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37signals Leaves the Cloud

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Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#81

Post by aliqot »

tomaskafka wrote: post #78
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 :).

Vultr has a good 2 dollar tier for this, my only gripe being that they're like Hetzner and will shut your shit down at random in the first 6 months and ask you for your passport or ID or a pic of you holding it. This has happened to me personally on Vultr and Hetzner.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#82

Post by Breza »

codegeek wrote: post #57
senttoschool wrote: post #8

So their AWS bill is $500k/year. Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? For an email service, you'd think that you want the most reliable host. Weird.

"Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? " Outside of expensive Silicon Valley and FAANGs, where do you get this $250k/Year ? I think most of us on HN are normalizing this whole "devs make 250k/year" thing when in reality, it is a tiny percentage of people. Tiny when you look at the entire ecosystem.

Agreed. Managing servers isn't easy, but it's also not going to get you a quarter million bucks a year.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#83

Post by Breza »

jjav wrote: post #62
senttoschool wrote: post #8

So their AWS bill is $500k/year. Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? For an email service, you'd think that you want the most reliable host. Weird.

> So their AWS bill is $500k/year. > Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? A company which has a total AWS bill of $500k/yr is a very small one (the article says 500K is just the RDS/ES bill, so total is surely much higher for them). Our (tiny startup) AWS bill is ~200K/yr and the amount of compute and storage we do could very easily b…

Well said! It's amazing how much power you can get in a $10,000 server. If you have a simple stack and consistent demand, self hosting makes a ton of sense.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#84

Post by [deleted] »

senttoschool wrote: post #8

So their AWS bill is $500k/year. Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? For an email service, you'd think that you want the most reliable host. Weird.

[deleted]

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#85

Post by khebbie »

I didn’t listen to the accompanying podcast so I might be missing some details.

It strikes me that it seems like 37signals are just using AWS as a glorified virtual machine with maybe some db hosting. To me the big benefit of the cloud is using all the little services they provide, like s3, sns, sqs, CloudSearch ECS, cloudwatch and the list goes on and on. If we were to host all those service ourselves and keep them up to date the operating cost would be huge. Furthermore I work for a site that is very public and has a lot of for instance ddos threats hanging over head. AWS handles lots of ddos threats all the time and they a much better suited for handling that than our own ops team.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#86

Post by datanerd613 »

brenogazzola wrote: post #11
senttoschool wrote: post #8

So their AWS bill is $500k/year. Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? For an email service, you'd think that you want the most reliable host. Weird.

Their RDS and ES are 500k. They still need to pay for EC2, S3 and any other services they might be using, like ELB and Elasticache. So probably higher than that. He also did not mention if they are going to self-host, colocate, or rent bare metal in a more traditional host (like softlayer). Probably colocate as I think that’s how they used to run? Both your points are still valid though.

He mentioned in the podcast that they rent a space at the data center so I assume colocate

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#87

Post by tomaskafka »

aliqot wrote: post #81
tomaskafka wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Vultr has a good 2 dollar tier for this, my only gripe being that they're like Hetzner and will shut your shit down at random in the first 6 months and ask you for your passport or ID or a pic of you holding it. This has happened to me personally on Vultr and Hetzner.

I understand why they need to do it, and am fine with that.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#89

Post by Breza »

commitpizza wrote: post #5

Very interesting post! I think there will be a movement away from the cloud in the coming time. People will realize that the cloud comes with it's problems when regulations come down, governments require companies to spy on them etc. The only way of being really sure of what is going on is to own it yourself. Unfortunately that has become more and more important.

I think there will be more competition for specific types of cloud needs. AWS, GCP, and Azure offer every service you could ever need in one place. At the other extreme, you can pay a colo facility to rack the servers you own. I think the in-between market has the potential to grow. Cheaper than AWS but without all the drawbacks of true self-hosting.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#90

Post by truetraveller »

Nextgrid wrote: post #59
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.

I'm going to beat its reliability (and successfully do so) because the complexity of my stack is less than 1% of Amazon's. I have way less moving parts (and complex interactions between them) to worry about than Amazon. My only liability is hardware failure, and it turns out that stuff has gotten pretty reliable nowadays. Am I able to beat Amazon on their wide range of services? Absolutely not - if you're looking for…

This is a fantastic rebuttal to those who claim "AWS has way more resources/experience, thus they will be more reliable".
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