I’m surprised no one has mentioned the number of data centers that AWS offers. Good luck using OVH anywhere but France/US east coast.
Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
71–80 of 338 posts
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get it that you’re indie and running web services from home? If you’re willing to share, I’d love to see what kind of apps (that aren’t “super critical”) one can from a cabinet from home.
"in house" doesn't necessarily mean in a residential home; it refers to "on premise" more generally. A previous company of mine did the same thing - they converted a maintenance closet into a server closet. Even with renovation costs to improve ventilation and electrical load to support the use case, it worked out substantially cheaper than cloud hosting. A few things we ran on it: - A large data infrastructure. We h…
Thank you for the info.
I got carried away mistaking “in house” for running a business (and hardware) from home!
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in an ecommerce agency environment and it can be quite frustrating. Every client, no matter how small, has been sold the spiel and had some guy come through and build a boutique cloud infrastructure, CI pipeline and development VM. As if traffic will increase 1000% by next week with no prior warning. It just doesn't happen like that. I spend half my time debugging Hyperscale Bullshit™ that the client never nee…
I did work for a YC startup that replaced my ~$100/mo Heroku app with a $5,000/mo AWS stack that nobody in the place knew how to manage. Their site was so ridiculously low traffic that I did some napkin math and figured out they were paying around $0.10 per web request.
Many (startup) SaaS companies (except metrics collectors e.g) have very low traffic from logged in users.
When I moved from an ecommerce company with 1000 logins/sec to a SaaS company I could not believe the low traffic :-)
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
From AWS' own marketing propaganda: How much would said clients have to invest in people and hardware otherwise? What if their application becomes an overnight success and needs to scale up fast? Sure, if it's an established company then using their own hardware (and people to set up and manage it) might make sense; iirc Dropbox is a fairly recent big player that made that move. But otherwise it's a big upfront inves…
For my own startup, I built a small cluster of 17 servers for just beneath $55K, and that had a month-to-month expense of $600 placed in a co-lo. In comparison, the same setup at AWS would be $96K per month. And it is not hard, easy in many ways. Do not be fooled, the cloud companies are peddling is an expensive scam.
Cloud companies are useful as long as you want what their selling. The best case is needing say 2 TB of ram for some workload or test that only going to take a few hours.
Or something like the Olympics where 95% of your demand comes in a predictable spike across a few days.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#75The article and the other posts in this thread miss the killer feature. Data security via backups. If I put my data in a manager DB and use S3 or equivalent I am more or less guaranteed to never lose data. Running bare metal in OVH can't provide that guarantee. The security of that data depends on the thoroughness and correctness of my back up policy. And those are almost guaranteed to be much worse than what AWS et al provide.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#76He kind of touches on this in point IV, but never mentioned specifically: the cost comparison is not AWS vs ovh. It's fragment-of-EC2 vs ovh. If you need a predefined small number of VMs and no other functionality, it would be silly to go with AWS. But on the other hand, if you want a set of servers of a given class spawning on demand, with traffic coming in via load balancers, with integrated certificate and DNS man…
Many people use AWS because everyone uses AWS. Many of my clients have no need for AWS but still use it, at least until the VC money runs out. Usually then I have to go first, then servers are moving to somewhere cheaper when a new CFO comes in.
At my company we colo at a few local datacenters and have do deal with a huge amount of pressure from our investors as to why we're not using AWS.
The points that always seem to come up:
* AWS is a known quantity and it's easier to evaluate our business with it.
* AWS provides "outage damage control" because AWS outages make the news and customers are more understanding. When our ISP has issues it just looks bad on us.
* Our company doesn't look as innovative because we're not cloud. Bleh.
Our app is compute, storage, and data transfer heavy but switching to AWS being a, literally, 10x cost for us is apparently not enough a good enough answer.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#77You actually get encryption out of the box on GCP. Your data is encrypted also at rest.
Do not compare apples with oranges, or compare them more fair.
Go to whatever provider you want. Make sure you know why you have choosen AWS or someone else.
For a lot of companies, the quality they get from GCP might be overkill, but don't get me wrong, infrastructure cost are often enough, in comparision to how critical they are, very cheap.
It might just be that it is easier for you to get another company to manage your AWS Account while they don't know anything about some other cloud provider and the additional cost is then just worth it.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#78He kind of touches on this in point IV, but never mentioned specifically: the cost comparison is not AWS vs ovh. It's fragment-of-EC2 vs ovh. If you need a predefined small number of VMs and no other functionality, it would be silly to go with AWS. But on the other hand, if you want a set of servers of a given class spawning on demand, with traffic coming in via load balancers, with integrated certificate and DNS man…
AWS gives you all the things you'd need to scale, without heavy up-front costs. There's a natural path from small instances -> bigger instances -> load balancers/ELB -> reserved instances (or spot if it fits your workload). For a smaller company, any savings you'd get from owned servers would be offset by much higher dev ops costs.
Plus, as mentioned, you get a vast menu of services to choose from, all of which are managed. Just in terms of databases alone, you could go with RDS (raw MySql/PG), Aurora, Dynamo, Elasticache/Redis, DocumentDB (Mongo) and more. Plus managed backups, failover, multi-AZ, security, and connectivity built-in.
If your team is filled with devops engineers, then, sure, go with the non-AWS route. But it's a lifesaver for agile companies who can't afford a lot of infrastructure work and need easy levers to scale, and can afford a modest markup.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people use AWS because everyone uses AWS. Many of my clients have no need for AWS but still use it, at least until the VC money runs out. Usually then I have to go first, then servers are moving to somewhere cheaper when a new CFO comes in.
I work in an ecommerce agency environment and it can be quite frustrating. Every client, no matter how small, has been sold the spiel and had some guy come through and build a boutique cloud infrastructure, CI pipeline and development VM. As if traffic will increase 1000% by next week with no prior warning. It just doesn't happen like that. I spend half my time debugging Hyperscale Bullshit™ that the client never nee…
You make it sound as if devops is the initiator of the complexity problems. This might well be in your case. My experience is the other way around.
I'm forced to think about stuff like Kubernetes because the devs are popping "micro-services" for almost anything and the answer to trying to keep things manageable is, hopefully, K8s.
Of course they then send funny memes and argue that K8s is overkill. Yet they have no idea how much a devops guy has to do to actually ramp up one of their multi-gigabyte container.
The whole micro-services mentality is proving to be backwards in my environment. It's seen as the answer to everything. "Oh we have a behemoth, let's just not use this part of the application and reimplement it somewhere else." In essence that's great. However, the grunt of the work is making tests to capture old behaviour/semantics; and who are the (indirect) clients of this piece of code. Ignoring a piece of code to death and reimplementing it somewhere else behind a socket is only part of the solution.
The hyperscalars are benefiting greatly of this mindset imo.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS also gives you a lot of cost savings for using Spot and signing contracts with minimum spends. Only a small shop pays full price for anything.
Okay but then you have to engineer your application around interuptable spot instances. You're also making a 36 month commitment when you sign that contract (generally buying the hardware for Amazon.)
> you have to engineer your application around interuptable spot instances
This is where your ALBs and ASGs come in. If your app doesn't use local writing and you can shift your caching to a shared cache, the cost savings are good.