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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

#111

Post by mwcampbell »

kaptainscarlet wrote: post #82
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.

There are also affordable dedicated server providers with DDoS protection, like OVHcloud.

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

#112

Post by shudza »

taylodl wrote: post #59
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…

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.

So what should you use for let say, a backend API service? Don't tell me beanstalk/fargate/etc, because they're actually more expensive.

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

#113

Post by shudza »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #92

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…

This is one of the few accurate comments in this thread.

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

#114

Post by etothepii »

datalopers wrote: post #97
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…

EC2 is vastly more cost efficient than using all of those managed services unless you only have tiny on-demand usage scenarios.

Or any kind of demand spikes.

If you are using lambda and suddenly need to run a million lambda you just can. If you want to have the ec2 support to run a million lambda at some time you are going to pay for a lot of sleeping computers.

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

#115

Post by jaclaz »

As a side note, I find this:

>Do you have any advice for software engineers who are just starting out?

>Don’t be afraid to talk with the customers. Throughout my career, the best software engineers were the ones who worked with the customer to solve their problems. Sometimes you can sack a half year of development time just by learning that you can solve the customer’s issue with a single line of code. I think the best engineers are creating solutions for real world problems.

to be very good generic advice.

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

#116

Post by pwinnski »

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…

> Ok so you save money on the monthly bill

Right, you understand, but maybe you don't really understand?

If you work at a company large enough, and with enough DevOps, NetOps, Ops people to go it alone, and can get favorable lease terms on hardware, then by all means, host it yourself! Paying all of those people and also paying for AWS seems odd, for sure.

But if you work at a company without a deep bench in various Ops groups, then good news! You don't have to hire them! Instead you can rely on Amazon's deep bench, and focus your salary budget on developers rather than Ops people.

There are scales at which, even not counting enormous budget expenditures on staff rather than managed services, AWS doesn't make sense. And if you're just using EC2, you'll hit those numbers more quickly than if you make good use of things like Lambdas and SNS/SQS and Dynamo and so on. The cost savings can be enormously staggering, and the more you lean into AWS managed services, the more that's true.

We see the edge cases on HN, the rare instances of someone being kicked off of somewhere, but for most people, the uptime and long-term reliability of AWS managed services is higher than trying to go it alone.

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

#117

Post by chucky_z »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #92

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…

I think there's some "cheat codes" now involving some of these things though. For instance, you can use some of AWS but keep your actual compute/networking out and have things like security patching and server inventory be completely solved by using AWS SSM. There's also options like EKS Anywhere to have managed on-prem k8s for way, way cheaper than running it in AWS proper. These kinds of services I think are the future for hybrid/on-prem folks.

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

#118

Post by mabbo »

I'll always celebrate stories like this, but I also don't take some kind of anti-AWS lesson from it.

This company saved $800k/year. Perfect time to go in-house with this solution.

But when they were 1/10th this size, they'd only have saved $80k/year. Does that cover the cost of the engineering to build and maintain this system? Maybe not. And when they were 1/100th the size, it would have been laughable to go in-house.

At the right time, you make the right transitions.

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

#119

Post by blackoil »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #105
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…

This is likely only true until they have enough lock-in on those cloud products to really turn the screws and extract maximum profits from people that are TOTALLY screwed by being completely locked into proprietary AWS services... This is basically the natural progression of SaaS...

This is often mentioned scenario but highly unlikely as impractical it is.

First, AWS is already highly profitable, they aren't dumping where this step becomes a necessity.

Also, any such move would dry up future growth from adding new customers, which is suicidal.

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

#120

Post by throwaway858 »

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…

The one big thing missing from dedicated hosts is an S3 equivalent. Sure, you can get a huge hard drive for cheap but this will not have the durability requirements for storing your precious data.

And if you try to use AWS just for S3 then you will pay a lot extra for the bandwidth charges of bringing the data from S3 to your server (something that is free if you were to use EC2 or other AWS services).

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