101–110 of 355 posts
I've said this a hundred times and it seems not loud enough. AWS is not cheap because of your server costs. AWS is cheap because of elasticity, velocity (opportunity cost of next feature), and reduced maintenance hours. "The cloud" was never (afaik) was about getting a cheaper VPS. It was about being able to get them on demand, give them back on demand, and generally not have to maintain anything besides your code (a…
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.
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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.
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…
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…
This is basically the natural progression of SaaS...
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> 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. At one point it took often days for a dedicated server to be set up. We also didn't have such nice provisioning tools. Now it just seems like cargo cult to use cloud providers as the only option. People just completely discount dedicated servers.
In most businesses I've worked in: developer costs >> infrastructure costs An AWS large server is around $500/year, which is about 1-2 developer hours (with taxes, overhead, etc) at the cost scales last time I priced this out. That's crazy expensive in the absolute, but if it saves a couple of hours, it makes sense. PaaS providers cost even more. I've gone with those in the past, since it basically eliminated dev-ops…
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EC2 is vastly more cost efficient than using all of those managed services unless you only have tiny on-demand usage scenarios.
Are you including the wages of the extra people to support building and managing such services?
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Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.
On a trivial level I agree, but only on a trivial level. Most developers will not set up a server in the most secure, maintainable manner. They're going to miss important things: - Disable password-based auth for ssh (require key-based auth) - Enable fail2ban or similar to slow down brute-force login attempts - Configure firewall - Install monitoring tools, antivirus, possibly backup daemons, etc - Setup a sane swapf…
A couple of others spring to mind:
- if you're not regularly testing your backups, you don't have backups
- monitor SSL certs for expiry. It's amazing how many outages I've seen because this was missed.
- are you allowing direct connection to your server from the internet, or do you want to go through a bastion host. Do you need 2FA on this, say because you need to meet ISO27001.
- do all the above through CM (like Ansible or Puppet) for obvious reasons.
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.
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.
The monthly opex to house and power and cool those servers isn't _negligible_, but if you're doing back of napkin math comparing MRCs to Cloud you can just deduct the costs from their bandwidth charges that have been marked up 10,000%