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AWS mistakes to avoid

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Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#191

Post by bbrazil »

comex wrote: post #173
bobbyi_settv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoDB? SES? Cloudwatch? If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't neces…

$20k/month is $240k/year, which is at least two developer salaries. Do you really need two full time devops/whatever to manage the open source equivalents to the AWS services? Aren't there tools that can provide a similarly high level/seamless/polished experience running on your own computer, using your choice of cloud provider as the backend? If not, why not? (I wouldn't know - I don't even run a website, and if I d…

It depends on which services, but for simpler services with well understood open source equivalents (e.g. route53 and BIND) you can probably manage two per sysadmin at a similar quality to AWS with a basic API. For something like RDS or Redshift, if you're very lucky you'll get away with one sysadmin per service.

This covers not just running the services, but keeping up to date with security updates, scaling the systems, feature additions, bug fixes and keeping up with the state of the art.

Services like RDS are an amazing net cost saving for small to medium users. Something like Cloudfront would cost you a million just to get going. Raw EC2 is nearer break even.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#193

Post by hrez »

siddharth_mal wrote: post #13

I'd like to add two more: 1) Not giving out your access and secret keys in scripts/buckets. 2) Always using IAM roles with your EC2

IAM roles is ok as long as you realize that anything and anybody on that instance gets access to those credentials.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#194

Post by bfung »

comex wrote: post #173
bobbyi_settv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoDB? SES? Cloudwatch? If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't neces…

$20k/month is $240k/year, which is at least two developer salaries. Do you really need two full time devops/whatever to manage the open source equivalents to the AWS services? Aren't there tools that can provide a similarly high level/seamless/polished experience running on your own computer, using your choice of cloud provider as the backend? If not, why not? (I wouldn't know - I don't even run a website, and if I d…

From a management standpoint, it takes at least 2 developers to run something equivalent. Perhaps not full time, but it doesn't scale out that much - not more than 10 highly available services per team. A good example of this is roughly a 3 instance RabbitMQ cluster used by ~100 people.

1. The "Bus Factor" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

2. Context switching - if you have a developer that also works on coding or other things.

So maybe it's not a full $240k/year for only 1 service, but the price in the door IS that. 2 to 3 extra services will cost no more - that's where AWS will make the money.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#195

Post by albertoleal »

Naomarik wrote: post #189
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really not trying to compare Linode to AWS here. I just felt that it was necessary to mention that I work for Linode because there _is_ some overlap. I'm really also not trying to sell anyone on Linode in particular. I'm pointing out that from my own personal experience, AWS is grossly overpriced and worse than the alternatives for a large number of use-cases.

AWS is insanely overpriced. It's weird to me that everyone jumping on AWS and some of their customers never come close to attracting the internet traffic required to set up CloudFormation. I think if you're starting a webapp out of your own pocket and not millions of dollars of investors, it makes sense to save where you can. Using locust.io, I've seen that my current site on two $10/month Linodes can scale up to app…

What are some alternatives to AWS? Are there realistic alternatives?

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#196

Post by kelnos »

comex wrote: post #173
bobbyi_settv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoDB? SES? Cloudwatch? If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't neces…

$20k/month is $240k/year, which is at least two developer salaries. Do you really need two full time devops/whatever to manage the open source equivalents to the AWS services? Aren't there tools that can provide a similarly high level/seamless/polished experience running on your own computer, using your choice of cloud provider as the backend? If not, why not? (I wouldn't know - I don't even run a website, and if I d…

Do you really need two full time devops/whatever to manage the open source equivalents to the AWS services?

No, you need many more than that. AWS's offerings are complex systems, each backed by multiple large teams of developers and operations people. And that's not just because they have tons of customers.

You want to run a partitioned, replicated data store with five nines of reliability? Good luck doing even just that with two people. Throw in metrics (CloudWatch), a queuing system (SQS), monitoring/failover with on-demand provisioning (EC2 + auto scaling groups), and you're talking a lot more than just two devops people... well, unless you want them both on-call 24/7/365, and you want them to burn out in a matter of weeks.

AWS isn't perfect by any means, and you can certainly argue that it can be overpriced... but maybe you pick and choose, and use AWS for the things you don't have expertise in or time for, and roll your own for the rest. The nice thing is that AWS lets you offload all that stuff when you're small and don't want to or can't retain that kind of expertise in-house, and then you can focus on actually building your awesome product that runs on AWS's plumbing. And when you have more time and people later, you can look into doing things differently to save money, piece by piece, when it makes sense to do so.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#197

Post by jasode »

albertoleal wrote: post #195
Naomarik wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is insanely overpriced. It's weird to me that everyone jumping on AWS and some of their customers never come close to attracting the internet traffic required to set up CloudFormation. I think if you're starting a webapp out of your own pocket and not millions of dollars of investors, it makes sense to save where you can. Using locust.io, I've seen that my current site on two $10/month Linodes can scale up to app…

What are some alternatives to AWS? Are there realistic alternatives?

The "alternatives" depend on your situation.

