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37signals Leaves the Cloud

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Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#71

Post by Ecio78 »

pfhayes wrote: post #58
adrianmsmith wrote: post #49

> The cloud excels at two ends of the spectrum ... The first end is when your application is so simple and low traffic that you really do save on complexity by starting with fully managed services .. The second is when your load is highly irregular I think there's a third, which is when the company is so rich it just doesn't matter. Then saving even a little bit of employee time (which are more likely to be the bottl…

This isn’t only true for “rich” companies. Companies (particularly young ones) succeed or fail if they are innovating on their products and delivering value to customers. Reducing cloud spend is not doing that. It may very well improve the bottom line, but when the company is (correctly) more focused on “how do we increase our customers by X% this year”, pursuing those savings is a distraction.

It's true also for companies where CIOs are going to Gartner events and don't want to appear like the only ones not being "cloud-only" or "cloud-first"

Then you end up with BS like the ones described here https://www.the-investing-desk.com/cloud-costs-are-in-a-bubb... where to justify the fact that cloud is much more expensive managers start to throw random numbers vaguely justified just to show that cloud is actually better.

I saw similar things in Corporate world even when choosing a colo/service partner vs doing in-house... managers asking us detailed costs for infra needed (servers, network, licenses etc.) and when you were getting something like 30 in-house vs 100 hosted they just threw some random FTE count to support it to get to 110 vs 100.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#72

Post by WhyNotHugo »

The premise of the cloud is actually a good idea: if you only use the server for 1cpu-hours per day, you should only pay that, and let others use it for the other 23cpu-hours in the day.

The executions we've had so far are terrible. There's huge markup, piles of complex abstractions, and all the other issues mentioned in this article.

When I was a teen, I used to pay this guy in town like $1.5 a month for a user on a *nix machine where I could run scripts and run my own IRC bouncer and stuff. A bunch of people shared this machine (mostly running IRC bouncers, AFAIK). I've no idea now many, it was stable, and nobody was eating up all the CPU. It worked.

I feel that this nostalgic memory of the past is closer to a utopic "cloud" than anything any modern provider is offering.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#73

Post by pelasaco »

Abe9000 wrote: post #68
pelasaco wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person + data center, right? Either he will build his own small server room or have to do co-location somewhere..

WIth 500K yearly you can do a lot!! Including renting 3 office spaces in multiple locations in the US and using them as data centers. Offices cost about $1000 - $3000 yearly, he doesn't need a premium space in a big building but for $500K yearly you can do a lot! In 2 years you would have spent 1M. That is more than enough to have a dedicated devops that travels to all the locations and setup the super beefy servers…

Ok but 500k is the whole budget for location, backup location, energy, devops people, operation people, etc.. I run part of our infra on-premise, and part of on AWS.. in the summer, we had issues with our air-conditioner (europe) and we had to turn-off partially our service, now in Winter because of the raising costs, we are discussing again what to do with the on-premise services, employees getting ill, etc but AWS, in another hand, is just a bill.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#75

Post by karmakaze »

lastofus wrote: post #45
karmakaze wrote: post #36

I worked at a hybrid shop that had main MySQL and MongoDB databases on bare metal rented servers and all the new extra features/services built in AWS. It was a pretty good split. We did have some human cost in handling hardware failures and scaling of the hardware but it was way less than cloud hosting for that much CPU and RAM would have been as well as access to higher performance machines. I'm glad that most of th…

I’d think the latency between the app servers and the DBs would be a problem, given they didn’t live in the same data center. How was that mitigated?

Oh right, we did have many app servers located with the DBs as well. They were stateless and numerous so could be anywhere. The datacentre with the bare metal did have dedicated links to the nearby AWS region we were using. At one point I think one of their redundant links got severed on purpose by accident, so things were slow for a while.

The microservices in AWS were feature-services that had their own datastores so only paid a single overall request latency than the many app-server to db queries per user request.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#76

Post by senttoschool »

jjav wrote: post #61
senttoschool wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has over a decade of experience and a ton of full-time dev ops to make complicated cloud usage easy. You're not going to beat the reliability by going inhouse.

> You're not going to beat the reliability by going inhouse. OP was talking about observability and diagnosability. These will be infinitely better/easier with access to the hardware & OS. But on reliability, if you keep your stack simple and boring, you can pretty easily also beat them on reliability. Complexity is the top enemy of reliability (and security).

Postgres is a simple stack.

On AWS, you can have a Postgres instance with multi-region availability. How do you plan to do this with your own hardware?

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#77

Post by tomaskafka »

Why Weathergraph (my hourly forecast app for iOS) was never in the cloud:

Because I’d be dumb to spend hundreds of dollars and engineering complexity for a stable load service, when a 20 EUR VPS (10 EUR until recently - see, scaling!) runs everything I need (forecast proxy, geocoding, website, payment verification) just fine :).

(Link: https://apps.apple.com/cz/app/weathergraph-weather-widget/id... )

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#78

Post by tomaskafka »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #72

The premise of the cloud is actually a good idea: if you only use the server for 1cpu-hours per day, you should only pay that, and let others use it for the other 23cpu-hours in the day. The executions we've had so far are terrible. There's huge markup, piles of complex abstractions, and all the other issues mentioned in this article. When I was a teen, I used to pay this guy in town like $1.5 a month for a user on a…

You just described a low budget shared VPS. I’m running everything on these for a few EUR per month :).

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#79

Post by papito »

The problem with the cloud is that it makes things easy. Just throw it in, eh?

Developers keep adding toys that cost money, and then at some point, someone at the top notices the bill, and it's all hands on deck.

The cost due diligence should happened before anything, not when your ass is on fire and you need to save money yesterday.

"Do we need that beefy RDS instance?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Why does our ElasticCache data keep growing at such a high rate and nothing is expiring?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Could X be done much cheaper with Y?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Why did we spin up DynamoDB for this if we already have Postgres?". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#80

Post by ericraio »

It almost seems like their is an opportunity to build a cloud hosting service, where mom and pop data centers can plug in their infrastructure to a cloud service and let the platform manage the renting and latency based routing.

If the software is developed enough, this enables an even more global distribution. Software services don't want to manage machines and data centers don't want to manage customers.

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