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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?

#41

Post by rovr138 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #34
syndicatedjelly wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's figuring out where to put them or installing them yourself vs building the locks.

Most things have accounts (database, servers). Are you using separate ones or a global admin?

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

#42

Post by qwytw »

fancythat wrote: post #17

Using any cloud only makes sense if a) you don't know how to setup things yourself and b) your project is so big, that salaries for ops would be higher than cloud cost. Also, be careful with b) since you still need people that know how to do stuff, otherwise, you will experience either data breach or long downtimes. What most people won't admit when recommending cloud is that, yes, cloud has all sorts of utility buil…

> your project is so big, that salaries for ops would be higher than cloud cost.

Couldn't it be the other way? On lower scale saving significant amounts of time just to save a few hundreds or thousands might not be worth it. OTH if you're paying millions to AWS hiring an extra person or two to save 20-50% (or whatever) might be a very good deal.

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

#43

Post by qwytw »

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…

Wouldn't it still be 1 sysadmin per 5 systems instead of 400? It's not like you can hire 1.25% of a sysadmin directly, while on AWS you can you just pay a significant premium.

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

#44

Post by tekkk »

I also considered AWS but then decided to go with Hetzner. For me it's a learning experience as well so I enjoy figuring out stuff. AWS would have cost 3-4x although I am using RDS for now.

I have scripts but use Ansible to setup snapshots to spin new servers from. And Terraform to configure everything. The biggest downside as I see it, is that _if_ I had to scale up the stack there would be issues regarding auto-scaling and additional regions.

However, Im not worried about that and if it happens, I probably have money to move back AWS - at least in part.

So my advice is that if it works and the servers stay up - keep it. AWS is no silver bullet and moreover, if you have little to no revenue it's better to keep costs down. As a small company I think you get a little more lee-way also regarding server downtime.

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

#45

Post by Saphyel »

fancythat wrote: post #17

Using any cloud only makes sense if a) you don't know how to setup things yourself and b) your project is so big, that salaries for ops would be higher than cloud cost. Also, be careful with b) since you still need people that know how to do stuff, otherwise, you will experience either data breach or long downtimes. What most people won't admit when recommending cloud is that, yes, cloud has all sorts of utility buil…

This is so wrong.

Cloud is for DECLARE the setup, if you don't care or you don't know then avoid cloud.

On-premise you can find always dodgy scripts with no copy, no backups, some people praying everyday if the service restart he'll quit, or something working but you don't know why and the worst one, everyone afraid of update anything

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

#46

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

slau wrote: post #38
tommek4077 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah that Lambda setup you mention is terribly cheap, and it is one of the very few extremely attractive services pricewise - but many people get lured into using other AWS services that aren't cheap, even though Amazon makes people think so by blurring the total price by splitting it into hours, calculating egress separately, dependencies on services that are billable by the hour (it's not obvious when you start that a private network has the cost of an NAT GW attached to it). Using only Lambda is really cost effective but frankly, few people resist the temptation and use it the way you described.

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

#47

Post by Patrickmi »

qwytw wrote: post #42
fancythat wrote: post #17

Using any cloud only makes sense if a) you don't know how to setup things yourself and b) your project is so big, that salaries for ops would be higher than cloud cost. Also, be careful with b) since you still need people that know how to do stuff, otherwise, you will experience either data breach or long downtimes. What most people won't admit when recommending cloud is that, yes, cloud has all sorts of utility buil…

> your project is so big, that salaries for ops would be higher than cloud cost. Couldn't it be the other way? On lower scale saving significant amounts of time just to save a few hundreds or thousands might not be worth it. OTH if you're paying millions to AWS hiring an extra person or two to save 20-50% (or whatever) might be a very good deal.

Well kinda, there’re indeed some services can cost more hosting than cloud hosting especially when it comes to geo-location, auto scaling, preventing dead servers but there’re are companies that maintain data centers, etc it depends

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

#48

Post by movedx »

tommek4077 wrote: post #27
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.

I would not give much on those gambled page speed analysis. It comes down to: is ist fast enough? The answer clearly was yes during all those years for the users.

This is exactly right.

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

#49

Post by movedx »

slau wrote: post #38
tommek4077 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ... I also reduced our monthly spend from $15k to $5k. This was a fully auto-scaling, redundant and highly available system.

I believe you, but most people don't do this, sadly. You very clearly _get_ Cloud, but most don't, and financial optimisations often come much later down the line.

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

#50

Post by pleoxy »

dangus wrote: post #12
movedx wrote: post #4

> I'm keeping things simple, so I've got mostly Go services, pg + caching, and a svelte webapp. I deployed my Go services on a low-ish end bare metal provider, and for now it is fine. Deployments are triggered via scripts, and so far so good. Is it sexy, using all the latest and greatest tech? No, its just simple shell scripts. But it works? Don't change a thing. This is perfect. > Am I wrong to think that I could pr…

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.

Simple, sure, but AWS still charges insane rates.

I can get 60k IOPS on a nanode at $5/mo rate. You actually get a random amount between 20k-60k depending on the type of machine they provision your nanode on.

You want 60k IOPS on AWS? Be prepared to pay like 4-5k/mo. Want multiple systems with it so you can cluster a reasonably performance database? Pay for each and you need to special request the ability to go past 100k IOPS in a region.

Want the privilege of a dedicated vCPU? It's $1500/mo per region just to turn on the feature.

I tried to use AWS just as you mention here and the cost was 100-1000x what it would cost me at akamai cloud or Hetzner. All these fees I was unfamiliar with popped out and the cost was crazy high.

The system I tried to provision was functionally similar to the bottom end dedicated akamai cloud offering and it was going to cost 15-20k/mo instead of $72. Over 200x. And that was just the hourly provisioned rate, not including egress and other bits...

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