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

151–160 of 355 posts

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

#151

Post by moonchrome »

etothepii wrote: post #121
datalopers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

The more I work with cloud the more I see this 'saves time on infrastructure' being a half-truth at best - we still have overwhelmed DevOps people who, unlike managing on-prem services, have 0 insight or control over what goes on inside AWS. And the services require a decent amount of hand holding, proprietary know how, etc.

In the end you replaced sysadmin with DevOps and got up charged multiples.

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

#152

Post by deltarholamda »

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. And for various good reasons: you hired your staff for their expertise with X, they are used to it, so now going for Y will usually be far higher cost than the benefits.

Yeah, I never got this. If actual, for really real SQL is necessary for your application, then you need an actual, for really real DBA. If it's just a really nifty flat-file interface that "just werks," go with whatever DB engine your framework is most tested/used on.

I get that sometimes you're interfacing two different things, one of which is on one DB engine, and you'd like to use the same software. That's fine. But DB agnosticism has a cost like anything else.

If you can be truly cloud-agnostic, then there is a high probability you can be cloud-free.

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

#153

Post by speedgoose »

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…

Not being cloud agnostic forces you to use one single cloud provider, that is not necessarily the best in everything.

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

#154

Post by gadflyinyoureye »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #77
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…

> 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. That's not a paradox. You're not crazy in either case. Starting in the cloud reduces costs for some strategies by removing necessary engineering. Starting in the cloud increases costs for other strategies by charging too much for commodity offerings. It's relati…

You’re going against the party line.

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

#155

Post by aetherson »

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…

There is plenty of competition for AWS, so we would, in terms of economic theory, expect that AWS charges you mildly more than it costs them to provide the service, unless they have any particular economies of scale that people like GCP and Azure (and the other less-known cloud offerings) do not have access to. Which seems unlikely to dominate the costing.

AWS may be able to charge a surcharge for being the biggest and best-known cloud offering that most people have expertise with, raising the de facto cost of switching.

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

#156

Post by dinobones »

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…

All of those services are poisonous.

They are awful to develop against, awful to test against, and often times "just work" until they don't.

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

#157

Post by maerF0x0 »

wooque wrote: post #132
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…

Prerender as I can see is founded by Hungarian and most employees are Hungarian. Even if he hired 2 FTEs in Hungary to maintain (which I doubt), it would eat 200k at most (probably much less), so they still saved 600k. For 800k he could probably hire 10 more people, to improve development, sales, marketing, support, and that would be better investment instead of burning money on AWS.

Fair enough, I assumed typical San Francisco/Silicon valley model.

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

#158

Post by that_guy_iain »

frognumber wrote: post #43
that_guy_iain wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> In most businesses I've worked in:

> developer costs >> infrastructure costs

What I've expected alot is the businesses are fundamentally struggling to find sysadmins therefore paying for infrastructure costs are there only option. And now more and more sysadmins are "AWS devops" who literally only know how to manage a AWS stack with many struggling even basic stuff such as managing to figure out how many resources they will need since more and more stuff are autoscaled.

They can hire devs but can't hire sys admins. Hell some of the time they can't even hire devs.

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

#159

Post by unity1001 »

elcomet wrote: post #21
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's totally non-obvious and certainly false in most cases. Cloud providers have huge economies of scale, which certainly makes it less expensive to use cloud if you factor in all your costs related to running it yourself. This is like saying buying furniture is more expensive than making your own furniture becaus…

> which certainly makes it less expensive to use cloud

AWS would pass that difference to Amazon shareholders than passing them to you.

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

#160

Post by unity1001 »

fabian2k wrote: post #11
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 expen…

> The cheapest provider there is probably Hetzner, but then your servers are in Germany

They have a US DC now. Though it only gives cloud servers. However even those are still way cheaper than any alternative.

Post reply on HN