Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#161

Post by dijit » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

throwawaymaths wrote: post #159

sofixa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks fo…

It also lets a CFO convert capex to opex (may or may not have tax implications), and you eliminate a cost center from your balance sheets (and turns it into service payments) which makes CFOs look better, even if it's net worse for the Company

CFO's don't care about CapEx vs OpEx.

At least mine doesn't seem to care even slightly, nor did my previous one.

I'm fairly certain this is an argument that we in the tech community make because we heard someone else make it.

When asking finance people blankly: having capital expenditure on the books is not a problem.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#162

Post by CharlieDigital » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

dimgl wrote: post #150

CharlieDigital wrote: post #30

> If you're an indie hacker, a boostrapper, a startup, an agency or a consultancy, or just a small team building a product, chances are you are not going to need the cost and complexity that comes with modern cloud platforms. Hard disagree. - On cost: there is almost nothing better for the indie hacker, bootstrapper, or startup than cloud services. I run apps on all three platforms (Google, AWS, and Azure) and my mon…

Yeah I can’t agree with you at all. Without setting up your own NAT Gateway on EC2 on a t2.micro instance (or something cheap like that), it runs you about $30. This isn’t even accounting for database costs, usage costs, development costs, etc. So right away that “I can’t believe they even charge my CC for $0.02” is real suspect. Do you have a completely empty AWS account? We haven’t even spoken about dev experience…

> Without setting up your own NAT Gateway on EC2 on a t2.micro instance...

The problem is that you're using EC2 instead of AWS App Runner, Google Cloud Run, or Azure Container Apps.

> We haven’t even spoken about dev experience yet.

I'd strongly recommend that you give Google Cloud Run a try. You can go from empty codebase to running, on demand serverlesss runtime via GitHub with only a Dockerfile. I can build an app from scratch and have it running in Google Cloud in probably under 3 minutes with no special CLI knowledge or build.

Here's a sample Dockerfile I'd need to get a dotnet app into Google Cloud Run:

  # The build environment
  FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:6.0-alpine as build
  WORKDIR /app
  COPY . .
  RUN dotnet restore
  RUN dotnet publish -o /app/published-app --configuration Release

  # The runtime
  FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:6.0-alpine as runtime
  WORKDIR /app
  COPY --from=build /app/published-app /app

  # The value production is used in Program.cs to set the URL for Google Cloud Run
  ENV ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=production
  ENV IS_GOOGLE_CLOUD=true

  ENTRYPOINT [ "dotnet", "/app/my-app.dll" ]

Every other aspect of the code remains unchanged. GCR will pull the code from GitHub, build the container, and operationalize it.

https://github.com/CharlieDigital/dn6-mongo-react-valtio

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#163

Post by throwawaymaths » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #161

throwawaymaths wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also lets a CFO convert capex to opex (may or may not have tax implications), and you eliminate a cost center from your balance sheets (and turns it into service payments) which makes CFOs look better, even if it's net worse for the Company

CFO's don't care about CapEx vs OpEx. At least mine doesn't seem to care even slightly, nor did my previous one. I'm fairly certain this is an argument that we in the tech community make because we heard someone else make it. When asking finance people blankly: having capital expenditure on the books is not a problem.

Ok. I guess I just worked for one CFO that obsessed about it, so for me n=1

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#164

Post by vsareto » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

chadash wrote: post #12

I don't know. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems to me that knowing the basics of AWS (or some cloud provider) has become part of the standard developer's toolkit. With AWS specifically, there's so much documentation out there about getting started that I think you can have something up in a day or two on something like ECS or lambda (using something like the Serverless framework). And then when you need the more co…

The basics give you enough to be dangerous, but cloud stuff has become complex enough to require dedicated people to do it well.

I'd prefer to hire someone dedicated to that and just let them work part time when the environment is simple over a developer with just the basics who's going to try to architect and run everything.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#165

Post by dijit » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

throwawaymaths wrote: post #163

dijit wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CFO's don't care about CapEx vs OpEx. At least mine doesn't seem to care even slightly, nor did my previous one. I'm fairly certain this is an argument that we in the tech community make because we heard someone else make it. When asking finance people blankly: having capital expenditure on the books is not a problem.

