Lenny Gordon

What were the arguments in favour of SPAs in the first place?

I'm finding it interesting that most of the top HN submissions (by popularity) matching "single page app" are critical, not positive. First 15 follow, all but 5 are negative:

- You probably don't need a single-page app (https://journal.plausible.io/you-probably-dont-need-a-single-page-app) 816 points | 6 years ago | 499 comments

- A single-page app is almost always worse than a multi-page app (https://www.gregnavis.com/articles/the-architecture-no-one-needs.html) 289 points | 6 years ago | 145 comments

- The myth that you can’t build interactive web apps except as single page app (https://htmx.org/essays/you-cant/) 262 points | 4 months ago | 143 comments

- Building a single-page app with Htmx (https://jakelazaroff.com/words/building-a-single-page-app-with-htmx/) 252 points | 5 months ago | 143 comments

- AWS Lambda as a back end for a single-page app (http://lg.io/2015/05/16/the-future-is-now-and-its-using-aws-lambda.html) 229 points | 10 years ago | 73 comments

- Create your own dysfunctional single-page app (https://tinnedfruit.com/articles/create-your-own-dysfunctional-single-page-app.html) 208 points | 6 years ago | 138 comments

- The Single-Page-App Morality Play (https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/single-page-app-morality-play/) 207 points | 3 years ago | 131 comments

- Todos: a Backbone.js example Single-Page-App (with…

I don't know, I worked in the gaming industry as well. Only left last year, but even then I was seeing a growing desire to move to host systems: https://nexus.vert.gg/gaming-on-amazon-s-ec2-83b178f47a34 or https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html

Larry Land even started working on Azure solutions. They were more stable, however, more expensive.

With all that said, there's definitely an interest to be hardware light. So this move into a hosted service should probably be pioneered by the big three hosts: AWS, Azure and Google. They are the biggest consumers of hardware at the moment. And have a hell of a lot more financial backup then Onlive (who only had one product to sell). Xbox has but to partner with their Azure counterparts. Although, I grant you there's probably little incentive due to them being hardware sellers.

All this hardware could have been used for better purposes, of course. Like AI training or Pharma... but like in Stross' Accelerando - it's all going to be used to run economics 2.0 anyway.

I've done it (Steam "in-home" streaming, over OpenVPN to AWS). It's works fairly well. Latency wasn't an issue for playing Skyrim, but for competitive multiplayer FPSes it's probably a no-go. You can tune the bandwidth vs. quality in Steam.

I followed this guide: https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html

I found managing the VM on AWS to be a terrible pain. I may have misunderstood it, but it seems you can't just turn off a spot instance, have it persist and start it up again later. I had to snapshot the VM and make a new AMI after each run. You could possibly omit this if you don't want to persist the disk between runs.

Make sure not to accidentally leave your VM running or you'll wish you'd just bought a gaming rig; GPU instances are expensive, but it's fine for a few hours at a time.

As an alternative, I found: https://www.paperspace.com/gaming but I've not used it myself.

Check things like this out: http://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html

If you've close enough to an AWS datacenter, you can reasonably play modern 3D games on a remote machine over the internet.

The internet is _surprisingly_ fast. There's a rant somewhere from John Carmack were he points out he can get packets to London faster than he can change pixels on his monitor...

Edit: See John Carmack's answer here: http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen

Exactly: a few reasons.

Moreover

1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr.

https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html

2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud.

3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase.

Alternatives

Geforce Now https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/

Parsec https://www.parsecgaming.com/

Make your own with EC2 https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html