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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

#241

Post by icedchai »

dijit wrote: post #236
moduspol wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true, then there'd be no value proposition to AWS. It is absolutely easier to use S3 than to create your own fast, highly available, infinitely scaling storage solution on your own metal. It requires more than zero knowledge / expertise to use S3, but far less than it would to implement and run yourself. If you can accept that, then we already agree in principle. It's just matter of where the line is dra…

There is a value prop for sure. It’s hard to quantify how best you’ll be served but a lot of people are following the mantra of “nobody got fired for going AWS”. It makes sense for some people, others are cargo-culting; yet more are fanning the flames of that cargo cult because their pay check depends on it. Sysadmins are/were paid much less than cloud native devops people, and you need the same number of them unless…

One good DevOps person can achieve much more than a single sysadmin. Most old school sysadmins were doing everything manually with relatively little automation.

You are certainly correct about the the overly complex AWS reference architectures. I've seen relatively simple applications with just as much infrastructure code (generally "terraform", occasionally CloudFormation JSON) as application code. It's crazy.

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

#242

Post by pessimizer »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #83
pessimizer wrote: post #46

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. That idea was not expressed in the comment that you replied to. The comment you replied to was in response to a strong claim that ignored the existence of economies of scale, and therefore concluded that it's so obvious that cloud providers must always be more expensive than se…

That's just not how this works. Dell can bulk order parts and has a strong negotiating stance, which makes the hardware __CHEAPER FOR THEM__. It says nothing about how much the market can bear for Dell. And in fact, companies use Dell because of the _guarantees_, not the cost. At any point in time, Dell will replace hardware with no questions asked. They can do this because of the margins between what it costs them a…

You're arguing with a position that no one is taking. I'm a cloud-to-butt guy, and have no love for AWS or cloud. I will probably always run my own servers because I spent a lot of my life learning how to do it. I'm annoyed that I'm telling you that as a way to try to trick you into reading the comments that you're replying to.

edit:

Also, this shit?

> That's just not how this works.

It never makes you sound right.

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

#244

Post by lakomen »

moduspol wrote: post #214
boltzmann-brain wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and in fact running own metal is an order of magnitude easier than puzzling around the Brazil nightmare that AWS is. Both people cost money. It's not like if you go with AWS things run themselves.

If that were true, then there'd be no value proposition to AWS. It is absolutely easier to use S3 than to create your own fast, highly available, infinitely scaling storage solution on your own metal. It requires more than zero knowledge / expertise to use S3, but far less than it would to implement and run yourself. If you can accept that, then we already agree in principle. It's just matter of where the line is dra…

Minio is FOSS and a lot cheaper. I don't see your point

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

#245

Post by pessimizer »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #66
pessimizer wrote: post #46

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. That idea was not expressed in the comment that you replied to. The comment you replied to was in response to a strong claim that ignored the existence of economies of scale, and therefore concluded that it's so obvious that cloud providers must always be more expensive than se…

At this point, it should be pretty clear that self-hosting is cheaper, given all of the examples we have seen. AWS's economies of scale have as much to do with its pricing as the phases of the moon, and citing them as a reason why AWS could be cheaper than self-hosting is pretty ignorant in itself.

Again. This was a reply to a strong, clearly expressed claim. You can make up other related claims to argue with, but you should find somebody actually making them in order to be more effective.

It is not obvious that growing your own wheat will always be cheaper than buying bread.

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

#246

Post by neeleshs »

boltzmann-brain wrote: post #187
Dma54rhs wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS knowledge and engineering doesn't come for free either. People have built whole careers and businesses around it.

Indeed, and in fact running own metal is an order of magnitude easier than puzzling around the Brazil nightmare that AWS is. Both people cost money. It's not like if you go with AWS things run themselves.

The value prop of AWS/GCP etc go beyond bare metal vs VMs. Running HA databases (even if you are a startup, you need this), centralized logging, secrets manager, KMS, making sure disks are encrypted, something like pub/sub as a messaging backbone for your application, load balancers... the list goes on.

Huge difference b/w reading a few pages of documentation on secrets manager, and clicking a button to get the service on vs deploying, and maintaining a vault on bare machines.

