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AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

david-codes.hatanian.com

81–90 of 163 posts

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re building your own infrastructure in a data center then sure you absolutely want to test your redundancy. But with AWS it’s a checkbox. It’s transparent to you and your applications. The infrastructure to host in multiple AZs is already in place. The only real issue with MultiAZ is the failover in RDS depending on the database you use could be seconds or 10s of seconds.

Back in colo days, I saw a lot of post-mortems that read “the thing we thought was redundant wasn’t”, leading me to call them “redundant like an appendix [rather than like a kidney]”. We instituted quarterly “game day testing” where we forcibly turned off one of the redundant items in all of our systems. It took us about 6 such cycles before these tests didn’t turn up outages that were just waiting for us. Thinking b…

Redundant like a Klingon penis.

https://www.inverse.com/article/41443-star-trek-klingon-peni...

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#82
post #4

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…

At scale, perhaps they are costly. But i just cannot imagine deploying a webapp without cloud services. For the indie dev, cloud services have made side projects and experiments extremely cheap to spin up and scale.

The idea of deploying an app to a machine sitting next to me, and serving the few requests per second just from that, is highly appealing. The only thing I'd always want is offsite backups which are best done to the cloud. You've inspired me!

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#83
post #61
post #4

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…

This isn't the only way, though. Cloudfront can distribute static content and backends running on Lambda@Edge. DynamoDB supports global distribution (eventually consistent). If you don't have massive scale, they're quite cheaper than self managing (infra itself and ops people involved). Yes, these services require adaptation to your old habits of freely controlling your own servers. As for vendor lock-in, even on EC2…

The original machine has a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semiboloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differential girdlespring on the "up" end of the grammeters.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be substantial amounts of code you are writing to provision, set up, maintain, scale, and troubleshoot all of those things. Whether you call it app code or not, it's something that you (and your team) will be on the hook for building and maintaining over time. Getting your Java Spring web server to scale to thousands of concurrent instances will require a lot of undifferentiated work outside the scope of J…

What sort of application are you building where you need a thousand instances of a spring application? Like even hosted on a low powered hardware, Java services can easily deal with order of 100 requests/second. This is home turf, this is what Java is really good at. That 100rps may be lowballing it. So you're what, processing 100k+ API requests per second? I can't imagine that would translate toward any less than a…

Or this Java-based Spring application is one of dozens or hundreds of ones built by different teams, for different customers, or for different purposes. Some of them may even be applications not built in Java or Spring.

You're missing the point, though.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#85
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares when you can accidentally bankrupt your company with the wrong keystroke? Time to spin up is nice for prototypes, it can be very freeing. The mistake that people make is assuming AWS can host things better than they can, since they’re only mere mortals: it leads to a sort of learned helplessness where you assume the cost of a thing is it’s true value and not an egregious markup. My biggest gripe with these…

> Who cares when you can accidentally bankrupt your company with the wrong keystroke? I think it's fair to say millions of AWS customers manage to avoid bankruptcy quite successfully. If you're incapable of following basic best practices, setting billing alarms, and using IaC, I agree AWS is probably not the best choice for you. > The mistake that people make is assuming AWS can host things better than they can, sinc…

I think one of the major contributors that is often not mentioned with cloud providers are the actual setup/human maintenance savings. As is, the premium that is added to the 'managed' services is usually much less than what would cost a DevOps to maintai /run. I.e - it is safe to assume (at least the market that I'm in) that 1 hour of DevOps services will cost 150USD. 10 hours would be 1. 5K USD. That is actually enough to host a PHP based medium sized ecommerce solution by using purely managed services for about a month (PS. This is written entirely from the perspective of running multiple small/medium ecommerce solutions (500 - 2000 usd/mo AWS bill) using the stack mentioned above. I have no real world experience doing grand scale setups.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#86
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

A competitor of AWS claimed that AWS' egress fees are excessive and by how much - https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ As for a fair price, I think Cloudflare and BackBlaze provide S3 API compatible services with better pricing. Cloudflare doesn't charge for egress at all. This lends substance to their claim that AWS is overcharging for egress.

Egress fees on AWS are high, but I'm not sure free from Cloudflare is the best evidence given they still haven't had a profitable year (getting close though in recent quarters).

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#87
post #41

AWS is overrated. Most of the engineers and managers choose it because it's a safe choice for them. But in the long term the costs rise and you can't get away from it. I would even argue it's only for those who are afraid of command line.

> I would even argue it's only for those who are afraid of command line.

This make no sense. Using AWS beyond spinning up a VM requires extensive knowledge and comfort at the 'command line'. In fact, I think the vast knowledge required is one of the negatives of all the current cloud providers. Back when I could walk down the hall into the DC and sit down at whatever machine it was easier, and arguably required less knowledge.

> But in the long term the costs rise and you can't get away from it.

With AWS at least, our long term costs have only gone up as the business has grown. If we went back to the same size many years ago, costs have gone down.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#89
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the only way, though. Cloudfront can distribute static content and backends running on Lambda@Edge. DynamoDB supports global distribution (eventually consistent). If you don't have massive scale, they're quite cheaper than self managing (infra itself and ops people involved). Yes, these services require adaptation to your old habits of freely controlling your own servers. As for vendor lock-in, even on EC2…

The original machine has a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in pane…

it's an older code sir, but it checks out

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#90
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the only way, though. Cloudfront can distribute static content and backends running on Lambda@Edge. DynamoDB supports global distribution (eventually consistent). If you don't have massive scale, they're quite cheaper than self managing (infra itself and ops people involved). Yes, these services require adaptation to your old habits of freely controlling your own servers. As for vendor lock-in, even on EC2…

The original machine has a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in pane…

For anyone reading this for the first time, well worth the watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag
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