31–40 of 163 posts
It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Currently have a deployment in Oregon and cloudfront servicing most of the world. With localisation. No need to deploy in Japan to support Japan. The only tricky one is China because of the firewall. Tho that hasn’t been an issue for the last few years as they haven’t been blocking cloudfront completely. (This has been running for 10 years in AWS without issue)
> Currently have a deployment in Oregon and cloudfront servicing most of the world. With localisation. So you're serving static assets through CloudFront with a single backing service. Congrats, you managed to have a service that doesn't offer regional services. Also, you definitely don't support clients in China, or enjoy shooting yourself in the foot. Most professional applications with a global deployment and payi…
It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…
It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…
Of all the AWS complaints, CDK is one of yours? I absolutely love CDK and its take on infra-as-code where you construct OO constructs imperatively in a sane language (please, please no more YAML-based DSLs...). I've found that CDK is the only one to have given us the code reusability that all of these solutions always promise while still being overtly hackable.
Debugging CDK code? What kind of wacky stuff are you trying to do? I don't think I've ever had to debug CDK outside of typical "what IAM action am I missing?" or "how do I click some checkbox in CDK?".
I'm curious what you would consider to be better alternatives to CDK.
aws can be so cheap. aside from egress bandwidth, it’s pricing is fantastic. crazy aws cost is always gonna be a case of your holding it wrong. either intentionally because it’s more fun, or accidentally. how to use aws well and cheaply: - scale to zero whenever possible (lambda) - use minimal infrastructure (lambda managing ec2 with route53 health check) - don’t use rds (s3+dynamo ideally, sql on i4i nvme if you mus…
> scale to zero whenever possible (lambda) AWS pricing is great because you aren't price-gouged if you don't use it? And your statement isn't really true. If you use AWS Lambdas do implement something like an HTTP endpoint, you still need to pay for stuff like AWS KMS and API Gateway even if no client hits you with a request. - use minimal infra (lambda managing ec2 with route53 health check) Above free tier AWS Lamb…
aws core primitives are:
- flexible
- reliable
- robust
if your service succeeds, you will definitely want to move some components out of aws, but not all of it. aws can always remain the control plane.
if you don’t need what aws offers, don’t use it. they offer it at a price, and it is what it is. thanks to other providers, it likely will remain fair over time.
what i outlined was how to make aws cheap(er). it’s a simple strategy:
- use the primitives: s3, ec2, nvme, route53, lambda, apigateway
- avoid the services: rds and all the rest
- avoid heavy egress: use cloudflare workers and r2
scaling to zero means avoiding things like kms keys.
not sure where you got apigateway pricing from, it definitely scales to zero without fixed minimum cost.
lambda will always be the most reliable part of your stack. when you have enough traffic that it’s worth it, use ec2 instead and let lambda manage those machines.
The one AWS service that I pay for is S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It is very cheap insurance for knowing with virtual certainty that your data exists. Egress is expensive ($100/TB last I checked), but in the target use - backups of last resort - I will be very glad to pay that to have my data back. And if all goes right I'll never pay it. Personally I find ordinary S3 far too expensive to justify. Not so with Deep Archi…
Out of curiosity, what do you think a fair price for s3 would be? I haven't had a problem with the storage prices, just egress fees can add up (I don't work for aws or a cloud provider, just curious)
It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…
> You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. Why would you care about the redundancy on staging / dev? Just making up things to inflate AWS costs now.
It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…
> And don't even get me started on how much work by this time has gone to build the infra-as-code to manage the rube golderg machine, you'll (seriously) have more lines of CDK code than app logic (that was slower to develop & harder to debug than your actual app code per line). Of all the AWS complaints, CDK is one of yours? I absolutely love CDK and its take on infra-as-code where you construct OO constructs imperat…
The amount of app code involved to stitch Kinesis, Lambda, and S3 together is minimal. The amount of app code to solve the same problems without them is orders of magnitude more plentiful and complex, which is why we avoid it.
Azure AWS
CPU core / month $40.32 $34.56
GB ram / month $10.00 $8.64
GB logs $2.30 $0.53
The biggest difference between the two biggest cloud providers I've noticed is Azure Log Analytics versus AWS CloudWatch logs.
Azure's logs are nearly 5x as expensive as AWS to ingest, and AWS is already overpriced in my opinion. Charging $542 to keep 1TB of logs for a month is insane, because they're stored in a compressed columnar format and aren't actually that big on disk. Azure's $2,350 for a TB of logs is highway robbery and makes it impossibly expensive to use many of their dependent services in the way they are supposed to be used. For example, ingesting all web logs can cost more than the web server being monitored! Similarly, their SIEM security product Sentinel is stupidly expensive if you enable all of the data feeds it supports. Think 5 or 6 figure sums per month.
PS: Another thing that catches people out when designing cloud solutions is disks are typically "fully allocated". If you pre-provision an empty 1 TB disk, you're charged for the full terabyte, not your current usage of it. This is not what VMware vSphere does (typically), so many people simply ask for 1, 2, or even 4 TB disks, put 20 megabytes of application code into them, and then they're unaware that they're overpaying for storage by a factor of 50,000x or more.