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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?

#101

Post by [deleted] »

sgarland wrote: post #80
dangus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to see the forest for the trees here: ask yourself how does the business make money? If I throw my application on some PaaS thing and put the database on RDS, let’s say I can hire 5 developers who know almost nothing about infrastructure to develop and deploy the application. Each developer working on the application delivers valuable business logic. Let’s say each developer makes $200,000 total compensation and…

So hire an SRE. You’re gonna have garbage / non-existent CI/CD, IaC, and all the other stuff that makes expansion (and audits, apparently) easier. Bonus, any decent SRE should also be able to code. I don’t think you _need_ a DBA/DBRE initially, but I do think if you’re in the range of hiring five devs, one of them should know about infrastructure.

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by gurchik »

pleoxy wrote: post #87
gurchik wrote: post #3

If you find yourself constantly reinventing the wheel when AWS offers a managed service that handles that for you, it might be time to switch to AWS. Some examples might be: writing a complicated postgres backup solution instead of using RDS Automated Backups, or running your own Kubernetes control plane instead of using EKS. But if you have an infrastructure that is easy for yourself to maintain, then spend your eff…

> similarly-specced EC2 will easily be 10x that cost. I actually tried this, it's closer to 200-300x. The number of premium add on fees that appear as you build a higher performing EC2 server is just stupid. It's not so bad if you scale out horizontally instead of vertically. But that complicates the architecture when other providers don't charge crazy pricing for vertical scaling.

Can you give some specific examples of the add-on fees when vertically scaling EC2 instances?

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

#104

Post by shrubble »

px1999 wrote: post #90
shrubble wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly FUD. A single 8core server made in the last 10 years, with 64GB RAM and SSD/NVME drives, can saturate a 10gb/s link even with some db lookups thrown into the mix. How many lifestyle businesses would even need more than this, aside from backups and redundancy?

Many people underestimate how much easier it is as a business to throw money at things than to actually solve possibly hard problems. "Database failover and scale to z1d.12xlarge" as a strategy is insanely cheap in comparison to spending days/weeks/months trying to prevent spikes from impacting performance. As much as folks here might not want to hear it, throwing an army of mediocre (or, ideally, decent) developers…

With (if using Postgres) WAL and log shipping, ZFS send/receive snapshots every minute, and other dead-simple setups, a single developer can easily protect against hardware failure, have solid backups, and unless using an absolutely horrific stack, can easily handle a very large amount of business with the hardware I have mentioned.

Have you ever worked with mediocre developers? Have you ever been responsible for a built-out implementation of the sort you are talking about?

And, have you ever actually run intensive tasks on hardware where you owned the entirety of the system and could have visibility into the full OS? (Many VM providers oversubscribe their CPU and RAM, and, you have no visibility into memory bandwidth performance either.)

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

#105

Post by sjducb »

Agingcoder wrote: post #93
hnGuyReaderDude wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is one million really the point where on prem becomes cheaper? I would think it’s much more like 10 million. Between having to pay server engineers and regional distribution and power costs I’d think it adds up to far more than 1 million. Where am I doing my math wrong?

In a large company the engineers , regional distribution etc are already there and pis for by other parts of the company I think. Your math is otherwise correct.

Exactly.

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

#106

Post by lakomen »

Imo IAM aka OIDC is keeping it simple. Do you want to develop your own auth solution, or focus on features of your service?

For the rest, of course. AWS, GCP, Azure, all too expensive.

Chances are very high you won't even need more than 3 machines, if you'd like to play it safe, 1 if downtime is acceptable.

The challenge is long term. You need to be able to switch after EOL of your current OS version, and easily. Data is something that's expensive. It requires constant backups. Snapshots. If you can afford it, have a dedicated machine or cluster for data. This way you can swap the webapi layer when you receive better offers over the years (cheaper hardware, EOL OS, etc) Do think in blocks or components and layers, but I'm guessing you do that anyway.

What cloud does is it adds convenience for ridiculous costs.

