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

tech.ahrefs.com

81–90 of 166 posts

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

#81

I feel this is comparing apple and pears. For sure AWS is more expensive, however, you looking at a markup of 50%, at most 100%.

Would be 1000% in our comparison

Your calculation is over simplified. For example, hardware just doesn't run for five years without glitch once once you have multiple servers.

For sure Cloud is more expensive, as it charges a premium for not having to invest upfront in a lot of hardware, however,if it was 1000% no one would be using the Cloud.

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

#82

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…

IME, business "leaders" follow the crowd even more than venture capitalists. If AWS gets frequent glowing praise in CFO Magazine, then by golly, we're going to move to the cloud and "save a bundle". Make enough similar decisions without actually being able to properly cost estimate the intangibles of what else is lost when those couple dozen experienced systems engineers move on, and you end up being valued at one-tenth of what you used to be within a few years (as is the enterprise where I was such an engineer).

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

#83
It's good they did the math. AWS doesn't fit everything.

Really, the main things that cost actual money in AWS are memory and CPU (that's including elasticache, RDS, etc). Bandwidth can be negotiated away. I'm sure you could do some kind of super deal on CPU/RAM, but we've never bothered.

Would it be worth it to rearchitect your app so it doesn't use 2TB of RAM? Probably not. You have a lot of sunk costs, and redoing everything will probably break everything. You guys are big enough that CapEx doesn't matter that much. You just need big boxes with lots of bandwidth.

If you're happy with what you've got, stay with it.

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

#84
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acce…

«is what all cloud providers use» - many cloud providers can offer local ssds, i.e.: https://cloud.google.com/local-ssd

“multiple nodes only give you reliability, not performance” - this, actually, is not true. Even mysql can offer ways to tune and gain performance improvements.

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

#85

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.

The thing is, his TCO would include training, rebuilding their existing processes and procedures, and having to run stuff in parallel for a while. That's not including a re-architecture and the impact it would have on their stuff today.

Sometimes all people need is a big box in a data center. Management of the environment is already a sunk cost. The hardware is already expensed. They don't care about scalability/DR/etc.

From a hard dollar point of view staying colo makes sense. Plus politically they don't want to do it, which is really the only point of view that mattered.

If they needed to have actual DR then the numbers would be different.

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

#87
I kind of wish they hadn't. Ahrefs claims to be in the "SEO" business, which as far as I'm concerned, has helped ruin web search, and indeed, the culture of the web in general.

Also, Ahrefs bot doesn't handle some things very well. I made an "infinite web site" in PHP a while back, and used Apache mod_rewrite to send every Ahrefs request to the infinite web site PHP program: https://github.com/bediger4000/infinite-fake-website

Ahrefs bot really freaked out, unlike some professional bots like Google's, and even Yandex' bot.

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

#88
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.

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

I moved my app to a 486 under my bosses desk and it was cheaper than azure.

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

#89
post #48
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…

Buying your own server requires an upfront investment. AS 90% of start-ups fail, hiring your computing resource flexibly is far better, even if it comes at a higher cost. Once your company is mature and relatively stable, it is worth considering if hosting your infrastructure is more cost-effective.

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

#90

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’m thinking more about evolution within the space of automated configuration tools.

I use Ansible at home as a replacement for the 1990s style of sysadmin where you manually managed your servers (which I did until the mid 2010s). Yet, I’m aware that Ansible is not declarative. It’s looks declarative, if you take your glasses off and don’t think too hard about it, but the key to understanding Ansible is really that the configuration is idempotent (not declarative).

Servers are cattle either way, it’s just that with Ansible, your servers will keep changes that you made months or years ago that have been deleted from your playbooks. That, to me, is what makes it old-fashioned.

I don’t think old-fashioned is bad. I’ve gotten into arguments where people have told me to manage my personal server(s) using K8s and I, politely as I could manage, told them to fuck off.

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