We used that particular feature quite heavily. A lot of our clients often have poorly cropped photos or something with branding that needed removal and the context-aware generative fill was quite good.
But we decided to drop Adobe after some of their recent shenanigans and moved to a set of tools that didn't have this ability and, frankly, we didn't really miss it that much. Certainly not enough to ever give Adobe another cent.
This has been my personal discovery as well. I inherited a bunch of old Scala code and, having had no experience with Scala, it took a while to get up to speed.
Canuck here. We're considering getting off AWS and our exposure is mostly limited to EC2/RDS/S3. OVH has a bad rep in Canada from my limited experience, but it's always hard to tell what services folks were using and how and when.
Our biggest concern is a reliable replacement for RDS-postgres, which we've been using for about 13 years now and has been rock solid with the exception of a single, short period. Even then it was an update that caused high baseline CPU usage and AWS had it fixed in a few days.
Cost isn't the primary concern - though lower costs would be a nice side effect.
Shopping list:
- Good OpenTofu (or Terraform) support
- Reliable
- Good managed database (we could roll our own here if needed, I just don't wanna).
- Canadian DC
Nothing we do requires high performance or anything vendor specific. We also roll our own o11y and don't use AWS's vendor-specific solutions (at least not primarily).
I'm in the exact same boat (Canadian + same requirements). If you settle on something I would love to hear your experiences. While looking around I did find a Canadian provider:
I hadn't heard of FullHost, and I agree, something seems off with their offerings. The site is so noisy. This really stood out to me in their "DevOps Paas" database section: "An Innovative Approach to Clustered Databases".
Like, I totally understand marketing is marketing, but I don't want an innovative approach to foundational technologies. These are things that we know how to work and operate well. Now maybe I'm not their target market, but I want a careful, thoughtful approach.
Also, while I'm sure there are incredibly talented, smart people working at these more local hosting / cloud companies, please, please don't try to innovate with bread and butter services... just make it work, day in, day out. That's what I want. It's why we're still on AWS.
Anyway, I sent FullHost sales a little note with some questions. Will report back.
Update: no terraform support (sales rep didn’t even know what that was) but claimed API support - which would sadly mean rolling our own provider. Not ideal.
They tried to suggest their in house Click-Ops layer (they compared it to Cloudformation) was adequate - which is a bit suspect.
They did offer some significant amount of access for exploration for a flat rate of $100. I might just poke around though I really don’t want to spend my time writing an OpenTofu provider.
My thinking on this has shifted a bit, I'm now just thinking I'll set up on Digital Ocean's Toronto data centre. I believe (assume is the right word, I guess) that they have a Canadian subsidiary (I found this: https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.digi...), and if Trump did issue an executive order cutting off Canadian access to American technology, I would hope this would be enough isolation to at least give me enough time to migrate elsewhere without customer impact. Who knows.
Although I still haven't ruled out giving OVH a try.
My email address is in my profile, happy to keep in touch if you turn up other options!
I know OCI isn't popular around here, but it ticks all the boxes you listed. Managed Postgres, Terraform, and Toronto/Vancouver regions. It'll end up being roughly half the cost of AWS at list for your average EC2/RDS/S3 workload.
I worked at a startup that was a supplier to Oracle for a while and had to work directly with their OCI API team. While I loathed the hubris of the “I work for Oracle” employees - the one thing they were absolutely militant about was legacy support and ensuring that if something was working it stayed working.
That said, part of the desire to get off AWS is finding slightly less nefarious set of characters to hand money to and Ellison (and his lot) doesn’t fit the bill.
Indeed. But that doesn't solve the issue that OVH's reputation for their Canadian DCs isn't great from the (again limited) information I have. If we had heard consistently positive things, we'd be there (or strongly considering them). A few platform engineers I worked with had worked at OVH in Canada - again no stellar reports sadly.
My experience as well. Working in Scala primarily, it tends to be very good at following the constructs of the project.
Using a specific Monad-transformer regularly? It'll use that pattern, and often very well, handling all the wrapping and unwrapping needed to move data types about (at least well enough that the odd case it misses some wrapping/unwrapping is easy to spot and manage).
A custom GPT or GEM with the same source files, and those models regularly fail to maintain style and context, often suggesting solutions that might be fine in isolation but make little sense in the context of a larger codebase. It's almost like they never reliably refer to the code included in the project/GPT/GEM.
Claude on the other hand is so consistent about referring to existing artifacts that, as you approach the limit of project size (which is admittedly small) you can use up your entire 5-hour block of credits with just a few back-and-forths.
"low quality users"? I think you mean folks trying to assess if it's a low quality product.
I just couldn't finish this thing. Disdain mixed in with some wild understanding of the world.
The fact that we so often care about DAU/MAU as a key metric for running a business continues to be one of the many issues some of us face when trying to build "quality" businesses of any size/scale.
"here at wannabeMegaCorp our mission is numberGoUp"
cool cool I'm out (even if I missed a later point). I'm all for reading a take I don't agree with, but this was something else entirely.
I've tried Nix on a couple of occasions, most recently about two months ago, and ended up coming to the conclusion that it's just not for me.
I can see the value in a completely declarative configuration for my OS.
But the hurdles to get something worthwhile out of that value prop are just too high with my (low) level of skill (in this area) coupled with the limited time I have to build new skills. There are other things I want to invest my time in, but I can totally see this being where someone wants to spend some of their time.
I've never found setting up a Linux distro the way I want it particularly hard and once in a while I like to just start from a blank slate to see what's new—so yeah, not for me.
From what I've seen they've targeted the low end in price, but solid mid-range in performance. It's hard to know if that's a strategy to get started (likely) with price increases down the road or they're really that competitive.
Intel's iGPUs were low end. Battlemage looks firmly mid-range at the moment with between 4060/4070 performance in a lot of cases.
Update: It's picky about the Wayland compositor and I didn't notice that. Couldn't get it to work under Kwin (didn't try very hard but life's a bit too short for that).
But we decided to drop Adobe after some of their recent shenanigans and moved to a set of tools that didn't have this ability and, frankly, we didn't really miss it that much. Certainly not enough to ever give Adobe another cent.