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How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

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Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#91

Post by nemothekid »

oefrha wrote: post #40
jokethrowaway wrote: post #21

Canva is a case where AWS made sense for the founders. The founders anyway made billions and who cares if you give a few hundreds millions to Jeff and have to hire expensive AWS consultants if you can avoid hiring a few ops people that actually know how to operate a server /s More seriously, I think the sweet spot is to buy 2x o 3x what you expect to need but do it off the cloud. At Canva's scale you'll spend hundred…

Apple uses AWS for most(?) of their cloud services. TikTok grew to the #1 spot entirely on a public cloud (Alibaba). I’m sure they sure have hired “a few ops people that actually know how to operate a server” instead.

The anti-cloud sentiment on HN is as old as time; there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost. Yet AWS keeps growing and the people running these companies must be unable to do basic math. My account just crossed 11 years, and I think the whole cloud vs on-prem conversation is probably one of the most least productive conversations on HN. If there was so much waste out there you would think someone would figure out how to just siphon all that waste directly into their pockets instead of Jeff's; and maybe they have, I don't know, but the posts are always the same, handwaving about how the mark ups are insane the engineers at these companies aren't able to balance a checkbook.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#92

Post by tough »

fakedang wrote: post #81
electroly wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tip for anyone looking to spend seven-figure or more sums on one-time egress: Direct Connect egress is $0.02/GB. Rent a rack at a Direct Connect facility and get as many 10G fiber Direct Connects as you need, with corresponding flat rate 10G Internet ports with HE/Cogent/whatever transit provider. If you're going to be spending millions on egress, you could just hire someone to set this up for you. With that kind of…

Plot twist : Canva blogged this so someone could tell them some solution like this, without them having to hire the guy. :)

There's this law on the internet or SO or whatever where if you put the wrong answer in a post.

Someone else in the comments will correct you with the correct answer.

This in effect.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#93

Post by charcircuit »

vasco wrote: post #50
motoxpro wrote: post #42

A lot of people in this thread should start consultancies that transition companies off the cloud. Apparently, it would be easy for them to save tens of millions, in turn making millions for the consultant.

Couldn't agree more. One only says this if they don't have a good understanding of the differences between capex & opex, the amount of money spent on tech labor & compliance projects, as well as the level of assurances AWS give you regarding durability of data. All of this in 2023 when we have almost 20 years of data showing more and more business moving to the cloud and staying in the cloud. I think anti-cloud senti…

Have you even looked at S3 bandwidth pricing? I don't get how anyone using S3 for storing media or binaries can justify that outrageous price unless every download is connected to something making you money.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#94

Post by tough »

martinald wrote: post #67
maccard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team uses AWS for _everything_. There's three reasons for this on our team (and I've researched it for our use cases. - Consistency. Instead of saying "Oh look in AWS for this app, Azure for this one, and hetzner for this app, except it's test env is in AWS", it all just lives in AWS. It massively simplifies docs, onboarding, and reduces the amount of one-person specialised knowledge. - Engineering Costs. Similar…

But you're missing the point above. S3 is probably the easiest service to replace - there are loads of providers which use the _exact_ same protocol as S3. It's a drop in replacement. It literally uses AWS concepts, there is nothing else to learn apart from putting a different url into your application. Very few people should really be using S3 at any serious scale is my thoughts. The cost savings are enormous (plus…

People really have to be afraid of running VPS or whatever if they can't spun up a min.io instance to have their own S3 without dealing with Amazon's Bullshit

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#95

Post by kkielhofner »

nemothekid wrote: post #91
oefrha wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple uses AWS for most(?) of their cloud services. TikTok grew to the #1 spot entirely on a public cloud (Alibaba). I’m sure they sure have hired “a few ops people that actually know how to operate a server” instead.

The anti-cloud sentiment on HN is as old as time; there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost. Yet AWS keeps growing and the people running these companies must be unable to do basic math. My account just crossed 11 years, and I think the whole cloud vs on-prem conversation is probably one of the most least productive conversations on…

Inertia, group think, marketing, FUD, and "no one ever got fired for buying X" is INCREDIBLY powerful.

