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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

#81

Post by JohnHaugeland »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #42
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The whole idea that since they have economies of scale, they must pass those savings on to you is a misunderstanding of how companies work. Realistically, a company will charge slightly less than whatever your alternative is, and they will provide products that restrict the number of alternatives you have. AWS, GCP, and Azure provide several differentiated products that lock you in to higher prices on everything else…

> The whole idea that since they have economies of scale, they must pass those savings on to you is a misunderstanding of how companies work.

You're responding to someone who said "can," not "must."

What they said was "there's no requirement that cloud costs more than traditional hosting. Their scale allows them lower fundamental costs. They could outcompete traditional hosting on cost if they wanted to."

There's no misunderstanding of how comapnies work in what parent poster said; in reality they are 100% correct, and this is the path that CloudFlare is beginning to follow with services like workers and R2.

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

#82

Post by kaptainscarlet »

alberth wrote: post #35

Dedicated hosting providers. I'm so amazed that somehow people completely forget that for literally decades, web host provided dedicated hosting options at fantastic prices. Yes, loooong time ago - to get your dedicated server might have taken a few hours to provision and the instant server access that AWS brought should not be discredited. But large numbers of web host today allow you to programmatically spin up a d…

Hosting providers are a pain. My server was down for full day because the provider was being DDoSed. AWS has DDoS protection by default. If I was on AWS, my server would not go down due to network DDoS attacks. That is just one of many things AWS does for you that many hosting providers don't.

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

#83

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

pessimizer wrote: post #46
pclmulqdq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole idea that since they have economies of scale, they must pass those savings on to you is a misunderstanding of how companies work. Realistically, a company will charge slightly less than whatever your alternative is, and they will provide products that restrict the number of alternatives you have. AWS, GCP, and Azure provide several differentiated products that lock you in to higher prices on everything else…

> The whole idea that since they have economies of scale, they must pass those savings on to you is a misunderstanding of how companies work. That idea was not expressed in the comment that you replied to. The comment you replied to was in response to a strong claim that ignored the existence of economies of scale, and therefore concluded that it's so obvious that cloud providers must always be more expensive than se…

That's just not how this works.

Dell can bulk order parts and has a strong negotiating stance, which makes the hardware __CHEAPER FOR THEM__.

It says nothing about how much the market can bear for Dell. And in fact, companies use Dell because of the _guarantees_, not the cost. At any point in time, Dell will replace hardware with no questions asked. They can do this because of the margins between what it costs them and what it costs you.

There are benefits to cloud, cost aint one of them.

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

#84

Post by no_identd »

floatinglotus wrote: post #45

This is the Trillion Dollar Paradox described by Martin Casado. You’re crazy if you don’t start your business in the cloud, you’re crazy if you stay there. My new startup is focused on helping application owners repatriate their workloads into their own infrastructure. Our goal is to solve the network complexity challenges with a fully open network stack (open source software with all of the hardware options you woul…

What does your product offer over what Sovereign Cloud Stack (See https://scs.community/) already offers?

(And before anyone falsely claims no commercial offers for this exist yet:

https://www.plusserver.com/en/products/pluscloud-open [no affiliation])

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

#85

Post by pooper »

twawaaay wrote: post #70
joshstrange wrote: post #48

They don't mention at all what services they were using (other than slight mention of S3) which makes it very hard to respond to this. If you are running everything on EC2 then you are going to have a bad time (especially if you aren't using reserved instances). AWS (IMHO) shines with the various services they provide (S3, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS< SES, to name a few). AWS is a game of trying to reduce yo…

Yeah, you need to do calculation of what you are doing right now vs AWS. If you already have a mature team that is doing well optimising the environment, you have stable demand and no need to develop things rapidly then it is very likely that going cloud is poor choice. As to "cloud agnostic", don't believe this bullshit. In my opinion most projects fare much better by just letting go of this "cloud agnostic" and jus…

> It is the same story as with SQL. Trying to use frameworks to keep your app DBMS-agnostic but then nobody ever migrates their apps to another DBMS.

A small nit, I think this is partly because we've been burned before. Same idea as backups, if you don't restore from backups, you don't know if you have good backups. Similarly, if you don't use certain code paths, you can't tell if those code paths are sufficiently bug free.