Picture a continuum between brain-dead simple websites and business-critical complex websites:

  simple:  static website, WordPress blog
  moderate:  small business CMS, etc
  complex:  Netflix, AirBNB
If you're running a simple WordPress blog, the AWS prices are absurdly overkill. For this use-case, there are a zillion alternatives. Linode, Digital Ocean, Rackspace bare metal, etc, etc.

On the other end of the spectrum, you want to run a high-availability website with failover across multiple regions like Netflix. You need the value-added "services" of a comprehensive cloud provider (the "I" and "S" in "IaaS" as in "Infrastructure Services"). For that scenario, there are currently 4 big competitors: AWS, MS Azure, Google Compute Cloud, and IBM SoftLayer. However, many observers see that Google and IBM are not keeping pace with AWS and Azure on features so at the moment, it's more of a 2 horse race than a 4.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of cost comparisons showing AWS to be overpriced are based on comparing Amazon's EC2 vs bare metal. The EC2 component is a small part of the complete AWS portfolio.[1] If you're doing more complicated websites, you have to include the costs of Linux admins + devops programmers to reinvent what AWS has out of the box. (The non-EC2 services.) Even if you use OpenStack as a baseline for a "homegrown AWS", you'll still need extensive staffing to configure and customize it for your needs. It may very well turn out that homegrown on Linode is cheaper but most articles on the web do not have quality cost analysis on the more complicated business scenarios. Anecdotes yes! But comprehensive unbiased spreadsheets with realistic cost comparisons?!? No.

[1]https://aws.amazon.com/products/

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#198

Post by kelnos »

chucky_z wrote: post #137
alttab wrote: post #2

Also, dont use Dynamo unless you have a really good reason. "It scales better than MySQL" is not a good reason. Have fun migrating data and re-indexing constantly!

What about as a kind of Redis stand-in? I'm curious about the DynamoDB PHP session driver. It sounds like you have a lot of experience with Dynamo. All the use-cases I seem to keep coming up with are more for storing global environment keys outside of the environment itself and using a large number of IAM roles to access individual keys, and as a kind of throwaway 'I need to store this somewhere, but it doesn't reall…

Not the grandparent, but I have a lot of experience with DynamoDB as well. I migrated a self-managed, sharded redis store to DDB close to a year ago, and what it really depends on are your read and write patterns, and whether or not you can live with the opacity of what DDB is doing behind the scenes.

An example: if you provision X capacity units, you're actually provisioning X/N capacity units per partition. AWS is mostly transparent (via documentation) about when a table splits into a new partition (I say "mostly" because I was told by AWS that the numbers in the docs aren't quite right), but you'll have no idea how the keys are hashed between partitions, and you won't know if you have a hot partition that's getting slammed because your keys aren't well-distributed. Well, no, I take that back -- you will know, because you'll get throttled even though you're not consuming anywhere near the capacity you've provisioned. You just won't know how to fix it without a lot of trial and error (which isn't great in a production system). If your r/w usage isn't consistent, you'll either have periods of throttling, or you'll have to over-provision and waste money. There's no auto-scaling like you can do with EC2.

Not trying to knock the product: still using DDB... but getting it to a point where I felt reasonably confident about it took way longer than managing my own data store... and then they had a 6-hour outage one early, early Sunday morning a couple months ago. Possibly solution: dual-writes to two AWS regions at once and the ability to auto-pivot reads to the backup region. Which of course doubles provisioning costs.

Ok, maybe I'm knocking it a little. It's a good product, but there are definitely tradeoffs.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#199

Post by BogusIKnow »

ddevault wrote: post #103

Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…

I'm working at a medium, growing startup and wonder when/why to use AWS?

We currently use a mixture of root servers (DB) and VPS (App, HAProxy, NGinx) at a hoster.

* We use a Docker/Consul/Nomad/SaltStack setup to install new servers for replacing broken ones and growth

* App setup is Redis/Disque, Postgres(DB, BI) and app servers

* New dedicated servers we get in around 1h, VPS in around 1min (Only VPS over API)

* We have around 0.2 Ops FTE (devs rollout apps, ops for security updates, new infrastructure etc. and incidents)

* Price seems to be way below Amazon

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#200

Post by BogusIKnow »

bbrazil wrote: post #191
comex wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20k/month is $240k/year, which is at least two developer salaries. Do you really need two full time devops/whatever to manage the open source equivalents to the AWS services? Aren't there tools that can provide a similarly high level/seamless/polished experience running on your own computer, using your choice of cloud provider as the backend? If not, why not? (I wouldn't know - I don't even run a website, and if I d…

It depends on which services, but for simpler services with well understood open source equivalents (e.g. route53 and BIND) you can probably manage two per sysadmin at a similar quality to AWS with a basic API. For something like RDS or Redshift, if you're very lucky you'll get away with one sysadmin per service. This covers not just running the services, but keeping up to date with security updates, scaling the syst…

"Something like Cloudfront would cost you a million just to get going."

We've used CDNs in the past, way below a million/year for a medium, growing startup. care to elaborate?

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