A million-dollar engineering problem

Post by patrickg_zill » Fri, Mar 17, 2017, 12:55 AM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #144

throwawaysed wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by brianwawok » Fri, Mar 17, 2017, 12:59 AM UTC

ig1 wrote: post #157

However they miss the easiest fix: Calling their account rep at AWS and cutting a deal. AWS loves startups that could end up being huge customers so they're willing to slash bills upfront to help you get to growth stage; not only will they assign you an account rep but they'll have a rep whose job it is to build a good relationship with your VC. Speak to your account rep. Have your VC speak to their Amazon rep. Push…

Post by tyingq » Fri, Mar 17, 2017, 1:07 AM UTC

stemuk wrote: post #126

tyingq wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess the network egress costs, specifically, might justify a blanket statement like... "If you have content where you can't put a cache in front of it, and it drives significant bandwidth use, then AWS is not a great option"

This. I really feel like egress traffic costs is the most overlooked issue with popular cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud. Charging 9 or 12 cents for a mere GB of regular traffic is just insane, keeping in mind that even most CDNs are cheaper. Data driven applications on AWS are already expensive because of the high traffic costs, but storing/serving media on S3 single handedly lets your bill explode. For every…

Post by brianwawok » Fri, Mar 17, 2017, 1:09 AM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #148

that_colo_guy wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by bpicolo » Fri, Mar 17, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

abalone wrote: post #153

> In some cases, we’re currently packing 100-200 containers per instance. I have a very basic "Docker 101" question here.. Can someone explain how you might get to >100 containers on a given instance? That seems to imply that there are multiple containers of the same microservice running on one machine. Why would you pack duplicate containers like that instead of using one larger container?