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A million-dollar engineering problem

segment.com

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Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#201

Post by hueving »

daurnimator wrote: post #190
brianwawok wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need a DB guy if you host it on your server or AWSs? You have a DB either way. You can have a guy if you want or not... Physical location means nothing.

DB guy to tune the instance the database runs on + figure out your streaming backups etc. It's not a full time job, but it's a couple of days a week; and completely taken care of if you use RDS

A couple of days a week? That's ridiculous, once you have established procedures the only thing left is regular OS maintenance tasks which are the same as the rest of your servers.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#202

Post by hueving »

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…

Gross. AWS is becoming the Cisco of cloud computing. Get people hooked when they are low revenue and twist the screws in later when they get big.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#203

Post by hinkley »

kafkaesq wrote: post #116
QuinnyPig wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point simply not using AWS is a competitive advantage. Respectfully, I'm going to disagree. I consult full time on AWS cost optimization / reduction / understanding. If you blindly run things on AWS without an understanding of the costing model, that'll work for a time. As you scale, you start to realize "oh my god it runs on money." There are myriad ways around that, but a blanket "never use AWS" isn't goi…

A blanket "never use AWS" isn't going to address it constructively. But that's not what the commenter was saying, of course. More like (paraphrasing) "before you go full-hog on AWS, do some simple math first." Which an amazingly high percentage of people neglect to do, these days.

Weeks of work can save hours of meetings.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#204

Post by abalone »

bpicolo wrote: post #168
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?

The goal is just having a compute pool where you don't have to care at all where things are actually running. It definitely depends on the use case, but I could imagine more, smaller units allowing for more granular (and therefore a bit more cost-effective) scaling.

But isn't that actually less granular that one container that can size itself optimally? I.e. it could use as little or a much resources available on the machine. And it would eliminate any redundancies among the containers of the same type.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#205

Post by phamilton »

YZF wrote: post #193
Negitivefrags wrote: post #16

A 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…

If you have a more or less fixed workload then AWS ends up being a lot more expensive. If you have a highly variable workload and you have a bunch of servers sitting idle most of the time then it becomes more competitive. AWS lets a small startup go from one server to 10K servers without breaking sweat, at least in theory, but it's not for everyone. At the same time not everyone wants to build DCs with thousands of s…

The variable workload has been a little less important with reserved instances. They used to have a "light/heavy utilization" pricing structure but now it's basically cheaper to reserve the instance than it is to scale it up and down, unless you need the extra capacity less than 60% of the time.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#206

Post by [deleted] »

hueving wrote: post #202
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…

Gross. AWS is becoming the Cisco of cloud computing. Get people hooked when they are low revenue and twist the screws in later when they get big.

[deleted]

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#208

Post by edanm »

hueving wrote: post #202
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…

Gross. AWS is becoming the Cisco of cloud computing. Get people hooked when they are low revenue and twist the screws in later when they get big.

In what way is this gross?

They're giving people what is essentially a loan, which they are uniquely able to give, to help them start a business, in the hopes that this will be an even bigger business. This is almost the definition of a win-win.

Customers are free to leave at any time or work with other providers, but they choose AWS because they give them more value.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#210

Post by jaggederest »

rumcajz wrote: post #195

Given that Elite game [1] used to run on Sinclair with Z80 processor and 48kB of memory, any complaints about the costs nowadays sound ridiculous. If our software infrastructure was coded by Elite programmers, we would be able to run in at 0.01% of the cost. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)

> It was written in machine code using assembly language, giving much care to maximum compactness of code.

From the link. It seems unlikely that people would/could build applications in the modern world from scratch in assembler. Start with reimplementing the entire HTTP parsing engine and go from there? No thanks.

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