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

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

#131

Post by oxfordmale »

fidgewidge wrote: post #126
oxfordmale wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-Premise Indirect (Hidden) Costs There are a variety of other expenses associated with an on-premise environment considered indirect expenses. These expenses are often referred to as “hidden” expenses due to how often they are overlooked rather than “hidden.” These include: The real estate of the storage space used for the servers Tools used for temperature control in the data center The cost of set up, configurati…

You speak like clouds never have downtime, or don't charge you for space and power. Look at the article - that one company would needed to have paid more than their entire revenue to AWS for worse hardware . They'd have spent $400M in 3 years on the cloud! There are no "hidden costs" that can even begin to approach a fraction of that. As for staff salaries, lol. It's not like AWS is self administering.

In the cloud, costs are transparent, as you receive a single monthly bill. When you self-host, there are many hidden expenses you would need to track down (energy, admin, maintenance, etc.)

The figures in the article are for illustration purposes only and should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The author doesn't detail what hardware they are running, what EC2 instances he has selected for comparison and how comparable the storage statistics are. I would also love to hear the Finance Department's version of his calculations.

AWS is more expensive than self-hosting. However, it is not as skewed as the author claims. Otherwise, very few companies would be using the cloud.

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

#132

Post by oxfordmale »

thesh4d0w wrote: post #124
oxfordmale wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're using Dell and I would assume bought a 5 year warranty, so they don't have to factor that in.

Regardless of a warranty, the hardware still fails and needs to be replaced. That requires maintenance. Beyond that, can they afford to wait for Dell to fix the faulty device or send a replacement, or do they need several spare units to address outages quickly.

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

#134

Post by botsbreeder »

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.

If your startup survive next 6 months it is already more cost-effective to buy a server. And if startup fails you still have a server to run your next startup.

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

#135

Post by sshine »

topicseed wrote: post #117
Symbiote wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can obviously buy servers from HP or Dell. I have about 80 in a colo datacentre. Power, air-conditioning, security etc isn't my problem. That's what we pay the colo for. I go there about once a year to install new servers, and about once at some other point in the year to replace a failed disk. I've taken various developers who are interested each time, so if I'm out of town there are several people who can cover…

To be fair, this sounds a lot of to do items that I don't want to do.

That's why managed servers exist.

You can't get much more time efficient than data centre operators handling hardware.

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

#136

Post by sshine »

oxfordmale wrote: post #105
hinkley wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bringing your infrastructure from Cloud to on-perm is a project; you would have to hire a dedicated team. Once you have proven your start-up is providing a genuine solution, it is a lot easier to get funding for this.

You're missing several points on the spectrum.

You can provision dedicated servers with Terraform.

They can still be cloudy in the way you deal with hardware maintenance and risk of failure, and how you authenticate with them and how you name them, and how you hook them up on VPNs. But they're physical units without the AWS bells and whistles or the AWS premium. Not everyone needs their own colocated rack, and manage their own UPS and network peering.

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

#137

Post by Nextgrid »

glintik wrote: post #84
Nextgrid wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those SSDs are ephemeral, so unsuitable for long-term storage. If you wanted to use them you’d need a task that copies the entire persistent volume into the ephemeral SSD at boot, and then the reverse on shutdown (and pray that the machine doesn’t die abruptly as that would mean you lose the SSD without doing that reverse copy operation).

Presumably they would also lack the durability guarantees of the normal block storage offered by the provider.

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

#138

Post by Nextgrid »

oxfordmale wrote: post #75
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…

On-Premise Indirect (Hidden) Costs There are a variety of other expenses associated with an on-premise environment considered indirect expenses. These expenses are often referred to as “hidden” expenses due to how often they are overlooked rather than “hidden.” These include: The real estate of the storage space used for the servers Tools used for temperature control in the data center The cost of set up, configurati…

Hosting providers such as Hetzner or OVH take care of all of that for you and include it into a fixed, monthly price per server.

I however would like to address some of your points which I find absolutely ridiculous:

> Staff salaries for administrators that maintain an on-premise data center

Every cloud-native company I've been at had an entire team wrangling YAML files around. I'm not exactly sure why they had to do so (because everything was stable and as you say, the cloud is supposed to handle all maintenance/etc for you) but they did and cost a pretty penny.

The only case where I genuinely agree that the "cloud" saves money on administration is fully-managed PaaS providers.

> The cost of keeping the servers powered 24/7

A non-cloud-based, peak-capacity-sized deployment costs less to run than a cloud-based deployment scaled at minimum capacity. Servers are super fucking cheap nowadays. Hetzner will happily sell you a 16-core, 128GB of RAM, 4TB redundant NVME SSD machine with 20TB of included external bandwidth for ~150 bucks a month. AWS will cost more than that on bandwidth alone.

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

#139

Post by botsbreeder »

oxfordmale wrote: post #131
fidgewidge wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You speak like clouds never have downtime, or don't charge you for space and power. Look at the article - that one company would needed to have paid more than their entire revenue to AWS for worse hardware . They'd have spent $400M in 3 years on the cloud! There are no "hidden costs" that can even begin to approach a fraction of that. As for staff salaries, lol. It's not like AWS is self administering.

In the cloud, costs are transparent, as you receive a single monthly bill. When you self-host, there are many hidden expenses you would need to track down (energy, admin, maintenance, etc.) The figures in the article are for illustration purposes only and should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The author doesn't detail what hardware they are running, what EC2 instances he has selected for comparison and how comp…

Costs like energy, admin, maintenance were included. The figures for on premise are NOT illustrative but real figures.

It is hard to believe how high cloud costs are.

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

#140

Post by Szpadel »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #57
acedTrex wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inst…

> The cpu is then used to arbitrage value in the dedicated services like lambda and others

This could be only the case is t* instances? I learned the hard way that CPU misses can add even 30% of request latency, especially when you often do I/O eg to external services like db/Redis/etc

I didn't notice such behaviors on AWS. but when thinking about it, I read somewhere that one reason they have dedicated CPUs is for partitioning CPU cache so it's not shared between VMs. so maybe with some tricks they could get some free compute without side effects?

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