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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

#161

Post by wepzen »

bombcar wrote: post #78
amluto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never worked at a cloud company, but I know more than I’d really like about some of the stuff under the hood. First, changing out the CPU type to something that isn’t almost identical out from under a running VM is a mess and may require degrading the system by removing features from the starting CPU. Switching manufacturers at runtime (AMD vs Intel), while sort of possible in theory, is effectively a lost cause…

I get why actual "hot add whilst running" isn't a common feature (VMWare can do it but often does it via various tricks, such as the instance is already 'sized' with the number of CPUs/RAM and some are marked inaccessible). The thing that really pissed me off is when a cloud provider is UNABLE to add more CPU and RAM on reboot. I even understand having to migrate the instance disks to another host that has CPU/RAM av…

Your frustration with VMs and cloud providers is completely understandable. VMs are essentially entire machines, which makes hardware manipulation quite challenging. However, have you considered using containers instead? They are often easier to manage and offer more flexibility in terms of scaling resources up or down as required. Let me know if you are a developer, as I may have some recommendations to share.

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

#162

Post by Hnrobert42 »

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…

What if they went from a hairball in AWS to a much simpler architecture in AWS. Wouldn’t that be a better comparison?

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

#163

Post by codethief »

oxfordmale wrote: post #143
sshine wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The main problem is OPEX versus APEX, not whether you can Terraform your infrastructure. It depends on your business model whether self-hosting is more cost effective than the Cloud. Cloud is more flexible and as a result you pay a premium, however, the cost differences are not as large as claimed in this article

I think you're missing GP's point: On-prem/self-hosting vs. cloud aren't the only two solutions. You can also simply rent a managed (physical) server, like many people did before The Cloud became a thing.

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

#164

Post by sshine »

codethief wrote: post #163
oxfordmale wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is OPEX versus APEX, not whether you can Terraform your infrastructure. It depends on your business model whether self-hosting is more cost effective than the Cloud. Cloud is more flexible and as a result you pay a premium, however, the cost differences are not as large as claimed in this article

I think you're missing GP's point: On-prem/self-hosting vs. cloud aren't the only two solutions. You can also simply rent a managed (physical) server, like many people did before The Cloud became a thing.

OPEX vs. APEX is an interesting aspect.

It's covered more elsewhere in this thread, and I appreciated learning about it.

I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale.

But it is both simpler and less expensive when not at scale.

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

#165

Post by codethief »

sshine wrote: post #164
codethief wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing GP's point: On-prem/self-hosting vs. cloud aren't the only two solutions. You can also simply rent a managed (physical) server, like many people did before The Cloud became a thing.

OPEX vs. APEX is an interesting aspect. It's covered more elsewhere in this thread, and I appreciated learning about it. I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale. But it is both simpler and less expensive when not at scale.

> I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale.

…unless they are not physical servers but vservers. Hetzner, for instance, has such a "cloud" offering where you can dynamically spin up new vservers via an API/Terraform.

They represent yet another point on the spectrum but are not "fully cloud" yet if we take "fully cloud" to mean that, beyond hardware, the software stack is partly managed by a third party, too.

Put differently, to me the spectrum looks more or less like this:

- On-prem self-hosting (own data center, own hardware etc.) - (Off-prem) non-managed hosting (data center provided by third party, but you're providing the server hardware and put it in one of their racks) - Managed hosting of physical servers (data center + server hardware provided by third party) - Managed hosting of vservers (Hetzner Cloud, AWS EC2, …) - "Full cloud": Software stack is partly managed by 3rd party (e.g. managed Postgres, managed Kafka, managed ElasticSearch, serverless, etc.)

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

#166

Post by pauldambra »

I really don't miss running my own kit (colocated or directly owned)

I don't miss cycling around Manchester on a Bank Holiday weekend because I'd miscalculated how much network cabling I'd need for an upgrade.

I don't miss keeping a spreadsheet of storage so I knew when to order disks, negotiating with suppliers for cost of new disks because I was buying a slightly smaller bulk than AWS

I don't miss having to explain to folk in datacenter support that they could take the disks out of my failed server and put them in a new server if they had one available

I don't miss the day the single point of failure in the rack failed and everything was offline while I waited for a new doohicky to be shipped to me because it didn't make sense to keep spares of everything on hand

I don't miss trying to figure out if some new generation of server hardware would work for or would fit in my rack as manufacturers stopped making the kit we did use

I'm not going to say every workload should run in the cloud (cliche nod to StackOverflow) but it certainly isn't free to get all of the benefits

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