sense.

<comment><USER23> What part of Java having a more consistent API with identical performance would have not been practical?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> To me, the sin of Java has been to make String final. Or, to be more precise, not to have made it generifiable. (So the compiler knew the difference between, let's say, String<FirstName> and String<LastName>)

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure I understand your example, do you want a string of FirstNames? Did you mean something like:

class FirstName extends String {...}

<comment><USER24> Something like semantic-aware String, yes. (with syntactic sugar to avoid me repetitive tasks, plus the ability to uplift an existing code using String to its typesafe version in the most straightforwatrd manner). Something like the generics system but for String.

I of course can uplift my String into Objects. But it is unneeded for 90% of the String usages. Plus it forces you to unbox the String from its Object to pass it to a function that consumes just a String.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Besides, I've come to the conclusion that Java made the right call on array > covariance in the first place.

I'm actually curious to hear why the author thinks this, because I've largely come to the opposite conclusion…

<comment><AUTHOR> Dart's FAQ has an entry "Why are generics covariant?". Gilad Bracha was involved in Dart's early language design decisions.

[https://dart.dev/faq#q-why-are-generics- covariant](https://dart.dev/faq#q-why-are-generics-covariant)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interestingly enough, this motivates overcoming my long standing aversion to Scala and giving it a try finally.

<comment><USER14> If you're just looking for a cleaner type system, you might give Kotlin a look first. It gets you that, while remaining a much smaller and simpler language than Scala.

<comment><USER28> Kotlin is a much larger than Scala on syntax, has 100+ keywords and built-ins, compiles slower, all while having a way weaker OO system and and doing a small fraction of what Scala does.

<comment><USER14> I haven't made a formal study, but I think that it still ends up still being a smaller language. Scala doesn't have a lot of keywords, but it does have a _lot_ of overloading of what those keywords do. It's something I have to spend quite a bit of time explaining when I'm bringing people up to speed on Scala.

The OO system is absolutely weaker. Depending on your situation, that can be a big advantage. I work in a mixed Java/Scala codebase, and, while I generally like Scala, one of our more annoying bits of yak-shaving is making sure outward-facing Scala code doesn't do anything to make itself overly awkward to consume from Java. I haven't worked as extensively in Kotlin, but, from what I've seen, you've got to spend a lot less time worrying about it there, because Kotlin stays much closer to Java's OO semantics.

My sense is, if type erasure or lack of parametric polymorphism are really causing you pain, yes, Scala is for you. Pattern matching, too. If your Java pain points are more prosaic than that, Kotlin is a less radical change that is likely to address most of them them without introducing too many new ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> well how good did that work out for ruby???

But this actually would have been better in Java because the compiler could have delt with the inefficiency cause by the unnecessary overhead.

At implementation make it an object but at runtime it will be a scalar.</comment>


How the Church of Scientology fought the Internet and why it lost - <AUTHOR> http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/14384/scientology-versus-the-internet-going-clear/ <comment><USER2> From the article: _"Scientology is cutting-edge technology for 1950. All of the most important policies were laid down by the 1960s."_

Yes, which is their problem. Scientology is stuck with 1930s science. The "E-meter" is just an skin resistance ohmmeter, the least useful channel of a lie detector. If they were keeping up, they'd have the Scientology E-Meter Bracelet, a custom version of a Bluetooth fitness bracelet, reporting pulse, respiration, and skin resistance back to HQ in Clearwater, FL. They'd have auditing over Skype, server farms analyzing member communications and movements, and functional MRI machines at major Scientology centers.

Even when they had a good idea, they didn't keep up with technology. In "How to Live though an Executive" (1953), L. Ron Hubbard describes what is instantly recognizable as a ticket system for handling problems. But it's all manual, with boards and hooks and paper cards and messengers. They never computerized that.

A competing organization, the Rosicrucians, had the same problem. They used to have a "Science building" at Rosicrucian Park in San Jose (if you're in Silicon Valley, visit; they have great architecture, gardens, and museums), but it was stuck with 1950s high school physics experiments. Now they're building an Alchemy Museum. So retro.

I wonder if you could get venture capital to start a modernized religion, using modern surveillance technology.

<comment><USER3> > I wonder if you could get venture capital to start a modernized religion, > using modern surveillance technology.

For the love of all that is holy, please stop asking this question. Because the answer is almost certainly "yes".

Roko's basilisk doesn't scare me. But the thought of a clone of the Church of Scientology that is technically competent scares the living shit out of me. Seriously, how would we defend against that?

<comment><USER4> The way religions and other factions have duked it out in the past: war.

Most wars have been either about property, religion or both.

<comment><USER5> I think most wars involving religion have actually been about property.

<comment><USER6> Religion is such a nice tool to channel our tribal instincts.

The neurohormone oxytocyn, undelies not only brotherhood but xenophobia, which probabaly explains why you can find people who are both deeply religious and xenophobic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was the alt.relgion.scientology wave and then anonymous got involved after that batshit crazy Tom Cruise video got leaked on Youtube and the church tried to hide it.

One trouble with the church is their idea of of "ethics" is that when you are in trouble with the church you need to "Deliver an effective blow to the enemies of the group one has been pretending to be part of despite personal danger."

This is like if you work at a pizza restaurant and you come in late for work or if you don't sell as many pizzas as you did last week you are expected to firebomb a competing pizza restaurant.

And these people are so confused about why they have such consistently bad PR.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if the internet has had a decrease in the power and occurrences of cults as a whole.

I know the FBI has task forces that focus entirely on monitoring cult behavior. Any published statistics? I imagine that they might be wary of branding any "niche religion" as a cult to avoid accusations of violations of religious freedoms.

Regardless, I wonder what the overall trend is now that information access and easy communications are so prevalent.

Hell, North Korea's government can be seen to be operating as a kind of cult and even they are having difficulties with information leaking into their ecosystem through smuggled cheap Chinese phones and contraband radios.

<comment><USER9> The internet seems to have been a boon to conspiracy types, racist and religious fanatics more generally. It might be more fair to say that it's hurt certain type of cults, such as the kind that relies on secrets/esoteric knowledge.

<comment><USER8> And likely the type that requires blockading members off from interaction from the world.

Good points though. The internet has allowed people to create echo chambers to get a global pool of potential devotees.

It's still a different situation from the stereotypical cult system where they cut you off from the world and strip away your individuality.

Regardless, excellent point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Church of Scientology lost because of two reasons:

(1) Karin Spaink

(2) xs4all

If not for those two they would have very likely won.

</comment><comment><USER10> Germany is one of the few countries that gets destructive cults like these. I wish more countries would learn.

<comment><USER11> Please clarify. The German government doesn't recognize Scientology as a religion, but rather as an abusive business. Meanwhile in the U.S. ...

<comment><USER12> I think he means "get how to deal with them", or "see them for what they are".

<comment><USER10> I did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> An interesting read is "Bare-faced Messiah" \- an unauthorised biography of L. Ron Hubbard.</comment>