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AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

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Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#131

Post by steveBK123 »

Gravityloss wrote: post #92
steveBK123 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s also a lot of politics around OpEx vs capitalEx.

In prior firms we’d have to go hat-in-hand for $3M of hardware every 3 years on an upgrade cycle. Of course few were around long enough to be on the requesting or approving side of this upgrade cycle and it would drag out painfully. Sometimes we’d try to get creative and go more just-in-time and come back for $500K every 6 months but the pain would just be more frequent.

On the other hand, $150k/mo slowly growing adds up to more in the longterm, but no senior manager ever has to approve a single $500K-$3M purchase request.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#132

Post by [deleted] »

bombcar wrote: post #116
Gravityloss wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on where the budgets go - salary goes into something they have to answer for - "cloud infrastructure" goes elsewhere in the budget they don't have to answer for.

[deleted]

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#133

Post by daniel-cussen »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #111
Gravityloss wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody got fired buying IBM^H^H^H Amazon.

I think Elon Musk got technically demoted but at any rate shuffled around for wanting to use Microsoft for the servers, Paypal ended up using Unix instead.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#134

Post by steveBK123 »

bombcar wrote: post #116
Gravityloss wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on where the budgets go - salary goes into something they have to answer for - "cloud infrastructure" goes elsewhere in the budget they don't have to answer for.

Right - CapEx vs OpEx

Write big checks for big servers every few years Vs Recurring monthly out the door slowly growing, but maybe 2x higher in total

Also flexibility in not having to do capacity (or much of any other) planning.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#135

Post by kkielhofner »

steveBK123 wrote: post #131
Gravityloss wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s also a lot of politics around OpEx vs capitalEx. In prior firms we’d have to go hat-in-hand for $3M of hardware every 3 years on an upgrade cycle. Of course few were around long enough to be on the requesting or approving side of this upgrade cycle and it would drag out painfully. Sometimes we’d try to get creative and go more just-in-time and come back for $500K every 6 months but the pain would just be more…

Hardware need not be CapEx. There are plenty of leasing options available for just about everything. There are also some wild Section 179 options:

https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#136

Post by kkielhofner »

andrewstuart wrote: post #17

It is strange that bandwidth/traffic/egress seems to be an afterthought in this post and I think the numbers in the linked blog post are wrong anyway. Bandwidth out of AWS is at best 9 cents per gigabyte, which is HUGE and for many applications the primary cost. Indeed when I saw the title of the post I thought "there's only one number you need to know with AWS, it's 9 cents per gigabyte". Please correct me if I am w…

I still maintain bandwidth costs are the most poorly understood in the current CTO/CIO/Dev generation.

The "cloud native" generation has (of course) never purchased bandwidth (as in circuits, cross connects, etc) and the result is "Well, AWS charges $0.09/GB so that's what it costs".

I wouldn't be surprised if AWS is capitalizing on this blind spot and offering many services as loss-leaders knowing their 100x markup (or whatever) on bandwidth more than makes up for it.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#137

Post by abofh »

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…

You've got it backwards - which is to some extent why you have this problem:

If you're fully utilizing your instances, you're working from the bottom of the pricing up, and all these things (3x redundancy, etc) are marginal costs of doing business because you're successful. What you're opting out of is the data-center workers, the sysadmins, the operators, and the expertise that comes with if it offered you value.

Your hundreds of lines of CDK are people you're not employing to write them (it's your job I guess?), and applying the AWS systems and services to do that work for you - given you've chosen CDK, I have to assume you've bought into AWS anyhow, and someone in the chain sees the value extracted or savings approach.

Where AWS burns you is when you don't know what you're doing - you have a PHP app, so you put in on an instance, you need it reliable so you have two, you need shared storage so you put it on EFS, and so on and so forth.

If you're at the other end of the spectrum, and you want to buy the level of reliability and redundancy you get from three of the smallest instances in AWS spread in three AZ's, you're looking at a six figure investment. So yes, it's pricy if you use it like you use the desktop under you (8 hours a day, usually at 20% load), but you can also run millions of hits for pennies if you learn that most of what you're doing is overhead that gets built into, well, serverless.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#138

Post by abofh »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #80
moduspol wrote: post #68

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…

What sort of app code are you writing where you can keep data, authentication and user data all on the desktop?

Just because you can write a docker-compose.yml (or do without) that describes a system that holds together, doesn't mean the system you've produced stands the chance at SOC2 or whatever standard you hold dear.

Having just finished a 27001 audit, I promise, "we rely on AWS for X" went a lot farther than "we have a homegrown system that does X", every single time. AWS - box checked, homegrown? Let's dig in for two more hours.

Thousands of instances is easy to need - if you have an active CI/CD lifecycle - you just might not need them all at once. Even just one per PR and it adds up super fast if you've got a competent developer team.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#139

Post by bombcar »

steveBK123 wrote: post #134
bombcar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where the budgets go - salary goes into something they have to answer for - "cloud infrastructure" goes elsewhere in the budget they don't have to answer for.

Right - CapEx vs OpEx Write big checks for big servers every few years Vs Recurring monthly out the door slowly growing, but maybe 2x higher in total Also flexibility in not having to do capacity (or much of any other) planning.

There's also the thousand cuts - if you want a big server, you will have to do lots of discussion and arguing about the cost there of, but if instead you're adding a small monthly cost, the arguing isn't as much.

You keep doing that and suddenly someone notices that half the budget is AWS, at which point the "move onsite" dance begins (until the next time the big server argument happens).

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#140

Post by randomtwiddler »

andrewstuart wrote: post #17

It is strange that bandwidth/traffic/egress seems to be an afterthought in this post and I think the numbers in the linked blog post are wrong anyway. Bandwidth out of AWS is at best 9 cents per gigabyte, which is HUGE and for many applications the primary cost. Indeed when I saw the title of the post I thought "there's only one number you need to know with AWS, it's 9 cents per gigabyte". Please correct me if I am w…

Pricing is different for large customers, they can get special discounted rates.

For the small guys, that's the ballpark as I understand it also.

And I agree with you. That's the #1 item when building online infrastructure.

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