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Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

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Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#141

Post by an_opabinia »

viraptor wrote: post #10

He 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…

Sounds like you're listing the enterprise features people pay for. If Amazon sells it so cheaply why don't enterprises go direct to Amazon instead of paying a SaaS provider like you?

It's about economics not accounting.

Once you get into cost comparisons you've already lost. AWS is purpose built for an accounting narrative.

To illustrate what a dead end accounting is, accounting can't explain things like, "I spend money today to possibly make money more than 1 year in the future." That's basically every startup and accounting doesn't have a story for it.

Of course a free tier looks good accounting-wise. How does one "account" for lock-in though? If you can't figure that out you will not convince bean counters to consider alternatives.

And good luck teaching economics (as opposed to accounting) to bean counters.

Here are a few compelling explanations: the cheapest bid (i.e. free tier) is always the worst one. Some people are so addicted to accounting storytelling - as a way to organize their world, a whole philosophy - they are actually always convinced the cheapest bid is always the best one.

Another: AWS is so overpriced, the $50k you spend on developing against AWS services to use $500k of "free credits" will deliver less value than $50k you spend developing for a single vertically scaled beige box computer with simple ergonomics and running it.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#142

Post by hobby-coder-guy »

x0x0 wrote: post #133
tw04 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to move a single customer to Amazon that fired the FTE who was managing on-prem infrastructure and chalked it up to a cost-savings move. . The idea of cutting headcount is a fallacy. In small shops the guy that was managing on-prem infrastructure is now doing that (because it turns out you still need switches and phones and routers and firewalls even if you host things in AWS) as well as managing the AWS i…

We're a small company who avoided the hire. And we don't bother with a firewall at our office -- the only things on the office network are laptops, phones, printers, and sonos. Basically, if you model senior eng time as $5k/week -- not even counting the opportunity cost -- you'll understand why AWS. While I definitely think AWS is very expensive for the servers, they are not overall expensive. Again, setting up Cloud…

$5k per week?

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#143

Post by devonkim »

ehnto wrote: post #44
KingOfCoders wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

As an ops and infrastructure engineer I cringe every time people talk about trying to automate all these processes early in the life of an organization or if there’s zero way for the company to have explosive growth. Not every company is going to need to rapidly scale up and down and I rarely see cloud saving money unless one’s infrastructure is pretty garbage already. Cloud lift and shifts are like bad rewrites inheriting all the architectural problems and increasing opex for the sake of a “cloud” stamp aka cloud washing.

But I do recommend companies have a means of deploying stuff to AWS and doing basic security there for clients that really require AWS. Having a VPC ready to go costs nothing operational and is good for at least having some semblance of collective skill with a major public cloud provider.

Invariably though when I see undisciplined developers take on colo style hosting systems become brittle and unable to accept changes and with any success it becomes a Herculean task to deploy new features without putting something important at risk. This results in more time spent on systems archaeology for new engineers eventually than creating new features or improving maintainability.

In 2020 I’d recommend developing as much as possible on PaaS type platforms like Heroku, a managed K8S, or even App Engine to avoid more bike shedding that really doesn’t buy a company anything materially advantageous early on like deciding which kind of EC2 instance to standardize on. Until engineers know what to optimize and concentrate upon in terms of process and there’s perhaps tens of thousands in monthly infrastructure costs most skilled (read: expensive) ops engineers won’t really be of much value except offloading work that developers shouldn’t have been thinking about in the first place.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#144

Post by wazoox »

drchopchop wrote: post #78
viraptor wrote: post #10

He 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 m…

Then you remember that for years, Stack Overflow ran out of a couple of well administered servers. YAGNI. KISS. People forget the basics because "infrastructure astronautics" is fun, and it probably helps make a beautiful resume, too.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#146

Post by deegles »

smolder wrote: post #132
ndomer wrote: post #12

One big thing not mentioned here: the massive collection of managed services AWS gives you at no cost. The biggest example is probably IAM, which makes it easy to control which servers can take what actions on which other services. And can also be integrated directly into external tools like Vault. Want to use service discovery? No need to set up Consul/Istio/etc., just use the managed service. Same with load balance…

> At no cost That's so ridiculous I'm not sure how to reply or even interpret your comment.

Maybe they mean that if you're already using some services, you don't need to implement another in the same way you would when self-hosting.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#147

Post by sparrc »

AWS is not optimized or built for people who want to reserve their own personal server for a year or more.

Another cost option that the author didn't mention are spot instances. An r4.16xlarge spot instance in Paris for one year would cost $8,900, about half the price of OVH and that is assuming that the customer needs the server 24x7. Having a server 24x7 obviously wouldn't work on spot, but the point is that AWS is built more for customers who are frequently creating, destroying, and scaling their clusters based on need.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#148

Post by closeparen »

Hypothesis: the big three US cloud providers are not really trying to be competitive in the European market. Their EU datacenters price in the convenience of a consistent dev/ops story when a US company extends its primarily US footprint into Europe. They are a bad deal for entirely European ops, but this story doesn’t generalize to the US. US dedicated server pricing is much closer to cloud pricing.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#149

Post by agilob »

Amazon hides a lot of extra paid features that are free in dedicated servers. I got cut by their practices of hiding prices while trying to experiment with "free-tried" someone recommended me. Amazon made it really easy to subscribe to paid features. After first $50 bill I moved to kimsufi where I have more memory, disk, transfer and public addresses for €5/monthly.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#150

Post by rbanffy »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #126
NoOneNew wrote: post #116

Um, the real reason CFOs go for cloudserver solutions is tax reasons. The tax breaks for "leasing" instead of owning, are a cheap way of an exec looking good to a board (plus it's easier to do creative accounting). I promise you, this accounts for easily 70% of equipment leasing/renting agreements, no matter the industry. Construction, printing, food industry, etc. They get a full tax break on the lease and on the se…

I've assumed this for a while, because so many companies appear to be doing this - do you have any links to the tax savings as I'd like to understand this in more detail?

If you don't need what cloud providers offer you, from hosted databases, access control, blue-green deployment, load balancing, auto-scaling, multiple detacenters, etc, there is little point in going with something like AWS.

OTOH, if you decide to do it yourself, you'll need to engineer a lot of what you need. That costs time and money. In the very low-end, it's cheaper to go bare VM. As size and complexity grows, it'll be cheaper to go with a cloud provider for a while, until you reach a point where you have so much infrastructure and so many services running that moving parts of it to on-prem will be the cheapest option. At this point, you will be your own little AWS.

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