I am thinking of Drupal. Pretty much everyone who uses Drupal uses MySQL/MariaDB as far as I know. I think Drupal supports Postgresql but nobody I know uses it because nobody they know uses Drupal with Postgresql. I don't know anyone who uses drupal with sqlite on production either.

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

#86

Post by nithril »

goodpoint wrote: post #50
alberth wrote: post #35

Dedicated hosting providers. I'm so amazed that somehow people completely forget that for literally decades, web host provided dedicated hosting options at fantastic prices. Yes, loooong time ago - to get your dedicated server might have taken a few hours to provision and the instant server access that AWS brought should not be discredited. But large numbers of web host today allow you to programmatically spin up a d…

Not to mention having your own datacenter, which is even cheaper (unless you do something stupid). EDIT: to the naysayers: I worked in various companies (from tiny to huge) maintaining their own DCs and had access to financial data. And I was involved in the setting up new DCs.

Might not be so obvious when summing all the cost (apex, opex). Not mentioning the difficulty to find experienced people to maintain it. Unless you are really big of course

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

#87

Post by michaelcampbell »

macinjosh wrote: post #65
taylodl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you use and manage AWS resources as you would your own on-prem resources then you're not going to have a good time. As soon as you think you need EC2 instances you need to re-think your architecture. You're probably not using AWS most effectively.

What I don't understand is why anyone would spend, precious and expensive engineering resources on coding to a proprietary API owned by one of the largest companies on the planet to whom you are nothing. Ok so you save money on the monthly bill but what happens when Amazon decides they want to enter your market? What happens if they decide your service is too controversial and they kick you off? If you were deploying…

> What I don't understand is why anyone would spend, precious and expensive engineering resources on coding to a proprietary API owned by one of the largest companies on the planet to whom you are nothing.

> Ok so you save money on the monthly bill...

Sounds like you do understand it.

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

#88

Post by shepardrtc »

joshstrange wrote: post #48

They don't mention at all what services they were using (other than slight mention of S3) which makes it very hard to respond to this. If you are running everything on EC2 then you are going to have a bad time (especially if you aren't using reserved instances). AWS (IMHO) shines with the various services they provide (S3, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS< SES, to name a few). AWS is a game of trying to reduce yo…

Going from Alooma (pre-Google acquire) to DMS saved us thousands. I was shocked when I read that the only thing that DMS cost was running a small EC2 instance. It's a fairly good service - it mostly just runs. AWS has so many offerings like that. They really want to make sure you stick with their ecosystem, and it pays to do so.

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

#89

Post by bachmeier »

joshstrange wrote: post #48

They don't mention at all what services they were using (other than slight mention of S3) which makes it very hard to respond to this. If you are running everything on EC2 then you are going to have a bad time (especially if you aren't using reserved instances). AWS (IMHO) shines with the various services they provide (S3, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS< SES, to name a few). AWS is a game of trying to reduce yo…

> which makes it very hard to respond to this

It's possible that they are not interested in a response. They are saying what worked for them, whether or not others want to agree.

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

#90

Post by macinjosh »

pooper wrote: post #68
macinjosh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is why anyone would spend, precious and expensive engineering resources on coding to a proprietary API owned by one of the largest companies on the planet to whom you are nothing. Ok so you save money on the monthly bill but what happens when Amazon decides they want to enter your market? What happens if they decide your service is too controversial and they kick you off? If you were deploying…

> To me it is antithetical to building a sustainable product. Continuing what you said, Google uses macOS and Windows for client machines. That is ok because if Apple or Microsoft were to decide to cut off Google altogether, Google would have bigger problems. However, I think from a business point of view, this is similar to how so many businesses use cloudinary. Cloudinary is a software as a service company that pro…

I can't find the quote, but I think it was Joel Spolsky on an old stackoverflow podcast with Jeff Atwood. They were discussing why stackoverflow built their own servers and did not use cloud or other hosting. He said something like companies should fully own and control their product and any direct dependencies thereof. If you think of it as a concentric set of rings you at least want to have full control over your ring and the ring below it. In the terms of a web app it meant the code for your application and the hardware it runs on. To me that seems reasonable.
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