Personally I have an incubation server where all trials and or developing projects are hosted. Once and if something takes off, it receives dedicated hardware. In the unlikely case that this dedicated setup isn't enough I'll start thinking about cloud. But even in that case, I'm pretty sure, a private cloud with dedicated personnel is cheaper than AWS etc

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

#107

Post by pleoxy »

gurchik wrote: post #102
pleoxy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> similarly-specced EC2 will easily be 10x that cost. I actually tried this, it's closer to 200-300x. The number of premium add on fees that appear as you build a higher performing EC2 server is just stupid. It's not so bad if you scale out horizontally instead of vertically. But that complicates the architecture when other providers don't charge crazy pricing for vertical scaling.

Can you give some specific examples of the add-on fees when vertically scaling EC2 instances?

Dedicated vCPU requires a "enable dedicated vCPU" service that is $2/hr (per region). It starts billing you as soon as you enable a dedicated vCPU. I had no idea this existed till I saw the charges.

Max IOPS without paying for provisioned IOPS is 3000 (gp3 stock setting). Much lower than other providers and will cap your database performance. That's combined too, 1500 read and 1500 write. Throughput is 125mb/s.

Hetzner gives you 45k if memory serves, vultr gives you a ton, akamai cloud gives you at least 40k and some instances give you 125k. With throughput in the >3GB/s range.

Provisioned IOPS cost thousands per month to reach these levels via io2 volume. Io2 is capped at 45k if memory serves unless you have a bare metal instance. Which is a whole new pricing tier I didn't investigate.

I believe it is cheaper per IOP to go wide with gp3, complete with additional compute, than to provision io2. Which really kills the whole "go tall not wide" architecture strategy.

Big price bump with dedicated vCPU encourages wide rather than tall also. You can buy a ton of compute for that $2/hr fee.

Moral of the story. Don't try to go tall on Amazon.

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

#108

Post by gurchik »

pleoxy wrote: post #107
gurchik wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some specific examples of the add-on fees when vertically scaling EC2 instances?

Dedicated vCPU requires a "enable dedicated vCPU" service that is $2/hr (per region). It starts billing you as soon as you enable a dedicated vCPU. I had no idea this existed till I saw the charges. Max IOPS without paying for provisioned IOPS is 3000 (gp3 stock setting). Much lower than other providers and will cap your database performance. That's combined too, 1500 read and 1500 write. Throughput is 125mb/s. Hetzn…

AWS has some complicated features that they don't really explain well. In your case, you're talking about "Dedicated vCPU" having a $2/hr fee, and this was confusing to me because I don't recall this fee existing. It turns out they have two completely different offerings for dedicated hardware: Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances. The latter has the $2/hr fee, but I've only ever used the former which has no fee[1]. I'm still not exactly sure what the advantages are for the latter and why those advantages cost $2/hr.

1: When you use a Dedicated Host, you won't see a "fee" on your bill, but you are charged more. As an example, in us-east-1, an m5 Dedicated Host costs 10% more than a m5.metal AKA m5.24xlarge. It's about $0.40/hr more expensive. You'd think it would get cheaper since you're buying in bulk, but I can understand this actually maybe is not preferable for AWS because it is difficult to find a completely unused server on demand.

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

#109

Post by pleoxy »

gurchik wrote: post #108
pleoxy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dedicated vCPU requires a "enable dedicated vCPU" service that is $2/hr (per region). It starts billing you as soon as you enable a dedicated vCPU. I had no idea this existed till I saw the charges. Max IOPS without paying for provisioned IOPS is 3000 (gp3 stock setting). Much lower than other providers and will cap your database performance. That's combined too, 1500 read and 1500 write. Throughput is 125mb/s. Hetzn…

AWS has some complicated features that they don't really explain well. In your case, you're talking about "Dedicated vCPU" having a $2/hr fee, and this was confusing to me because I don't recall this fee existing. It turns out they have two completely different offerings for dedicated hardware: Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances. The latter has the $2/hr fee, but I've only ever used the former which has no fee[1…

> AWS has some complicated features that they don't really explain well.

Yeah... Complicated...

What do you do for disk IOPS? Seems like they make you sip through a straw unless you pay them big bucks.

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