At this point even the not-infrequent public cloud outages are essentially shrugged off with "Eh, we use $CLOUD, that's what everyone uses. What are you going to do?"

The ops team can actually say "It's Amazon, not our problem." while they sit around powerless to do anything about it.

Yes there is the "survive anything AWS related" geo-distributed multi-region approach that you pretty rarely even see because it itself requires an army of AWS experts and drastically increased cost to actually implement and operate while not shooting yourself in the foot left and right - actually decreasing reliability. Not to mention the uber-unicorn "multi cloud" which at least I've never seen or actually heard of in practice. These don't usually survive even an initial cost review.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#96

Post by shadowtree »

andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Seems crazy to run such large infrastructure on a major cloud. Tens of millions wasted. Canva is likely trapped in S3 never to exit. The cost of getting their data out makes it impossible. S3…. the Hotel California of the cloud. You can check in any time you like but you can never leave. S3 is 9 cents per GB egress fees. Cloudflare R2 charges zero egress fees. At list price of 9 cents per GB it would cost Canva about…

Most businesses treat cloud like a utility, not tech. Don't want to generate their own power, deal with sewage ... and compute.

Which in 99.9% of the cases is the right decision. Sorry for all you infra techies, but that's the way tech matures.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#97

Post by icedchai »

willcipriano wrote: post #86
chii wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you haven't done enough research. the research isn't free either. The more indepth and time it takes to do such research, the slower you come to a decision and ship. Cloud allows you to ship fast. It allows you to go without research - just accept the marketing, and pay up. You pay above-cost (compared to on-prem) when you grow to a certain size. But this is usually a worthy trade off tbh.

It's a good way to bypass legacy IT teams. A onprem server will have a bunch of snake oil endpoint protection products running on the box, bespoke config changes and take a couple months to get up and running, a ECS container is up and running in minutes and has whatever you shipped in the container without all the commentary from the peanut gallery.

I've run into this kind of snake oil in the cloud, as well. Some organizations demand all routing go through an "upstream" VPC operated by the parent org's IT dept, so various third-party security services (WAFs, IDSes, etc.) can scan / inspect the traffic.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#98

Post by StratusBen »

This is an interesting post...though I'm surprised to see this kind of optimization occur so late stage/as large as Canva.

There's quite a few anti-cloud opinions in the comments but for anyone who is hosted on S3 and would like this same level of automated analysis for cost savings on S3 (and other AWS services), we basically profile for this out-of-the-box on Vantage and it's free to get an optimization check to see savings: https://www.vantage.sh/

Not meant to be as shameless of a plug, but seems very relevant to the topic at hand for onlookers.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#99

Post by Quarrel »

charcircuit wrote: post #93
vasco wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. One only says this if they don't have a good understanding of the differences between capex & opex, the amount of money spent on tech labor & compliance projects, as well as the level of assurances AWS give you regarding durability of data. All of this in 2023 when we have almost 20 years of data showing more and more business moving to the cloud and staying in the cloud. I think anti-cloud senti…

Have you even looked at S3 bandwidth pricing? I don't get how anyone using S3 for storing media or binaries can justify that outrageous price unless every download is connected to something making you money.

Well, step 1, have petabytes of data in S3, then don't pay the sticker price.

Step 2, write articles like this as part of your newly contracted "engagement" with Amazon to help justify the lower price.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#100

Post by Solvency »

StratusBen wrote: post #98

This is an interesting post...though I'm surprised to see this kind of optimization occur so late stage/as large as Canva. There's quite a few anti-cloud opinions in the comments but for anyone who is hosted on S3 and would like this same level of automated analysis for cost savings on S3 (and other AWS services), we basically profile for this out-of-the-box on Vantage and it's free to get an optimization check to se…

"I'm surprised to see this kind of optimization occur so late"

Every single day I read the trope on HN that "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

So, these guys literally followed HN's creed.

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