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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

#91

Post by steve1977 »

bfeynman wrote: post #46
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

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.

Yeah that’s the sales pitch. As soon as reality sets in and you need to integrate with an existing identity service for example, things can get pretty complex quickly.

AWS & Co. use cases always look nice on paper, in reality it’s often not as easy as advertised.

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

#92

Post by sebiandev »

It depends. Are these PAYGO prices or reserved instance prices? There is a HUGE difference. If these are PAYGO prices, the cost would probably be about the same to have your infra reserved in AWS WITH the added flexibility. This is why not just ANYONE should be able to spin up infrastructure in cloud providers. You should hire someone who knows what they're even doing.

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

#93

Post by justinclift »

acedTrex wrote: post #45
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.

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

Is that 500, or 500k?

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

#94

Post by manv1 »

warent wrote: post #59
senttoschool wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, it depends on the colo.

I mean, it's not like a colo doesn't have issues. At one point our colo was running some cable and we discovered that their cables to our rack were wiggly...after our stuff went offline intermittently. That was hard to track down.

And you need to set up the LOMs, the management network (hey, you don't want that on the public internet), VPN, serial cables (backup to network LOM), maybe a load balancer. And you have to hope that when you reboot the box it doesn't fail POST. And you have to remember to turn off power saving in the BIOS (how many people forget to do this?). And you have to set up the RAID 5/10.

And you have to do this sitting on the floor, because not a lot of places provide chairs in the racks. Oh, do you have a rack-mounted KVM/monitor/serial console or are you using your laptop with a serial cable to do all this?

I mean, it's not hard, it's just a lot of detail work. And I suspect that these skills are going away.

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

#95

Post by manv1 »

One interesting question is: if you started today, would you be able to afford boxes that cost 60k? Or would you do your software some other way that doesn't require 2TB of RAM?

Obviously when you started your stuff didn't need 2TB of RAM. If I read your history correctly I don't think you could even buy a box with 2TB of RAM back then. That's enterprise grade hardware, which today costs a fortune. Back in the day it would be a bigger fortune.

Instead, you probably started the way everyone else did, with maybe a 4GB or 8GB linux box at home then built things up from there and a bunch of curl scripts and a local instance.

So why the resource requirement? An in-ram database?

Mainly curious.

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

#96

Post by manv1 »

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…

Let's face it, fear of vendor lock-in is almost always bullshit.

Everyone's locked into a vendor at some level or another. Want to move off of Oracle? It's work. Want to move off of servers and into VMs? It's work. Do you want to move off of some Java library like Spring? It's work. Even moving from apache to nginx is work (assuming you're not just serving static files).

Your technology choices always lock you in. You can minimize the cost of moving with architecture, but there's only so much you can do.

The key isn't avoiding vendor lock-in, it's understanding what the tradeoffs are for that lock-in and making sure it's a decision instead of a by-product.

It's like writing your stuff in NEW_TECH_LANGUAGE. Sure it might give you better performance, but now you have a bunch of deployment and maintenance headaches, and your people will cost more and be harder to find. And does it even work/scale in production/HA? How do you monitor it? What kind of weird runtime things are you going to get abused by?

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

#97

Post by manv1 »

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…

"We could run our entire production system in a half-rack for about 10% of what we pay AWS"

It sounds like you should make a business case. 90% savings is a big deal, unless it's the difference between $1k and $100.

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

#98

Post by hinkley »

oxfordmale wrote: post #89
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…

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.

But now you have a culture that has no experience or value with self hosted hardware. How are you going to fix that cultural problem? Hire a bunch of outsiders? How’s that gonna fly?

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

#99

Post by warent »

manv1 wrote: post #94
warent wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, it depends on the colo. I mean, it's not like a colo doesn't have issues. At one point our colo was running some cable and we discovered that their cables to our rack were wiggly...after our stuff went offline intermittently. That was hard to track down. And you need to set up the LOMs, the management network (hey, you don't want that on the public internet), VPN, serial cables (backup to network LOM), maybe a…

These are great points, thank you for the insight. A small note I will add is that these days there are remote BIOS options available for servers like iDRAC

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

#100

Post by debarshri »

KyeRussell wrote: post #40
debarshri wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is my mistake. I'm sorry. I did not read it correctly.
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