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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

#171

Post by minhazm »

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…

The SQL example is a great one. I worked on a project where we used MySQL but then used SQLite for unit tests and integration tests. We technically wanted to be able to swap out the RDBMS to something like Postgres but in practice it was never going to happen. Over time it started getting complicated as some stuff we used in MySQL wasn't supported in SQLite. Eventually I just ditched SQLite and changed our testing to start a real MySQL server and destroy it after testing is complete.

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

#172

Post by cj »

300bps wrote: post #150
shudza wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lambda, SQS and SNS. That’s how just about everyone does backend API services with AWS. You’ll be shocked at how cheap, scalable and bullet-proof it can be.

Until you reach scale, and then you’ll typically end up migrating off of those services onto EC2 where a $10k/yr machine can process many orders of magnitude more requests for the same price.

Lambda, etc, just doesn’t scale well financially if you’re doing millions of requests per day.

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

#173

Post by systemvoltage »

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…

If you want rocksolid dedicated servers of utmost HA and reliability, look no further than Equinix Metal: https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/

They run datacenters for other datacenter companies. Most people have never heard of them because they're a $6B/year revenue beast that runs behind the scenes; but they also offer direct metal servers.

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

#175

Post by throwaway894345 »

pwinnski wrote: post #133
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You think AWS doesn't have enough lock-in now? And yet maximum profits come from keeping customers, not driving them away. There's no such thing as a managed service so proprietary that it can't be essentially cloned by another provider. I remember people making the same claims about S3 long ago, and yet there are multiple providers of S3-compatible file storage services now. Microsoft's Azure provides migration tool…

Our organization moved from AWS to GCP. We were very integrated in AWS, but the migration wasn’t so bad, and even with the benefit of hindsight I would never have thought that we should have strived to be cloud agnostic. Or rather, the best way to be “cloud agnostic” is to architect your applications sensibly such that changing from S3 to GCS is a relatively small, localized change in each application. Also, having a good test suite really helps to protect against regressions, and a culture of documentation will help to make sure you know what things to port over and what things are vestiges of some old requirements and so on. Ultimately, moving cloud providers wasn’t that bad in my experience.

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

#176

Post by galaxyLogic »

guhidalg wrote: post #170
joshstrange wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As to "cloud agnostic", don't believe this bullshit. > 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. I agree, I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted trying to keeps something (theoretically) cloud or DBMS agnostic, how many problems it's caused, and at the end of the day we could never "easily" move to a diffe…

But why would you try to build something cloud-agnostic to run on the most cloud-aware tier: serverless? Computers don't come forth from the ether, your code is always running _somewhere_ and serverless means your provider makes a ton of choices for you. The lowest common denominator across clouds is a VM. If you can run your applications and your databases on VMs, you can run them on any cloud AND on-premises. If yo…

I wonder could micro-services be the solution?

Run some of your micro-services on AWS and another on Azure etc. A given micro-service then might be highly dependent on AWS but the part of your application that uses those micro-services would not know anything about internals of AWS etc.

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

#177

Post by zo1 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #28
zo1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. Ask one of your devs to spend X amount of time on something. Might not be an exact 1 for 1 or 0.1% but it still beats the many many hours you'd waste architecting around cloud-specific issues and nuances. Or the cost of dealing with the friction that comes when you want to do anything with cloud in a manner that isn't cloud-supported.

Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.

That's a failing on our industry to some degree then. We automate everything and fix gaps with technical solutions all the time. But now, 20 years after the internet became huge, we think that we still haven't figured out how to easily provision servers. We have, we just let AWS et al capture all the value of that discovery.

Yes I exaggerate a bit, but I do so to make a point stand out.

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

#178

Post by throwaway894345 »

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.

Maybe if you ignore the costs associated with operating EC2 or if you have a steady, predictable workload. Or perhaps if you have enormous (on the order of FAANG) scale to absorb those operational costs.

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

#180

Post by 60secs »

pwinnski wrote: post #116
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…

> 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…

If you need to hire 5-10 engineers to save $1MM, you didn't save anything.
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