barryhennessy

I'm budgeting for a new project and it struck me that I've no idea how much faith I should really put into a cloud pricing calculator. (e.g. AWS' https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)

It's complicated enough that I could easily miss a foot-gun, and clearly a sales tool: there's plenty of wiggle room built in to how prices are calculated in the end.

Have you ever compared your actuals to the estimates you started with? Were they accurate? Miles off? If not how then did you budget for cloud costs? Or did you skip that and just see what happened?

Same question goes for the other clouds/providers etc.

Thanks for your time!

I think decision making is one of the most important things we do as software engineers (not to mention other disciplines).

How you manage decisions in your teams? Do you have heavy process, lightweight, none? What works, what _doesn't_ and in what situations?

My aim here is to flush out ideas and generate some discussion. Hopefully to figure out some better ways of managing this critical piece of our work.

Thanks for your time!

You have a system broken into components. Some custom built, some off-the-shelf. Any of them might need to send a message to a customer. How do you manage:

* Tracking (and auditing) who is receiving what messages.

* Let customers manage their preferred contact method.

* Manage templates and UI centrally (e.g. email templates).

* Track GDPR and consent.

* Block if consent has been revoked.

For example: a basic web app with a keycloak server to handle auth (registration/password reset etc.). Keycloak has a simple smtp integration and hooks to customise templates. But, naturally enough, the web app needs to send emails too.

Is there a more scaleable way to manage consistency and tracking than 'just do it manually'?

I want to write events to a calendar, keep them up to date and perhaps cancel them on reasonably short notice. While supporting any calendar app (not just Google Calendar).

How have you solved this in the past (or present)? Is there a service/project that handles this smoothly?

My gut tells me that this problem has been solved many, many times before, and that someone may have written a service for it, but I can't seem to find anything.

The obvious choice seems to be the open formats: CalDAV, iCalendar etc. But I read nothing but bad things about integration with the likes of Google Calendar. From data loss to 12-24 hour delays in syncing.

So that pushes me to API integration. But integrating with every calendar API out there seems like a never-ending job.

Any insights and help are welcome.

GCal data loss: https://evertpot.com/google-carddav-issues/

GCal delays: https://help.cheqroom.com/en/articles/1502123-why-is-my-google-calendar-sync-slow-or-not-updating-at-all

I periodically hear about projects that use/have used sqlite as their sole datastore. The theory seems to be is that you can test out an idea with fewer dependencies (and cost) and that it scales surprisingly far.

There are even distributed versions being built for reliability in the cloud: dqlite by canonical (of Ubuntu fame) and rqlite

Given the complexity it seems like there are use cases or needs here that I'm not seeing and I'd be very interested to know more from those who've tried.

Have you tried this? Did it go well? Or blow up? Were there big surprises along the way?

- https://sqlite.org - https://dqlite.io - https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite

You've had an iOs and Android MVP built by an agency, you're about to go live and officially handover, what's in your go-live checklist?

Bonus points: it has a 'serverless' backend in AWS