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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

#51

Post by acedTrex »

klodolph wrote: post #41
hotpotamus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you manage to run on prem infra with vms and clusters in a true cattle mindset then cloud doesnt offer you as much for sure

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

#52

Post by glintik »

Nextgrid wrote: post #36
glintik wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t agree. Multiple database nodes with enterprise grade SSDs is a way better in many terms.

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

#53

Post by linksnapzz »

KyeRussell wrote: post #32
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.

In this case, the nerd has a point, and is probably correct.

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

#54

Post by oxfordmale »

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.

For example, hardware doesn't just survive five years. As the hardware ages, the failure rate will increase. This calculation doesn't even mention this at all.

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

#55

Post by senttoschool »

warent wrote: post #48
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…

They'd have to keep you employed to manage the hardware. What happens if you get run over by a bus (which I never hope will happen)? What happens if you decide to move to another city? There are a lot more "what ifs" by employing you to build and manage the hardware.

Saving $100k would not be worth the hassle/risk for most well funded startups.

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

#56

Post by Nextgrid »

glintik wrote: post #52
Nextgrid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t agree. Multiple database nodes with enterprise grade SSDs is a way better in many terms.

For conventional relational databases like Postgres, multiple nodes only give you reliability, not performance (ignoring things like read-only replicas which your application explicitly has to choose to query), so horizontal scaling doesn't help there.

Enterprise-grade SSDs is what I meant by direct-attach storage - I was comparing against network storage which is what all cloud providers use (your EBS volume is accessed over the network internally, which incurs some latency, ultimately limits IOPS and destroys random access performance which can't be cached or read-ahead by the underlying hypervisor).

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

#57

Post by anonymouse008 »

acedTrex wrote: post #51
klodolph wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you manage to run on prem infra with vms and clusters in a true cattle mindset then cloud doesnt offer you as much for sure

I feel like you have a unique perspective to offer here - though at the moment I disagree given the lack of detail.

What about the specialized services from AWS provides leverage outside of the “cattle mindset”?

In my experience, AWS’s primary value and leverage is based on intermittent burst compute. It’s why you rarely get a hard answer on the Hz of each vCPU and have credits to the overuse or underuse of said instances. The cpu is then used to arbitrage value in the dedicated services like lambda and others - so your mindset and infra needs to match AWS’s incentives to get the same value, correct?

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

#58

Post by bastawhiz »

Ahrefs could probably save another few hundred million if they didn't repeatedly visit the same links over and over indefinitely to find the same error codes or a binary file that they surely don't care about. I see them in my logs for my podcast hosting service, hitting the same 404s for months and months. They end up hitting audio files and downloading (or attempting to download) many gigabytes of content each day. They don't do anything with audio! As soon as they get the HTTP headers, they could say "oops, I don't care about this" and disconnect. And in many cases, they got those URLs from the enclosure tags of RSS feeds... I'm not sure what they were expecting!

In the cloud, not in the cloud, frankly it seems to me like their business would be far more efficient if they tuned what their crawler actually crawled.

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

#59

Post by warent »

senttoschool wrote: post #55
warent wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They'd have to keep you employed to manage the hardware. What happens if you get run over by a bus (which I never hope will happen)? What happens if you decide to move to another city? There are a lot more "what ifs" by employing you to build and manage the hardware. Saving $100k would not be worth the hassle/risk for most well funded startups.

Again this is the kool-aid speaking. The co-location manages most of the complexity and the probability of failure is basically zero for the first 4 years.

Hardware these days is really good.

People have this illusion that servers are extremely hard to maintain because big companies constantly have to maintain their 1000s, and because clouds are incentivized to sell this lie.

It would still be a huge cost saving and trivial for them to contract someone to maintain the servers for like 1 hour a month with emergency on-call. Of which there are numerous such people who are not me.

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

#60

Post by Dunedan »

botsbreeder wrote: post #34
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.

Sorry, but if I'm reading the article correctly you didn't save any money, because you weren't using AWS in the first place. All you did was to do some back of the napkin math what it might cost you to run something on AWS.
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