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

#247

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> 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.

For comparison's sake, the net salary for a software developer in Latvia is roughly between 950 and 2800 euros per month: https://www.algas.lv/en/salaryinfo/information-technology/pr...

Given the above number, some calculations of the gross salary land at between 1350 and 4000 euros per month: https://mansjumis.lv/darba-algas-kalkulators

So essentially one of your developer days would represent weeks of work for a Latvian developer (depending on additional expenses/overhead), which I find curious.

Developer costs are still likely to be higher than infrastructure costs, but not nearly by as much, which might explain why I've seen a lot of on-prem deployments locally, and people shying away from going all in with cloud technologies.

I wonder whether these differences are more pronounced for other countries where developers can be comparatively less expensive (at least in relation to using the cloud and/or hardware), like India, Russia and elsewhere, how much the development culture differs. Also how many would opt for alternative providers like Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway, OVH and so on...

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

#248

Post by pessimizer »

merb wrote: post #196
pessimizer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way this figure is accurate. You've got the FUD covered, but you also need to add at least some substance to your claim. How do you know this figure would not be accurate? Why is your (hypothetical, not offered) estimate better than the author's?

well the problem with the article is basically that they left out a lot of important detail, like which bare metal servers, how many, where do they host now, did they use cloudfront what about cloudflare did they use an edge cache? what about reducing costs by killing stopping unneeded resources? a lot of their workload looks dynamic. it's also fishy what they wrote here: > After testing whether Prerender pages could…

> well the problem with the article is basically that they left out a lot of important detail,

The problem with your comment is that you insisted that they gave you enough detail to definitively determine that they were either lying or mistaken.

> There is no way this figure is accurate.

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

#249

Post by mappu »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #210
pclmulqdq wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

R2 is an object store. It is literally a drop-in replacement to S3. Cloudflare is a CDN, which, like all of its competitors, is a lot cheaper than doing it yourself because CDNs are a competitive market . There are at least 10 (if not more) CDN providers out there that have footprints in several thousand datacenters, and the product is completely undifferentiated. In a competitive market, you have to charge related t…

> R2 is an object store. It is literally a drop-in replacement to S3. A CDN is a thing where you can put things, and request them by web, and have them geo-distributed. R2 is actually a CDN. So is S3. Yes, I'm aware, the vending companies also sell different products called CDNs. Nonetheless, R2 and S3 (unlike B2) are CDNs. You can make distributed hits to it across the planet to addresses you don't control. You can…

Thanks for the long comment, there's a few insightful parts, and a few parts i wanted to reply to:

> R2 is actually a CDN. So is S3. Yes, I'm aware, the vending companies also sell different products called CDNs. Nonetheless, R2 and S3 (unlike B2) are CDNs. You can make distributed hits to it across the planet to addresses you don't control. You can hit it directly from the web, and it will serve to you from a local node you never knew anything about. Its goals are speed and locality. You can look up programmers debating whether to use CloudFront or S3 as their CDN based on time to invalidate vs actual speed and cost control.

S3 does not serve you from a local node (by my understanding of 'local'), it always goes to the source AWS region. It can take advantage of availability zones but it is still regional. It is missing the "D" part of "CDN". Perhaps this argument is just semantics, but the conventionally held understanding of "CDN" is that it's much much more widely geo-distributed. Otherwise you're right that they both provide a storage function.

> Wasabi has been around since 2015. B2 isn't really the same kind of thing as R2 or S3.

B2 added an S3-compatible API, so they're now directly comparable.

Other recent entrants in this market are IDrive e2 (4 USD/mo/TB) and Storj (4 USD/mo/TB). It's definitely a competitive market aside from the anti-competitive pressures that keep people using S3 anyway, such as zero-rated transfer within an AWS region to your other AWS resources.

Storj is the closest competitive object-store to a CDN in that it is possible to get data from the nearest geolocated node, although you'll (A) have to use the non-S3-compatible version of their API to do it, and (B) tolerate a certain degree of crypto-adjacency,

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

#250

Post by CreepGin »

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/

Wow! I thought it was a typo for "bizarre"... but now I know
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