Entirely predictable. Cloud is good for some use cases. Self hosting is good for some other use cases. Neither is objectively “better”. Both should be seen and used in the context of a task in hand.
But alas it is human nature to pick up a hammer, call it the best thing in the world, and start whacking it at every problem. See: cloud, blockchain, k8s, and now chatgpt/ai.
Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
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Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#12I often fantasize about moving a bunch of my company's crap off of ECS/EKS and onto a managed colo with just old-school ansible deployments. I've even spec'd out some bare metal from our local colocation facility and the servers they offer are so ridiculously powerful and CHEAP. We could run our entire production system in a half-rack for about 10% of what we pay AWS. But alas, nobody will ever go for it and I'm left…
> "We could run our entire production system in a half-rack for about 10% of what we pay AWS"
Performance. You'd also get way faster hardware too.
Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#13I recently heard from a senior IT person that the company for which he works could save many millions by moving a certain application from a hairball of micro-services at AWS to a much simpler architecture on colocated servers... but the company's management doesn't want to hear any of it. In fact, management wants IT to move every legacy application that's not yet on the cloud to the cloud, specifically to AWS, beca…
I think a lot of companies are going to find that they have the same relationship with AWS as banks do with Bloomberg i.e. a massive spend that they constantly try to manage downwards but can never escape.
I‘m in this picture twice and I don’t like it.
Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#14In the last 15 years that I've seen this type of clickbait, 100% of the time it's written by someone who doesn't know how to make a TCO calculation. Of course, this time was no different. Should have saved myself the agony after reading the first sentence: "Clouds for IT infrastructure are so popular lately that moving into the cloud has become a trend.". Please.
Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#15I recently heard from a senior IT person that the company for which he works could save many millions by moving a certain application from a hairball of micro-services at AWS to a much simpler architecture on colocated servers... but the company's management doesn't want to hear any of it. In fact, management wants IT to move every legacy application that's not yet on the cloud to the cloud, specifically to AWS, beca…
Tale as old as time. Heard the same with exchange, MSP contracts, etc etc some suit somewhere always has some CYA reason no matter how silly or wrong it may me.
Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#16[deleted]
Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#17This napkin math is pointless, if you're a business leader, you're going to factor in non physical costs as well, since you need a team to run hundreds of servers most likely. If business all of a sudden starts to go under, you can pull plug on cloud, but you'd have to write it off if self hosting.
Hosting yourself makes sense if you're providing hardware level services like storage or compute. In that case, going to the cloud is literally financing your (potential ) competitor.
Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#18I recently heard from a senior IT person that the company for which he works could save many millions by moving a certain application from a hairball of micro-services at AWS to a much simpler architecture on colocated servers... but the company's management doesn't want to hear any of it. In fact, management wants IT to move every legacy application that's not yet on the cloud to the cloud, specifically to AWS, beca…
From a biz perspective, that can be a bad move and signals that you're not in growth phase but in cutting costs to preserve profits. Using cloud derisks you for future costs because it's managed for you, and then you allocate capex towards making better features. Doing it locally means having a team of IT admins/professionals you normally only need a few of which also incurs a lot of cost and risk.
Lets replace 4 cheap admins with 3 expensive devops engs
Yaay savings!
Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#19> We use high core-count CPUs, 2TB RAM, and 2x 100Gbps per server. On average, our servers have about 16x 15TB drives.
> So let’s say we run our 850 servers
I'm not familiar with this company, but it says on their website We’ve been crawling the web for over 10 years, collecting and processing petabytes of data every day., they have their own search engine (named 'Yep), provide all kinds of reports, etc.
I'm guessing they are running huge Hadoop clusters or something? One of those workloads that just isn't suited for the cloud, and they're just taking the advice of Joel Spolsky
“If it's a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.”
Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
#20Pretty interesting point there at the end of the post: But with the mass layoffs in Big Tech in recent months, this may be an opportunity to re-evaluate the approach to the cloud, consider a reverse migration from the cloud, and hire seasoned professionals of the data center world. I do think with all these layoffs we can't help but see some interesting things happen from people who have been let go. Either through t…
despite what everyone thinks that doing things locally is cheaper, if you're running a business and allocating money towards headcount and benefits plus additional risk of maintaining team it rarely makes sense. HN is full of people who run a hobby server and think that a fortune 500 should manage its own PostGres
You still need headcount to manage systems on AWS. And not really fewer then if you would run them locally.
Source: managed systems locally, am now managing systems on AWS