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We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

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Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#11

Post by fabian2k »

maxfurman wrote: post #5

I feel like there's a middle step missing from this article (or I just missed it reading quickly) - did they build their own data center? Where are these new non-AWS servers physically located?

You can easily rent space in a data center and put your own servers in there or just rent dedicated servers. The cheapest provider there is probably Hetzner, but then your servers are in Germany. This gets you a real, full server for something between 30-200 EUR per month. There are many other hosting providers that offer dedicated servers also in the US, e.g. OVH. This works the same way, they are usually more expensive than Hetzner.

Renting a dedicated server is very similar to renting a VM. It has a much higher provisioning time, usually hours to 1-2 days. And it takes some upfront cost or a time commitment. But it also has a lot more raw power. So if you don't require the flexibility VMs and the cloud provide they can be a very effective alternative.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#12

Post by ehutch79 »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #2

I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.

When you're a small team, possibly solo, having someone else deal with hardware is key.

Focusing just on what you're working on is great.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#13

Post by taldo »

When the cost of delivering your product/service is mostly compute or traffic, sure, migrating off of AWS is a must once you reach a certain scale. But for the other 99% [0], where infrastructure is but a small cost, then think really hard if you're willing to trade the engineering effort for the convenience of managed cloud services.

[0]: or 90%, or 80% or who cares, but a majority of software services seem to NOT be compute- or traffic- heavy.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#14

Post by teraflop »

maxfurman wrote: post #5

I feel like there's a middle step missing from this article (or I just missed it reading quickly) - did they build their own data center? Where are these new non-AWS servers physically located?

In addition, usually the main financial effect of going from AWS to on-premises is to replace a lot of your recurring monthly costs with up-front capital costs.

The article spends a lot of time talking about how much lower their monthly bill is, but it says nothing about how much they spent to buy those 300 servers in the first place.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#15

Post by zo1 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #3
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #2

I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.

You also get a lot of finely incremental costs and the ability to grow. Like, can you really buy 0.1% more IT people? Well, yeah if you already have a thousand. Otherwise you have to buy in bigger chunks. So you save money because you can timeshare talent and hardware. And the ability to write a larger check to scale is valuable for consumer facing applications you're hoping by to grow.

Sure you can. Ask one of your devs to spend X amount of time on something. Might not be an exact 1 for 1 or 0.1% but it still beats the many many hours you'd waste architecting around cloud-specific issues and nuances. Or the cost of dealing with the friction that comes when you want to do anything with cloud in a manner that isn't cloud-supported.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#16

Post by hazmazlaz »

There is no way this figure is accurate. The annual spend cited of $1,000,000 is purely hypothetical, as admitted here:

"However, all this data and processes need to happen on a server and, of course, we used AWS for it. A few years of growth later, we’re handling over 70,000 pages per minute, storing around 560 million pages, and paying well over $1,000,000 per year.

Or at least we would be paying that much if we stayed with AWS. Instead, we were able to cut costs by 80% in a little over three months with some out-of-the-box thinking and a clear plan."

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#17

Post by whatever1 »

LanceH wrote: post #6
HWR_14 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also get a lot of finely incremental costs and the ability to grow. Like, can you really buy 0.1% more IT people? Well, yeah if you already have a thousand. Otherwise you have to buy in bigger chunks. So you save money because you can timeshare talent and hardware. And the ability to write a larger check to scale is valuable for consumer facing applications you're hoping by to grow.

And, importantly, you can turn off your commitment to spending in a second.

Making IT an OPEX problem is the main reason that C-suites love cloud providers

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#18

Post by Marazan »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #10
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #2

I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.

> These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. That is _not_ a given. They're charging you more than it costs _them_ to run it. They get: - much lower hardware prices than you - lower bandwidth prices than you - likely lower electricity costs than you

Aws bandwidth costs charged to consumers are a notorious ripoff.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#19

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #10
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #2

I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.

> These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. That is _not_ a given. They're charging you more than it costs _them_ to run it. They get: - much lower hardware prices than you - lower bandwidth prices than you - likely lower electricity costs than you

AWS's bandwidth charges are highway robbery.

It's my impression that AWS competes with the EC2 instance cost (as it that's what new customers look at), and the bandwidth/storage only becomes apparent when you are locked in.

Really what AWS should be is one or two phases of service maturity: dev infrastructure and experimentation is phase one, phase two would be the "its a couple servers" production, BUT: with a scale plan for phase 3 being not-AWS.

Having a mature/battle tested phase 2 --> phase 3 should be a market advantage in the modern business landscape, but that's also a post-acquisition/exit phase, so none of the presumed target HN crowd care about it.

There are extensive articles and public knowledgebases on various technologies and architectures, but there is effectively nothing on AWS independence out there, even though almost every mature organization will need to face it.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#20

Post by dkarl »

rossdavidh wrote: post #7
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #2

I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.

I think some of this is due to the presence (until just recently) of abundant VC money, encouraging tech companies to trade of money for time by outsourcing their server admin (or part of it, anyway). It's one less thing you have to hire for and spend time getting good corporate policies and procedures on. But, now that the emphasis seems to have shifted from growth-at-all-costs to where-can-we-cut-costs, I think the…

It would be shocking if, in the long term, there were not cloud providers with lower prices than any but the biggest companies could achieve by themselves. AWS will have to work hard to keep giving customers a reason to pay the premium.
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