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AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

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Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#91

Post by steveBK123 »

fulafel wrote: 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…

As an "onPrem" & "Big Data" guy I've been astonished at how fast the bill can run up. We are in the middle of a cloud adoption where the big proponent started with "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" to "hey so we need to consolidate these 3 DBs, and X is on vacation so lets spin this service down, and lets not worry about multi AZ/region yet" .. all before we even have a PROD launch, lol.

In any case, was recently amazed at the cost of an RDS instance to host a meager 2B total records of vendor data. For the annual price I could buy one of the beefy servers I use to host 20% of my entire on-prem estate with 100s of vendor data sets. For my on-prem plant, 2B records is table stakes and we have datasets we receive that much data every day. Probably have something like 10T records of data across datasets if I had to speculate.

Similarly on the ops/infra folks cost save, for every on-prem infra guy they think they can RIF, they've hired a cloud infra guy who for sure costs more.

Likewise for the redundancy/backups/etc being "easy/free" in the cloud, we've already lost data in object store because of poorly execute combination of configuration & actions when try to do some permission changes/copy migration. It was completely unintentional and not noticed for weeks. No one actually executed a literal rm command at the time. Just because the object store advertises zero loss / versioning / etc, you really do still need to do backups.

Clearly theres a lot of ephemeral & burst compute / variable cost stuff that totally belongs in the cloud. However for internal apps at a firm where the usage is largely scaled with staffing levels, the amount of fixed compute makes it hard to argue every app and every use case belongs in the cloud.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#92

Post by Gravityloss »

steveBK123 wrote: post #91
fulafel wrote: 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…

As an "onPrem" & "Big Data" guy I've been astonished at how fast the bill can run up. We are in the middle of a cloud adoption where the big proponent started with "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" to "hey so we need to consolidate these 3 DBs, and X is on vacation so lets spin this service down, and lets not worry about multi AZ/region yet" .. all before we even have a PROD launch, lol. I…

It's interesting to think about the process that lead to this: "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do"

Are cloud vendor salesmen doing jedi mind tricks? Or are these decisions just made by incompetent people? Who researches this kind of stuff? It's some kind of a management trends history subject.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#93

Post by Enhex »

lbriner wrote: post #42

The complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often compare apples with pears. Complaining that a machine that "I could buy for $1000" costs like $4000/year on cloud missing an enormous number of costs that people don't consider as well as the reliability/availability that you are paying for. Do it the same on-prem and you need to include the costs for: * An air-conditioned room + maintenance (this could be very large…

for a single box the extra cost is roughly as much as you need for your personal computer.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#95

Post by dncornholio »

lbriner wrote: post #42

The complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often compare apples with pears. Complaining that a machine that "I could buy for $1000" costs like $4000/year on cloud missing an enormous number of costs that people don't consider as well as the reliability/availability that you are paying for. Do it the same on-prem and you need to include the costs for: * An air-conditioned room + maintenance (this could be very large…

> If you have the people/skills and need control over exactly how your hardware is provisioned, go on-prem and good luck but plenty of us would rather concentrate on what we are good at and are happy to pay 50-100K per year to a cloud provider to do it for us.

This is the only thing that matters when you talk about AWS. All your other points are not mutual exclusive.

I love the "good luck". As if it's some magic that we do to get applications run on the internet. It's not as hard as you think. Even scaling. These are solved problems and just abstracted away by AWS behind a paywall.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#96

Post by sieabahlpark »

philliphaydon wrote: post #32
arinlen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So 10+ years of supporting broadcasters and creative agencies around the world from 1 region is not supporting those countries. Got it. I mean there’s services in those regions for the tasks performed but even then it doesn’t require the level of testing you’re assuming it does.

No post body was provided.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#97

Post by 90minuteAPI »

russellendicott wrote: post #55
fulafel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, this is often the next step. The new architect must have lots of AWS certifications. With the new architeture, the long term cost savings will be exponential, compared to the current projected cost curve! This can optionally combine with the Kubernetes scenario.

Exactly, then you need at least 1 architect per app. I wrote an article about this problem: http://blog.bytester.net/posts/cloud-talent/

This was a great read, thank you. I’m just now removing my application-focused blinders, but I already see the same technical, organizational, and financial issues.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#98

Post by bluedino »

steveBK123 wrote: post #91
fulafel wrote: 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…

As an "onPrem" & "Big Data" guy I've been astonished at how fast the bill can run up. We are in the middle of a cloud adoption where the big proponent started with "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" to "hey so we need to consolidate these 3 DBs, and X is on vacation so lets spin this service down, and lets not worry about multi AZ/region yet" .. all before we even have a PROD launch, lol. I…

> "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do"

Old boss said the same thing, but with administrators instead of devs.

So we go and start up $n worth of AWS instances, and then spend $n/2 to have Rackspace of all people administer it.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#99

Post by api »

steveBK123 wrote: post #91
fulafel wrote: 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…

As an "onPrem" & "Big Data" guy I've been astonished at how fast the bill can run up. We are in the middle of a cloud adoption where the big proponent started with "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" to "hey so we need to consolidate these 3 DBs, and X is on vacation so lets spin this service down, and lets not worry about multi AZ/region yet" .. all before we even have a PROD launch, lol. I…

"Dev or IT admin time costs more."

That is the core argument. It can be true, but it's not always true. The larger your cloud footprint gets, the less true it often becomes. It's also not true if you are doing something that really slams one of the cloud's high cost areas like outbound bandwidth or tons of sustained compute.

If you are running a business or department it's your job to run these numbers properly and not listen to mindless cloud salespeople or developers brainwashed by them.

The cloud is great for prototyping. As you scale there usually comes a point at which the cloud cost line crosses the "hire one or two people" line. If you think you have to hire five or ten people, your architecture is probably too complex.

Of course the cloud industry really pushes complex architectures hard because they know this. Complexity works in their favor on both ends. It makes it harder to get off managed services by adding labor costs and it also means you have to run more stuff in their cloud.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#100

Post by Slartie »

dncornholio wrote: post #95
lbriner wrote: post #42

The complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often compare apples with pears. Complaining that a machine that "I could buy for $1000" costs like $4000/year on cloud missing an enormous number of costs that people don't consider as well as the reliability/availability that you are paying for. Do it the same on-prem and you need to include the costs for: * An air-conditioned room + maintenance (this could be very large…

> If you have the people/skills and need control over exactly how your hardware is provisioned, go on-prem and good luck but plenty of us would rather concentrate on what we are good at and are happy to pay 50-100K per year to a cloud provider to do it for us. This is the only thing that matters when you talk about AWS. All your other points are not mutual exclusive. I love the "good luck". As if it's some magic that…

> I love the "good luck". As if it's some magic that we do to get applications run on the internet.

For those of us that haven't gone through the internet of the late 1990s or early 2000s as a software developer, where it was the norm for everyone to self-host their hobbyist or semi-professionally-operated online services on rented or bought linux boxes, it actually often is some kind of black magic.

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