god this is written so poorly it's hard to follow
Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
171–180 of 338 posts
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#172Earlier 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…
On top of that add the opportunity cost of spending all that time managing/setting on prem infrastructure Vs solving business problems....there’s a good reason AWS and the likes have millions of customers today.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#173Earlier 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.
I've seen this exact same thing happen to a company I used to work for. They had an enterprise B2B app that had extremely low traffic. The Heroku app worked fine but the CTO spent a year building a super complicated AWS stack as an exercise in resume building. After the AWS stack launch filed miserably and we had to switch back to Heroku the CTO quit and still has "migrated company to infrastructure as code AWS stack" on their Linkedin profile.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#174This is giving too much credit to organizations. In some Cloud providers arechosen plainly because some executive asked “So are we cloud?” And someone said “err I don’t think so” and then some other middle manager was charged with “make us cloud please” and it was never a question of what actually makes sense just a “do we side with Amazon, Google or Microsoft?”.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#175I wonder how many billions of dollars worth of unsold cars are just 'lying around'. How many billions of dollars worth of fire trucks are parked right now doing nothing?
Given redundancy and inventory logistics, once your industry gets to some number of billions of dollars of equipment, you're goddamn right there's going to be a billion dollars worth of equipment lying around. It's not the magnitude, it's the ratio that you should get upset about, if there's even anything to get upset about.
There's also rates of consumption versus rates of production. If consumption rates are variable (eg, ramp-up to Black Friday), there is only so much variability I can manage in production. I can produce at a mostly-stable rate all year and let inventory accumulate during slow months, or I can improve my variability, but the cost is more complicated management of people, and increased likelihood of late surprises.
Also, don't data centers collide with public sector timelines? If you have to start building a data center by November 1 and you try to get your approvals all to happen on October 31, you're going to fail, and possibly get fired.
You try to line those up ahead of time, maybe break ground before the next election so they can't stop it, or someone else sucks up the surplus grid power in that substation. If it's built early, it's sitting around waiting for demand to use it. But at least you have it.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would guess SO had a relatively small number of employees and their servers were running a pretty straight-forward CRUD app and a database. Comparing that to the heterogeneous workloads that large organizations deal with is a bit silly. No doubt there's still a lot of fat to trim in those large organizations, but trimming that fat is rarely their largest opportunity (much to the chagrin of those of us who like simp…
It is the World top 50 site by Alexa. Comparatively speaking even compare them to the same CRUD app and DB, most are using 5 to 10x more servers with 1/2 to 1/5 of the traffic.
It is a large site by traffic measure but I would guess the traffic is heavily read only. Managing workloads with more data mutation introduces different complexities which mean you can't just cache everything and accept the TTL for writes based on cache invalidation.
edit: To be clear, not saying SO isn't an achievement, but its one type of use case that yields a really simple tech stack.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SO also ran on .net, which is a far cry from the typical startup server load running on Python, Ruby, or PHP.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> AWS gives you all the things you'd need to scale, without heavy up-front costs A startup doesn't need AWS right off the bat. Planning for scale right from the beginning is a way to quickly bleed $. Of course, if you have VC money, why not spend that cash right? Where I work we've started non-AWS and have continued non-AWS. We don't have a team of devops engineers, but rather a team where there are a engineers who _…
> A startup doesn't need AWS right off the bat. Planning for scale right from the beginning is a way to quickly bleed $. Of course, if you have VC money, why not spend that cash right?
Especially when the alternative is to hear a lot of, "What? You don't expect to scale? I thought you took this seriously."
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#179I wonder how many billions of dollars worth of unsold cars are just 'lying around'. How many billions of dollars worth of fire trucks are parked right now doing nothing? Given redundancy and inventory logistics, once your industry gets to some number of billions of dollars of equipment, you're goddamn right there's going to be a billion dollars worth of equipment lying around. It's not the magnitude, it's the ratio t…
The article does discuss ratios. "Billion" is just the attention-grabber.
> If the first server, the one that is better in literally every way, costs ~16k/year... how much should the other one cost? Well, maybe 10, maybe 12, maybe 14?
> I don't know, but the answer certainly shouldn't be "Almost twice as much at 26k/year", that's the kind of answer that indicates something is broken.
> In a worst-case scenario, AWS is ~1.6x times as expensive, but again, that's paid yearly. If we compare paid monthly to paid hourly (not exactly fair) we get 37k vs 16k, if we do some napkin math calculations for equivalent storage cost (with equivalent speed via guaranteed iops) we easily get to ~3k/year extra. We have a 40k vs 16k difference, the AWS machine with the worst specs is 250% more expensive.
> But whether the worst AWS machine is 160% or 250% as expensive as the OVH one is not the relevant question here, the question is why are we seeing those astronomical differences in terms of cost to being with.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#180If I get a three-year reserved instance of a t3.small, it works out to $6/month. A t3.micro works out to $3/mo. Storage and bandwidth, for my use-cases, amount to less than a dollar a month.
Are there any other providers that compete on the low end like this? The common suggestions (DO, Linode, etc.) all cost at least twice as much.
I buy the author's argument for "real" use-cases where you need one or more expensive servers. But I also see this argument made to people using AWS for personal use, and I've never understood it. Am I missing something?
I don't need a massive server, I need something that can run code, and that's always on. AWS seems really cheap on the low end, and those machines are more than powerful enough to host your own email, files, projects, etc.