Ok. I guess I just worked for one CFO that obsessed about it, so for me n=1

Well, n=2 for me, but that's not to say you're wrong.

I reached the conclusion that it's basically a self-perpetuating myth because I asked my CFO's directly about it because it comes up often.

Curious though: where are you based? My CFO's were German and... German (but the second was working in Sweden with Swedish financial rules)

Maybe it is actually different depending on location or there's some other factor at play?

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#166

Post by systemvoltage » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #56

dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really agree with you, what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud. There's also something to be said for buying a VPS or a Colo machine, making sure it's backed up and dealing with the 9's that you get from that machine on it's own. I am routinely surprised by how far a single node machine will get you.

> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks fo…

Equinix Bare Metal. https://metal.equinix.com/

They’re a $6B revenue company that most people haven’t heard of. Their expertise is in building data centers for other data center companies.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#167

Post by sofixa » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #149

sofixa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks fo…

If you open a ticket with a real remote hands you should get a response back in minutes; typically someone will be on-site in your cage in under an hour. You also don’t “deploy a server” to reduce load you plan ahead every few months and deploy thousands at a time. Even then- if you have a good relationship with a really good systems integrator, they can ship and rack machines in a matter of days, not weeks. I’m incr…

> If you open a ticket with a real remote hands you should get a response back in minutes; typically someone will be on-site in your cage in under an hour

Remote hands won't order your servers, configure your networking, install OSes/configure your PXE, and all the other tedious things running your own DC entails.

Yes, most DIY DCs are done terribly, that's to whole point - if so many people struggle with that, doesn't it make sense to just outsource it?

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#168

Post by Nextgrid » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #19

This article is written in kind of a controversial way but it seems like the throughline of the argument is something like "use heroku until you have 100k users". This seems very reasonable to me. I thought it was going to be a pitch for on prem, which is also fine for certain scales. I think generally the scaling steps from startup to megacorp go: Heroku/Dokku > Public Cloud >Dedicated servers in someone else's DC >…

I don't see the point of public cloud. In practice, it still requires a sysadmin (now called "DevOps engineers") so it's not any better than rented bare-metal in terms of maintenance overhead, while still being extremely expensive.

Use a managed PaaS to begin with (you pay more but it does genuinely save you time as there is no management overhead), then when you're ready to do things yourself go straight to hosted bare-metal, and only use public cloud services for their managed services that you can't replicate yourself (think Redshift/Athena/Aurora/etc).

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#169

Post by Nextgrid » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

sakisv wrote: post #115

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #19

This article is written in kind of a controversial way but it seems like the throughline of the argument is something like "use heroku until you have 100k users". This seems very reasonable to me. I thought it was going to be a pitch for on prem, which is also fine for certain scales. I think generally the scaling steps from startup to megacorp go: Heroku/Dokku > Public Cloud >Dedicated servers in someone else's DC >…

> Heroku/Dokku > Public Cloud >Dedicated servers in someone else's DC > Custom Hardware in custom built data centers. I think stackoverflow and its siblings proved that having a handful of servers can go a very long way, even making cloud ops redundant. Of course this is function of what you're optimizing for, and whether you want to go down the "boring monolithic app" route.

> Of course this is function of what you're optimizing for, and whether you want to go down the "boring monolithic app" route.

Microservices do add some overhead but it's not extreme - even a microservices-based app can run just fine on a decent bare-metal box if you run all the services on it.

Of course, the talk of microservices brings the question of what problem you're actually trying to solve - are you aiming to build a technical solution to a business problem or are you aiming to create an engineering playground so there's endless busywork and justification for hiring lots of engineers? If it's the latter, then bare-metal is going to be a bad option anyway as it's not the kind of toy a typical startup engineer wants to play with.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#170

Post by ericd » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #105

ericd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, we were easily saving a developer salary per month vs AWS using colo’d hardware even as a very small company. And god help you if you’re trying to run something bandwidth intensive on AWS.

What happens if your server's hardware seriously breaks?

Then there are a few other physical servers with load balanced redundant VMs, and it fails over seamlessly. HAProxy makes this pretty easy to handle. But we almost never had any hardware issues, servers are pretty reliable.