Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be surprised if AWS started a on-prem hardware leasing service. Some company are providing "On-premise As A Servicse" solution.
Could you name names? I am very interested in this!
Hetzner ?
Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
221–230 of 526 posts
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there’s a kind of irony it’s come from an internal Amazon team. As another poster commented, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s taken down at some point. Why? Using the model they switched to (which uses a different set of AWS services) instead of the model they switched from is a recommendation that the AWS tech advisers that are made available to enterprise customers will…
Have you had AWS tech advisers advise teams in your company to go with this stack? Because I haven't. AWS doesn't have an equally distributed interest in selling all of its products. Some AWS products exist because customers need/demand them and others exist because they provide higher margins and tighter lock-in to Amazon: the first type of products are great for customer acquisition, the role of their sales folk is…
I've never knowingly had an AWS solutions architect recommend something because it would make AWS more money in the short term. The most frequent advice I've seen from them has been on how to give AWS less money by making use of different features, or changing how particular services are being used.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
For some Alexa integrations it is neat and convenient, but I went back to hosting such small interfaces as a service on another server. Not an EC2 instance, just another hosted unmanaged server. They are as cheap as they can get right now.
I'm not really interested in the operational overhead that brings for these small services. Cost-wise they might be just about neck-and-neck, but at least I don't need to worry about the server going down, or having outdated software. Lambda gives me scaling, load balancing and redundancy for that $2.
> these small services
I think you might be unintentionally arguing with a strawman, as everyone else here is talking about using monoliths instead of that.
Few people want to administer a bunch of micro services themselves, but running a single service on a box is pretty low effort, even if you duplicate it for fail over/redundancy
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#224My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…
I feel like it’s an object lesson in using the right solution for a problem. Step functions do not appear to me to be something that you’d use for things that need to be executed multiple times per second.
Having occasionally looked at them for workflow driven tasks I'm not sure what the use case for Step Functions is, unless your workflow being called once an hour or something they seem infeasibly expensive for what they offer, and somehow manage to be more complex than just writing some code to model the workflow.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#225Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely agree, buuuut also realize we as programmers don't even have the same definition of what a microservice is. A lot of people here say...one service per team. But to me that is, or can be, a monolith. Often a team is a product line, so you have one service for that product. Is that a monolith? I don't know either, I guess. I -do- know most people who go around promoting that sweet microservice life end up…
Every service needs it’s own database. Then you need to handle all the DLQ errors between services as well.
Devils advocate, but is it possible microservices need a shared feature-ful message passing layer, and good tooling, to be working well? Eg schema, auth, flow control, ttl, persistence, partitioning etc in the message layer, a la Kafka? I mean it’s kind of implied that microservices can only work if they can talk to each other, and “talking” is a lot more nuanced than we tend to think.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#227Two things:
- When people use the solution -> problem path instead of problem -> proposals -> cost analysis -> solution they get what they deserve.
- It is possible to optimize most infrastructures and code, it depends how much obviously but I have seen such percentages before
The real question is: why didn't they chose the right stack for their problem the begin with?
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#228My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…
Half of the AWS certifications isn't about what's what but what to use when and using it for the right use case.
Exactly right. Most cloud victims are people who have faith instead of cost calculations. DHH & co. are the prime example. It seems even Amazon has such people. I guess hiring is much harder nowadays.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#229Breaking things into tiny functions and putting them on many different servers incurs tradeoff costs in both complexity and compute. There is a complexity cost in having to deal with the setup, security, and orchestration of those functions, and a compute cost because if the overall system is running constantly it will be less efficient and therefore more expensive than running on one box.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tongue in cheek, but > Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon So it’s technically another company. Another comment seems to confirm this akshually comment ^_^’ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35812230
It’s still all Amazon, the single publicly traded company. Legal shenanigans/optimizations don’t change that. The other commenter was referring to AWS the org over Amazon Retail or Devices (other orgs).
Context: I worked at Amazon Retail for 10 years.
Amazon Retail and AWS are the same legal entity for stocks, but other than that they might as well be separate companies.
Retail uses AWS with all the same APIs and quirks as any other company. The only thing different is the negotiation on price (which many large companies also do).
Meanwhile, AWS is apathetic towards feature requests from Retail, and especially operational support for Retail.
In many ways Retail would be better off if it was a separate company and could threaten AWS with a multi-cloud diversification play.