Earlier quoted context omitted.
A million dollars buys a shitload of fast 1U dual socket xeon servers each with 512GB of RAM.
-looks at this datacenter- Well, actually it doesn't. RAM and Xeons are expensive.
So how many does it buy?
A million-dollar engineering problem
141–150 of 265 posts
Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#142For us the ECS autoscaling feature is way too naive. We need to do our own controller on some more responsive metrics. The customization support is pretty bad.
Would you mind saying more about what you had to build, and what you would liked to see?
One thing I'd like to see in the future is scaling actions that supported multipliers, as well as metric math support (scale service to request_count/acceptable_requests_per_service).
Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Close! It's Drift (drift.com), not Intercom.
Thanks David. You're right it's Drift. I'm the CEO. Love working with Segment, Mixpanel, Clearbit and other great companies to deliver a personalized experience on their sites like in this example.
We just published an article on how Segment doubled their sales using Drift. Here's all the details on how it works: https://blog.drift.com/segment-case-study/
Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#144A friend of mine was annoyed that a small service he liked was shutting down. He contacted the developer who said that they were shutting it down because the server costs were higher than the money they were making. They were spending 5k a month on AWS crap and claimed it was impossible to get any lower. He helped them consolidate everything onto a single rented dedicated server costing 400 a month. Now the service i…
A lot of people are in denial that there isn't using some magic efficiency to cloud services that other datacenters don't have. Primary cost savings on cloud VM's is from overprovisioning. The more abstracted away the service is from the hardware, the more they can overprovision without customers noticing. The 50%+ profit margins have to be coming from somewhere. AWS is not made of magic, it's made from largely the s…
This is just factually incorrect. AWS hard partitions all instance types, except T2 (which are overcommitted, and clearly advertised as such: "burstable").
So, if you provision an x1.32xlarge with 128 vCPU and 1.92TB of RAM, you get a single, dedicated host with that much CPU and memory. Nobody else gets it - it's dedicated to you 100%.
The profit AWS is making is purely due to datacenter efficiency and being able to automate their operations at scale.
Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#145A friend of mine was annoyed that a small service he liked was shutting down. He contacted the developer who said that they were shutting it down because the server costs were higher than the money they were making. They were spending 5k a month on AWS crap and claimed it was impossible to get any lower. He helped them consolidate everything onto a single rented dedicated server costing 400 a month. Now the service i…
The company I work for is backed by a bunch of data in a MySQL database, scripts to aggregate and process more data into that database, and simple internal webapp to both manage inventory, track tasks and run lots of reporting on the aggregated data. We made do for quite a while on a single colocated database with 32 GB of RAM and a few fast SSDs (for the time, which was about 6 years ago), and a few multi-TB archiva…
May I make a suggestion: Try Amazon Aurora. You'll get 500,000 read operations per second, and 100,000 writes per second. It supports up to 64TB of total capacity, and 244GB RAM on your primary master. You can also have up to 15 read replicas with a similar footprint. You should seriously try it. It's amazing.
Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Depends on the service's business model obviously, but there are services where the convenience will more than offset the extra costs. Once the company grows big enough, yes, then it might make sense to go off AWS (or not - see: Netflix).
I've always found it interesting that Netflix has not at least tried to go off AWS; if only because Amazon has a competing service with Amazon video. I'm sure its not an easy problem to solve, but Dropbox has gone off AWS as well; it seems like they would be much better served with their own "Video Cloud" with specialized hardware for streaming/processing videos.
Netflix realizes that the value presented by AWS for outweighs the costs. If you feel differently, you should probably ask yourself what information you are missing, rather than just dismissing Netflix and their decision. It's clear that Netflix knows more about operating applications with tens of millions of simultaneous global users than most companies...
Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#147Umm... i take issue with the comment "distribution is essentially free". nonononnononooooo. Other than the rare case of virality, I'd like to know in what software industry where distribution is essentially free - i'm happy to be wrong about this, let me know.
the rest of the article was fine.
Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#148A friend of mine was annoyed that a small service he liked was shutting down. He contacted the developer who said that they were shutting it down because the server costs were higher than the money they were making. They were spending 5k a month on AWS crap and claimed it was impossible to get any lower. He helped them consolidate everything onto a single rented dedicated server costing 400 a month. Now the service i…
anon account for obvious reasons. Came here to share my story, which is very close to what you describe. tl;dr: Moved from AWS to colo in desperate attempt to make balance sheet more attractive. It worked. Before I took over the engineering bits at this plateau/failing startup, they were all in on AWS. Monthly costs were running at around £3k. Which is not much, but since the revenue was tiny, the costs of hosting wa…
Of course, because how do you scale up when you're building everything yourself? Suddenly you have to hire a whole bunch of hardware guys, storage guys, db guys etc, etc.
Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#149Re: A million-dollar engineering problem
#150I work in a start up, we own all our own hardware, and it is HELL. We are forced to pay extremely large sums of money to upgrade our infrastructure as any purchase requires a redundant piece as well. For example we have used 90% of our SANs storage, our IO is suffering and now were looking at purchasing two $10k SANs to upgrade. In the meantime, we have probably spent over 10k worth of development time to compress, c…
Why is it always colo vs cloud in these arguments? What about renting everything monthly from ovh, rackspace, softlayer etc? Many of them can provision dedicated servers within minutes, too.
Also some combination of cloud and private servers. If I was starting up a Netflix competitor for instance, the site could probably run fine from owned hardware, but the content itself would be better off being cloud based.