Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

levelup.gitconnected.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 355 posts

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

#121

Post by etothepii »

datalopers wrote: post #107
andy_ppp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you including the wages of the extra people to support building and managing such services?

extra people? no because I hire generalists actually capable of building software, not overpaid kids only capable of gluing aws services together.

How much of your developer time gets lost to maintaining servers.

I used to think this sort of thing was a valuable use of my time but I now have over $200k in annual revenue and we pay less that $5 a month in raw compute (and that's nearly all S3). My Co-founder is always worried about the cost of our AWS but so far we just haven't witnessed it.

My mandate has always been the price should be able to scale to 0. So no EC2, has made building some longer running tasks a bit more complicated, but that's just because we didn't know how to do it before we started.

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

#122

Post by pclmulqdq »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #81
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. 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…

R2 and workers are absolutely not cheaper than doing it yourself. They are cheaper than AWS, but both of those services are "value-added" from AWS, and as such have a 20-100x markup.

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

#123

Post by dehrmann »

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...

Existing customers will flee as quickly as they can, and new customers will look elsewhere. In reality, they'll never charge more than their public rate card, and that rate card has to be competitive with the competition.

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

#124

Post by lbriner »

mabbo wrote: post #118

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-hous…

Yes, exactly this.

At what point do you have the time/money/confidence to invest goodness knows how much in a data centre with space to grow, to purchase an enormous amount of capital to have it all installed etc. the building alone could eat that first years saving easily.

How many people are now needed to fault-find bad hardware/software/networks, to be on call for any problems? How many calls out to the Electrician to fix some power issue?

How much to setup and run a large air-con system for the data centre. Maybe not much in the US where aircon is common but much more expensive in Europe.

The fact they could afford to do this over such a short time period speaks to having a decent amount of cash on-hand.

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

#125

Post by MajimasEyepatch »

mabbo wrote: post #118

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-hous…

Thank you for bringing up the engineering cost. People always look at this as just AWS > Bare metal or whatever, but there's so much more to it than that.

If they saved $800k per year, and they have to hire four additional ops engineers to run it at a cost of $400k per year, then they actually saved $400k. Which is still substantial and, all else being equal, sounds worthwhile.

If they saved $800k per year, and they have to hire ten additional ops engineers to run it at a cost of $1 million per year, then they've actually gone and burned $200k on something that provides no additional value to the business or their customers.

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

#126

Post by dehrmann »

isoprophlex wrote: post #52
frognumber wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1-2 developer hours?! Anyone looking to hire an ML guy for 250-500$/hr flat fee, hourly rate, no taxes, no healthcare, cancel any time... get in touch! For that money I'll gladly bark like a dog, walk on all fours and fetch your slippers.

That number would actually be the opportunity cost of developer time.

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

#127

Post by JohnHaugeland »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #122
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #81

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. 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…

R2 and workers are absolutely not cheaper than doing it yourself. They are cheaper than AWS, but both of those services are "value-added" from AWS, and as such have a 20-100x markup.

R2 is radically cheaper than doing it yourself

It's a CDN, not a filestore. CDNs mean hundreds of locations.

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

#128

Post by candiddevmike »

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…

Elasticity is a gamble. You're betting that you can save more money investing in an elastic/on demand stack than what you'd pay for static resources. Judging by how much the cloud providers push this, the unknown cost to create/maintain auto scaling infra/apps, and how intricate the pricing gets with elastic resources/spots/faas, I still think the cloud providers are coming out ahead vs folks using static compute.

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

#129

Post by varsketiz »

m0llusk wrote: post #61

There is not quite enough information here to be sure, but this article highlights transmission costs. This particular business model involves throwing around big chunks of data just in case they end up being needed and then handing them back out in response to potentially large numbers of requests. That would make this particular usage pattern fit to exactly what AWS is charging the most for. Also many alternative A…

You can save even more if your app uses richer formats than images.

Also, if you are bigger and can start really negotiating with hardware providers.

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

#130

Post by Gregioei »

So little real information...

So the team is now responsible for backups, hardware ordering,.forecast etc?

How big is the team now compared to before?

Does it scale?

If you price it correctly and keep the free tier small, I would either talked to AWS for better pricing or moved to another cloud Provider.

S3 on AWS is a total no-brainer, minio on bare metal might mean much more work and a bigger infra team than business actually wants.

I would also love to know what optimizations are already in place. Does cloudflare caching work? Are the results compressed on rest? Is geolocation latency relevant?

Why even Cassandra? Are websites not unique? Wouldn't a nginx and a few big servers not work?

But who knows? The article doesn't tell me that :-(

Post reply on HN