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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

#41

Post by klodolph »

hotpotamus wrote: post #28
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #3

I 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…

I had to look it up - Ansible's initial release was just over 11 years ago. Calling it "old-school" sure took me by surprise, though I suppose that is a long time in the tech world. To me, old school is doing everything via Bash or even by hand.

To me, old-school is the approach of updating servers so they match the desired configuration, rather than wiping the servers and deploying new versions of your containers.

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

#42

Post by bombcar »

hotpotamus wrote: post #39
bombcar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What really annoys me is that few if any clouds actually allow "dynamic scaling" of a single instance running operating system where you can hot-add more RAM or more CPU, with or without a restart.

Some can do it, some require you to basically image the entire machine onto a new one, some can't handle it at all.

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

#43

Post by amluto »

bfeynman wrote: post #9
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…

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.

Siloing expenses into capex and opex gets a bit silly when the cost effectiveness of that opex becomes low enough. For some cloud services, one can replace it with on-prem or colo’d equipment and recover the capex in months.

Similarly, “easy” scalability doesn’t necessarily make up for COGS when scaling up. If I can flip the autoscale switch while I grow to $1bn ARR and pay $750M/yr to the cloud, I’m not doing nearly as well as if I hire ten FTEs and pay $150M in combined capex and opex over two years.

(And if my COGS is 75% of the list price, it’s hard to give discounts, pay for sales, etc)

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

#45

Post by acedTrex »

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.

our vms we were running our stuff on was costing my team like 20-30k a month, we moved them to azure pay around 500ish

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

#46

Post by bfeynman »

steve1977 wrote: post #20
bfeynman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

if you think you need more headcount to do things on cloud you're doing it wrong. Just the identity setup alone needs multiple people, and that's almost a full time job for them. On cloud you don't have to worry about that at all, and it comes with full auditibility and compliance.

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

#47

Post by steve1977 »

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.

It is standardized and documented if you DO document it and properly use IaC like CloudFormation or Terraform. But you can absolutely have people do ad-hoc changes in AWS that are not gonna be reproducible.

Also, all of your points apply to non-cloud systems too.

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

#48

Post by warent »

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…

When consulting for a seed funded startup, I suggested they buy their own servers and colocate them. It could save them almost 100k a year.

Everyone looked at me like an alien speaking a different language, lol. Then was politely dismissed, even though I'm experienced in running hardware.

AWS, GCP, Azure, really managed to expertly pull off the greatest heist of all time. They're useful for sure, but somehow they've gotten everyone to drink this potent marketing kool-aid that if you're not using them then you're not serious about success. So cringe.

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

#49

Post by ejb999 »

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…

But that doesn't really prove much does it? You are saying they could rearchitect/simplify the whole thing and move it on site to save money - but what about rearchitecting the whole thing and leaving it on AWS?

Which part would actually saving them the money? - rearchitecting/simplifying, or changing where it runs? There would need to be an apples-to-apples comparison to be meaningful.

That said, I don't believe everything needs to be in the cloud - but maintaining data-centers are also very expensive, and need to be accounted for very differently.

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

#50

Post by OtomotO »

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.

Ah, so now the developers will service the AWS instances from your end which means they can work less on delivering new features... also left out of the equation quite often :)
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