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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

#221

Post by 0x457 »

theptip wrote: post #142
throwaway858 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Right -- that's the one implementation detail in the OP that was interesting. It sounds like they ultimately used MinIO to replace S3. I've seen people use Ceph, but it's apparently a nightmare to operate a Ceph cluster. If you're on k8s I think the "cloud native" way might be Rook, haven't looked into that. Anyway, running an object store is painful. Their notes here are a bit vague: > When the migration reached mid…

Well, their layout is essentially a map from url to html, so cassandra would work well here.

MinIO is AGPL-3 though or commercial license. Pretty sure using it as cache would be considered combined work?

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

#222

Post by PetahNZ »

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.

Unless your app is doing a lot of compute. We tried moving our workers to lambda, it was 10x the cost vs an EC2 auto scaling group

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

#223

Post by twawaaay »

speedgoose wrote: post #153
twawaaay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a tradeoff. Whatever you choose will have its costs.

You need to know the tradeoff you are making but what I am saying is that, in most cases, it costs more to spend so much effort up front to be "cloud agnostic" than any benefits of maybe being able to switch cloud environment in a hurry.

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

#224

Post by RussianCow »

macinjosh wrote: post #90
pooper wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me it is antithetical to building a sustainable product. Continuing what you said, Google uses macOS and Windows for client machines. That is ok because if Apple or Microsoft were to decide to cut off Google altogether, Google would have bigger problems. However, I think from a business point of view, this is similar to how so many businesses use cloudinary. Cloudinary is a software as a service company that pro…

I can't find the quote, but I think it was Joel Spolsky on an old stackoverflow podcast with Jeff Atwood. They were discussing why stackoverflow built their own servers and did not use cloud or other hosting. He said something like companies should fully own and control their product and any direct dependencies thereof. If you think of it as a concentric set of rings you at least want to have full control over your r…

That doesn't sound reasonable at all to me. Unless you are building your own cloud service or doing something out of the ordinary (for which cloud wouldn't be a good fit anyway), the hardware you run on has absolutely nothing to do with your business. Take the shortest/cheapest path and move on.

To be fair to the Stack Overflow guys, AWS had fewer offerings when SO was built, so the comparison wasn't the same then as it is now.

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

#225

Post by twawaaay »

spoiler wrote: post #149
twawaaay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> As to "cloud agnostic", don't believe this bullshit. A notable exception to this is of you have clients whose IT departments require you to work on specific cloud providers. Although, there's tools that help abstract deploying infrastructure to different cloud providers (eg terraform, pulumi), but they still require some familiarity with the providers. With all that said, overall I agree with your sentiment

When you build software for a client that is a completely different game.

I divide this into two completely separate areas:

* advisory -- you advise your client on what is prudent in their circumstances,

* software development -- you produce software to client specifications, regardless of what they asked.

You can advise them all you want but then you do what they asked and that's it -- they are always right.

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

#226

Post by dalmo3 »

maxfurman wrote: post #204
monkpit wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazil?

This is a reference to the film Brazil[0], which centers on a labyrinthine bureaucracy [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/

> labyrinthine bureaucracy

This is a reference to the country Brazil [0], which centers on...

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-18020623

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

#227

Post by twawaaay »

ozim wrote: post #96
twawaaay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cloud agnostic has its place if you have enterprise contract with cloud provider. If you have 100s of projects cloud agnostic infra is good. If for example Amazon buys your competitor and now you get "new contract coming up". That said I agree "most projects fare much better without" - a lot of people don't understand they are not in position where they would benefit from that.

The issue here is that the contract terms might change iteratively by some percentage, while development costs are exponential -- adding requirements to the project increases cost exponentially.

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

#228

Post by registeredcorn »

(Note: I have never done any professional work in cloud. I could be completely mistaken. Feel free to correct me if I'm completely off-base.)

It's a fascinating article, for sure. I would have been interested to hear what their backup strategy looked like though.

One of the big benefits of cloud services, that I am aware of, is the assurance that if natural disaster strikes, you don't lose all of your data. I kind of got the impression that, more than anything else, that is what you are paying for. Data protection and uptime.

I suppose big enough bills could lead a company to make the kinds of changes that Prerender did, but when that disaster does strike, and it is time to try and recover from a fire, flood, earthquake, etc. the responsibility and speed of getting your customers back online is reliant completely upon your staff - a staff who might be extremely shaken up, hurt, or pre-occupied in taking care of their own affairs. I'm not saying it's not possible, but there is a kind of cost that comes in the form of responsibility. It's a trade off that I would not fault many people from avoiding.

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

#230

Post by taylodl »

cj wrote: post #172
300bps wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then as the OP said, AWS isn't for you if you have a constant 24/7 compute load. In my case the load is very bursty. I sometimes do millions of requests per day, but I typically don't. We lowered our TCO by 75% by moving from on-prem to AWS and using Lambda. It really comes down to your compute load profile.
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