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Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

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Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#31

Post by moltar »

I’m biased, but I originally came from the sort of setup you have into AWS. And I’ve never looked back. The time I spent tinkering with bare metal servers is just wasted. AWS has figured it out. Yes, there’s a bit of premium you’ll pay for that. But that’s your own time saved. Only you can tell what’s your time worth. But as an engineer it’s probably a lot and every hour you spend tinkering can probably pay for the whole AWS monthly bill.

For me, the strength of AWS is in scalability and reproducibility. I use AWS CDK to define infra as code. Which allows me to make changes with confidence. Test changes in other environments. Use CI/CD and pipelines even on small projects.

I only needed to figure this out once. Then all of it is reused across any project from first commit to deployed infra is matter of minutes. When I’m done I can tear it down in minutes.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#32

Post by px1999 »

If you can do things yourself or with your staff, you probably don't need aws.

But when the cost of you doing something (either direct or opportunity cost) becomes higher than that of using aws (or another cloud provider), you should use them.

Yes, you can get really really really far without needing to scale if you spend a lot of energy and effort on optimisation, but that's time you're not doing biz dev, or building out capability.

And even now you probably are currently spending a lot of energy on things that are useless outside of saving $ you'd pay to Amazon. As you grow, the cost:value of doing these things yourselfor even in-house changes.

If you're successful and scaling, it's often waaaaay easier and cheaper to throw $$ at a problem short term than getting engineers to actually prioritise and look at it.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#33

Post by tommek4077 »

Scarbutt wrote: post #30
dangus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I would point out is that the simplicity of StackOverflow's hardware stack means that it would also be very simple to host in a cloud provider like AWS. I would also point out that StackOverflow isn't an incredibly good performer compared to a number of other websites. Check it out on PageSpeed Insights. I also used a couple other tools that suggest that it loads slower in some regions than others.

This. AWS can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.

Just not cheap.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#34

Post by theshrike79 »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #25
Supply5411 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. IAM is like having a house with doors that lock. It doesn't matter how big or small your house is, you're going to want the ability to restrict who can go where and do what. It's part of basic security. If they're not doing that, and their 1 server is talking to AWS resources, it means its using superadmin credentials. If that 1 server is compromised, can you see why that would be a bad idea?

But does not using IAM mean that they are not doing anything to handle credentials securely?

To keep with the house analogy, not using IAM is like building your own locks for your house.

It might be enough for now, but if you grow big enough to be a target it's very likely your home-spun lock won't stand up to professionals.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#35

Post by theshrike79 »

shrubble wrote: post #21
dangus wrote: post #9

There's nothing wrong with feeling this way, but you're comparing a very small company (your own) to a much larger corporation. The appeal of AWS' "insane" bills are that they are not so "insane" when compared to the salaries required to maintain a home grown stack in-house, especially as complexity increases. It's not just application complexity, it's organizational complexity. Doing everything yourself is fine unti…

In the mid-1990s a large ISP I am aware of, rented "pizzabox" and larger Sun SPARC systems (like SPARCstation 2s; but even the larger systems ran the same OS) to corporate clients. The team of 5 sysadmins setup, installed, secured and managed 2000 such systems, mostly running SunOS 4.1.x , which didn't have nearly the automation that we have now on newer Unix based OSes. Using only the bash shell and the many scripts…

"A large ISP" will have the money to hire a team of 5 experienced sysadmins to be 24/7 on-call to handle 2000 systems.

A small to medium business won't have the 500k to 1M per year pay the sysadmins salaries.

For them AWS or other managed services are the correct choice.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#36

Post by theshrike79 »

If you're not using AWS services, there is no good reason to stay with AWS.

But if you see yourself reimplementing AWS services on your own stack, you should fire up Excel and do the math which is more cost-effective.

Your business is delivering product to your customers, not building and maintaining the technology to do so.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#37

Post by ochronus »

What you need to understand (at any given point in time) is:

- how is the complexity & scale of your system going? Make projections

- identify potential breaking points in this

- figure out roughly how long it'd take to migrate to e.g. AWS

- the cost of migration (not only the diff between your current costs and AWS costs, but the opportunity costs all the projects you won't do while you're migrating)

- now you have your "buffer" figured out, as in, when you need to start acting.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#38

Post by slau »

tommek4077 wrote: post #33
Scarbutt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. AWS can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.

Just not cheap.

Yeah, I have to strongly disagree with that. Sure, AWS can be stupidly expensive, however it can also save you a lot of money.

A few years ago, I was the VPoE for a small-ish startup in Denmark. I was the only ops person, and I was able to provide 100% uptime for a year, including a migration from k8s clusters, AWS AZ outages and whatnot. During that time, I also reduced our monthly spend from $15k to $5k. This was a fully auto-scaling, redundant and highly available system.

When I started, every night I got woken up by alerts (working alongside the CEO and another engineer to fix things). By the time I had stabilised things, the only thing waking us up were our providers having outages.

I used to run a similar business earlier, without AWS. We owned our own hardware and had ops people going to data centres. I can guarantee you we did not spend less than $12-13k/month (AWS fee + my salary) in that company. Think closer to $100-150k/month.

AWS can be cheaper when you factor in the cost of employees. It can also be stupidly expensive when you use it the wrong way.

Another example: I host a small service that gets very seldom, seldom use. Maybe 20-50 people discover it and use it per month. I have the backend running on a Lambda, and it costs me about $0.5 per month. It took me 20 minutes to write the CloudFormation for that and push it through my CI pipeline to have it deployed. There is no way I could get cheaper hosting, uptime/availability, and faster time to market than with a Lambda.

If and when that service becomes more used where it warrants running full time, I’ll rewrite the request handling and throw it in my k8s cluster. But until then, I do believe this is the cheapest solution (for me).

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#39

Post by omeze »

This all depends on product requirements. But the single simplest reason for choosing a cloud provider like AWS is reliability. If a region or machine goes down, how do you handle it? AWS has the best reliability among cloud providers, so by choosing them, the odds you even need to think about it are minimized. And they have answers to multi-AZ and regions. But if a few mins of downtime every few months isn’t the end if the world, by all means save yourself the trouble until it is.
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