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Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

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Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#591

Post by WuxiFingerHold »

electroly wrote: post #6

> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…

Also, it is often overlooked that you still need skilled people to run RDS. It's certainly not "2-clicks and forget" and "you don't need to pay anyone running your DB".

I haven't run a Postgres instance with proper backup and restore, but it doesn't seem like rocket science using barman or pgbackrest.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#592

Post by jumploops »

hhsectech wrote: post #317
jumploops wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny story time. I was once part of an acquisition from a much larger corporate entity. The new parent company was in the middle of a huge cloud migration, and as part of our integration into their org, we were required to migrate our services to the cloud. Our calculations said it would cost 3x as much to run our infra on the cloud. We pushed back, and were greenlit on creating a hybrid architecture that allowed us…

There are two possible scenarios here. Firstly, they can't find the talent to support what you implemented...or more likely, your docs suck! I've made a career out of inheriting other peoples whacky setups and supporting them (as well as fixing them) and almost always its documentation that has prevented the client getting anywhere. I personally dont care if the docs are crap because usually the first thing I do is u…

Just to be clear, after I (and a few others left), they moved everything entirely to the cloud.

Even with documentation on the hybrid setup, they'd need to get a new on-prem environment up and running (find a colo, buy machines, set up the network, blah blah).

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#593

Post by solatic »

compumike wrote: post #188
solatic wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks super interesting, and that $3/month for hobbyists is just low enough to meet my budget for hobby services, but please, for on-call stuff, you gotta have alerts that make phone calls. Nothing else is going to wake me in the middle of the night. This is the #1 feature I expect from an on-call service - you're on-call because you will be called .

Thanks for the feedback! We use iOS “Critical Alerts” and similar on Android that breaks through any Do-Not-Disturb settings. https://heiioncall.com/blog/better-alerting-for-heii-on-call... Would you be willing to give that a shot? It wakes me every time :) (It’s configurable too; we have vibrate-only or silenced modes. Think old-school beeper.) In the rare case that it doesn’t wake you, we have configurable escalati…

One of the things about phone calls is that they will continue to ring and ring until you actively decide to answer or ignore; it's not just a half-second "ping!" sound delivered once. This is also useful in meetings when everything else is closed up or silenced, to jar you out.

I usually do not respond immediately to phone notifications, which I can handle async. Phone calls are by definition sync.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#594

Post by theonething »

I don't get why all startups don't just start with a PaaS like Render, Fly.io or Heroku. Why spend time setting up your own infra and potentially have to hire dedicated staff to manage it when you can do away with all that and get on with trying to move your business forward?

If and when you start experiencing scaling problems (great!), that's the time to think about migrating to setting up infra.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#595

Post by hardolaf »

overstay8930 wrote: post #544
hardolaf wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah 40% seems like a pipedream. I was at a Fortune 500 defense firm and we couldn't get any cloud provider to even offer us anything close to that discount if we agreed to move to them for 3-4 years minimum. That org ended up not migrating because it was significantly cheaper to buy land and build datacenters from scratch than to rent in the cloud.

There are basically no discounts in govcloud

Defense firms do a lot more than just government work. Also, there are definitely discounts in govcloud when Fortune 500 companies that operate 30+ datacenters start talking to govcloud providers about potentially migrating to their services.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#596

Post by exikyut »

theonething wrote: post #594

I don't get why all startups don't just start with a PaaS like Render, Fly.io or Heroku. Why spend time setting up your own infra and potentially have to hire dedicated staff to manage it when you can do away with all that and get on with trying to move your business forward? If and when you start experiencing scaling problems (great!), that's the time to think about migrating to setting up infra.

Because like every service-oriented offering, each platform differentiates as hard as it can to lock you in to their way of doing things.

Things largely look the same on the surface; this takes the most effect at the implementation-detail level, where adjusting and countercorrecting down the track is fiddly and uses an adrenally-draining level of attention span - right when you're at the point where you're scaling and you no longer have the time to deal with implementation detail level stuff.

You're on and you're doing things their way and pivoting the architecture will only be prioritised if the alternative would be bankruptcy.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#597

Post by parentheses »

electroly wrote: post #6

> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…

While I agree that RDS is expensive, you're making two false claims here:

1. Hiring someone full time to work on the database means migrating off RDS

2. Database work is only about spend reduction

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#598

Post by dfgdfg34545456 »

osigurdson wrote: post #199
electroly wrote: post #6

> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…

Cloud was supposed to be a commodity. Instead it is priced like at burger at the ski hill.

If it is such a golden goose, then there will be other competitors come in and compete the price down.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#599

Post by LunaSea »

bakchodi wrote: post #446
politelemon wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing hidden about the fact that they will push us to use AWS services. Our account team don't even do that. We use a lot of AWS anyway and they know it, so they're happy to help with competitor offerings and integrating with our existing stack. Their main push on us has been to not waste money.

When I was at AWS, I watched SAs get promoted for saving customers money all the time. AWS wants happy customers to stick around for a long time, not one month of goosed income

I can't say the same of the reserved instance team which is genuinely running a protection racket business.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#600

Post by LunaSea »

avbanks wrote: post #536
cedws wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using a K8S cluster just to deploy a few web apps then it's not really a platform that you could provide to an engineering team within a medium-large company. You could probably run your stuff on ECS.

While I love ECS you're not giving k8s enough credit. Nearly every COTS (common off the self) app has a helm chart, hardly any provide direct ECS support. If I want a simple kafka cluster or zookeeper cluster there's a supported helm chart for that, nothing is provided for ECS, you have to make that yourself.

Because you don't need any specific support for ECS? It's just Docker.
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