One thing that strikes me about the author's experience is how unusable Azure appears to be in all this. Like, this hits somewhat close to me as I also run a couple web projects, also written in Rust, on a serverless architecture, and frankly couldn't imagine wanting to spend the time to run them any other way. AWS Lambda for compute, and Dynamo for DB, have a perpetual free tier and it's been running practically without me touching it for years.
The AWS Rust SDK also seemed very mature to me when I was using it ... compare to:
>the only option for a database instance with a free plan was [...] serverless Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)
>the MSSQL connection required TLS and this hadn’t been implemented in the sqlx connector I chose to use for my Rust-based functions. I wasted two weeks implementing TLS support in sqlx
That is insane. Not to mention the later bit with sudden, unexplained availability and the only hint that it might to be related to a _future_ deprecation? Like, imagine if this were a critical service for you. Professional malpractice on Microsoft's part.
This isn't really the main point of the article, and I did find the stuff on self-hosting interesting, but it does seem like this could have been avoided if Azure had lived up to its peers.
At $DAYJOB, we used to have a few internal use Azure Functions (which we’ve migrated to AWS Lambda). My favourite Azure weirdness was a warning message that said some Blob Storage-related thing was about to expire. We hadn’t set up any Blob Storage, the Azure Functions .NET deployment thing we used did. And apparently, there was an encryption key or something with an expiry of 1 year. It seems that Microsoft did not expect code to just work and not need to be redeployed for that long.
There's not enough information to come to a conclusion as to what the 503s originated from. There is enough information for manufactured outrage, of course.
I don't see why one would want to run in-the-clear over the Azure network for SQL connections.
The author was doing hobby projects. Granted, hobby projects should run on any platform, but Azure seems to have less of that free tier you can get elsewhere.
> There's not enough information to come to a conclusion as to what the 503s originated from.
It's the MS way. I remember writing some code for MS graph and wondering why the hell it isn't working, I'm doing near same thing that doc example did. Nonsense generic error message. Left for the day, ran code next morning, everything works fine.
No message saying "hey the thing behind it is down", just error that was generic enough that it could be my inputs being wrong.
The author did not make any statements that would lead to the conclusion the issue is lack of information provided by the platform, simply they do not state any troubleshooting steps taken.
The author chose a library that didn't support TLS, written by a company that isn't Microsoft. Terrible devex indeed but hard to see why that's the fault of the platform that required TLS.
In my experience in the recent market (in a HCOL city in the U.S.), rentals (even only compared to the costs in homeownership, i.e. ignoring principal payments) are much cheaper than mortgages for an equivalently sized house/unit. That's the assertion of the article, and it rings true.
You're right that the bulk of the mortgage payments, especially towards the beginning, do not go towards building any capital, which makes the investment even less appealing.
His central point is that the "rent" you pay via the costs of homeownership are often approximately equal to the costs of actually paying rent. Since principal payments are on top of those costs, that is money you _can_ do something else with if you were renting, in this analysis.
Of course, that part of the analysis ignores the potential capital gain of the property value, which is often one of the appealing financial factors of homeownership. But the article also addresses that.
I can't speak to all markets, but in my experience in a HCOL city in the U.S., this is not true, at least anymore. Buying a place never broke even with renting an equivalently sized one, even in the long run. Yes, there are lifestyle advantages to homeownership, but at my current place and time, not financial advantages.
I live in a low-mid CoL city, so I guess this is all super YMMV, but even with a 5% down payment, a decent home would run me around $1.5k/mo in mortgage payments (including interest, principal, PMI, and an escrow payment for taxes and insurance), whereas an equivalent rental would run well over $2k/mo, possibly closer to $2.5k/mo.
Sure, I can (and do) rent an apartment for less than a house, but that means rent increases whenever the owner feels like it - my rent has been steadily increasing to the tune of about 5%/yr, and this year it was all the way up to a 7% increase.
I was in a similar boat years ago. The company I rented from wanted to increase my rent 12% year over year. I told them I didn't make 12% more money, spent a lot of time pleading, and talked them down to merely 9%. Rents were all over the place, and there was little I could do about, except move to a new apartment every year.
His analysis is that roughly 75% of his ownership costs are equivalent to a rent. To be able to invest the other 25% of his cost of ownership into something else, he would have to be able to find an equivalent property that he could rent for 75% of his total cost of ownership (or accept a reduction in the size and/or quality of his home).
I don't know how realistic that is across many different areas, but it's certainly not possible in many locations.
The AWS Rust SDK also seemed very mature to me when I was using it ... compare to:
>the only option for a database instance with a free plan was [...] serverless Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)
>the MSSQL connection required TLS and this hadn’t been implemented in the sqlx connector I chose to use for my Rust-based functions. I wasted two weeks implementing TLS support in sqlx
That is insane. Not to mention the later bit with sudden, unexplained availability and the only hint that it might to be related to a _future_ deprecation? Like, imagine if this were a critical service for you. Professional malpractice on Microsoft's part.
This isn't really the main point of the article, and I did find the stuff on self-hosting interesting, but it does seem like this could have been avoided if Azure had lived up to its peers.