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Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

tech.ahrefs.com

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Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#31

Post by endisneigh »

mlnj wrote: post #23
steve1977 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Surely the cloud managed solution reduces the amount of custom magic that I have to put into place to keep things running. Everything is standardized & documented. There is a huge community to turn to if help is needed. And very less work is required if I get hit by a bus and someone else is now the owner of the huge system that I previously owned.

but you can run kubernetes on bare metal

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#32

Post by KyeRussell »

antimius3000 wrote: post #14

In 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.

Yep. A completely natural instance of “computer nerd thinks that their expertise is transferrable”. The tech industry is rife with this sort of thinking.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#33

Post by Nextgrid »

bfeynman wrote: post #17

This 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…

Providers like OVH, Hetzner, etc will provide you servers and handle maintenance just like cloud providers, and it turns out that in both cases you need to hire sysadmins (or "DevOps" engineers). You don't need extra staff unless you do actual on-prem which very few companies need (most can be served by a provider like the aforementioned ones).

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#34

Post by botsbreeder »

bfeynman wrote: post #17

This 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…

Did you see how much we saved comparing to AWS? We could even hire an admin for each of 850 servers and would still have money left. But we have only one person taking care of hardware replacements. That is enough for the whole setup.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#36

Post by Nextgrid »

glintik wrote: post #30
tiffanyh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

And very wide choice of hardware and tuning abilities. Also network config can speed up overall performance greatly.

Direct-attach storage is a major improvement for things like databases, etc which you pretty much never have in the cloud, at least not in a persistent form.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#37

Post by quest88 »

nik736 wrote: post #21
antimius3000 wrote: post #14

In 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.

So let us know what is wrong and how a proper TCO calculation looks like. What's missing?

Yea, give us your template antimius3000.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#38

Post by humanistbot »

dtech wrote: post #26
nik736 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let us know what is wrong and how a proper TCO calculation looks like. What's missing?

Anything that you have to do "extra" compared to managing the hardware yourself. E.g. this article is missing even basic stuff like the (prorated) salary costs of employees buying, installing and servicing the hardware.

> E.g. this article is missing even basic stuff like the (prorated) salary costs of employees buying, installing and servicing the hardware.

You say that like you don't need a dedicated team to manage AWS.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#39

Post by hotpotamus »

bombcar wrote: post #5
cs702 wrote: post #2

I 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…

A significant number of "cloud migrations" involve moving an application running on Linux on a server to running on Linux on a VPS for similar or higher cost. Not even using ANY of the "features" of the cloud, just treating it like a server. But then they can say "cloud" and everyone's happy.

Ah yes, the "actual" way to use cloud is to undergo a major re-write of your application such that it is inextricably tied into the proprietary PaaS options of your cloud provider.

Cloud is amazing for highly variable loads. I also see it as a bit of a luxury service for ops types (like me) - I don't have to go to a DC and manage hardware or deal with a DCops crew, so that's nice, but you probably wouldn't buy luxury cars if you were starting a courier business.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#40

Post by KyeRussell »

debarshri wrote: post #24
bluedino wrote: post #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 guessin…

I'm familiar with the product. They help you optimize your SEO, provider serp scores, backlink health, organic keywords performance etc. Basically, everything to do with Google SEO. I think calling them "just a bunch of hadoop cluster" might be disservice to the amount of effort that goes into building a product like this esp. When millions of digital marketing professionals use their service.

I feel like you’ve used a dishonest interpretation of this comment to push back against it and flex that you know what this company does?

The only person ther said “just” is you. And “large Hadoop clusters” can be the most resource-intensive component of their infrastructure, but not necessarily the company’s value-add, or where most of their effort goes.

Stop being adversarial.

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