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2M users but no money in the bank

exercism.org

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Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#101

Post by ahofmann »

ihid wrote: post #81
Laaas wrote: post #10

How are they managing to spend 7.5k a month in server expenses? Are they using AWS?

We're paying ~$1k/month for all our webservers (which is a dozen ECS instances). They're handling about 3,000 requests per second (but that does sometimes massively spike to tens of thousands if not more). We're paying ~$1k/month for all our tooling servers (so the 150 different test runners, representers, analyzers that are used to check peoples code. There's >=1 of those running every second). Bare in mind, we're r…

Thank you so much for sharing your costs! I was very curious to see what the real expenses for AWS services look like, as I've always assumed AWS is massively overpriced.

From the numbers you've provided, it seems like your total cost is around $5.5k, so I assume the remaining $2k is attributed to traffic.

Everything looks quite reasonable, except for the database and traffic costs. I've run MySQL servers handling 150k reads/sec and 50k updates/sec with no issues, even on very cheap machines (around €30 per month). Years ago, we were serving over 100 million pages (of heavy content) per month, and we didn’t even bother looking at traffic statistics because, here in Germany, it’s hard to hit the traffic limits that most hosting providers impose.

That being said, AWS is less expensive than I initially thought. At the same time, I’m confident you could reduce your hosting bill by up to $2k without even leaving AWS by setting up your own database server. Moving away from AWS entirely might be challenging, as managing a fleet of about 30 servers would likely take one or two days of work per week (I'm managing a dozen mostly idling servers and I work one day per month on them). When your hosting bill reaches $30k, I'm very sure it would be cheaper to hire someone (hint, hint ;-)), that moves everything to dedicated servers and manages them.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#103

Post by RobRivera »

ihid wrote: post #81
Laaas wrote: post #10

How are they managing to spend 7.5k a month in server expenses? Are they using AWS?

We're paying ~$1k/month for all our webservers (which is a dozen ECS instances). They're handling about 3,000 requests per second (but that does sometimes massively spike to tens of thousands if not more). We're paying ~$1k/month for all our tooling servers (so the 150 different test runners, representers, analyzers that are used to check peoples code. There's >=1 of those running every second). Bare in mind, we're r…

A part of me is tempted to say 'maybe some cost reduction in cloud bill is possible' but for the scale you operate at and cost you already have, I feel like refactoring the revenue model is the greater strategic 'bang for your buck'

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#104

Post by swiftcoder »

re-thc wrote: post #91
swiftcoder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you get to stand up your own databases, load balancers, monitoring, logging, etc. For which you need a development team with significant operations experience to do correctly - who will surely cost you more than $90k/year I get it, AWS looks expensive, but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.

> And then you get to stand up your own databases, load balancers, monitoring, logging, etc. You get all if not most of this on DigitalOcean, Linode, Upcloud, Scaleway, etc all of a LOT cheaper. > but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams. No, it's not. As above and for a lot of things AWS' complexity and silly factor can mak…

I think a lot of folks make their lives unnecessarily complicated by trying to do things on AWS in an explicilty non-AWS way (I inherited a startup codebase last year that did this to themselves in spades).

Why go to the trouble of running Kubernetes on top of AWS, when ECS does roughly the same job at a fraction of the complexity?

Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#105

Post by swiftcoder »

andrewstuart wrote: post #90
swiftcoder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you get to stand up your own databases, load balancers, monitoring, logging, etc. For which you need a development team with significant operations experience to do correctly - who will surely cost you more than $90k/year I get it, AWS looks expensive, but a bunch of their foundational services are real force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.

>> if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams Its just not true that AWS doesn't need expensive experts to get stuff done - it really does. Anyone who is half decent on the command line in Linux can get all those servers installed and running without the spaghetti complexity of AWS. The cloud as a magical place of simplicity and ease of use and infinite scalability in every direction - I think i…

> Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful machine with everything you need. I'm not saying that works for all workloads but a single machine or a few machines can take you an awful long way.

For the core service I tend to favour monoliths too, but I would say you are vastly underestimating the halo of other crap needed to operationalise a real website/SaaS.

Where is your load balancer? Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?

Bare metal is great, but you have to build a ton of shit to actually ship product.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#106

Post by fragmede »

swiftcoder wrote: post #105
andrewstuart wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams Its just not true that AWS doesn't need expensive experts to get stuff done - it really does. Anyone who is half decent on the command line in Linux can get all those servers installed and running without the spaghetti complexity of AWS. The cloud as a magical place of simplicity and ease of use and infinite scalability in every direction - I think i…

> Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful machine with everything you need. I'm not saying that works for all workloads but a single machine or a few machines can take you an awful long way. For the core service I tend to favour monoliths too, but I would say you are vastly underestimating the halo of other crap needed to operationalise a real website/SaaS. Where is your load balancer? Your database redunda…

> Where is your load balancer? Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?

What we lose sight of, is that those things aren't as important as we, as SREs would like to think. When you're a corporation of one person, trying to stay afloat, you can just rely on a single big box and spend your time dealing with all the other problems first. Make sure you have an escape hatch so you can scale up if need be, but don't overengineer for a problem you won't run in to.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#107

Post by dang »

thunderbong wrote: post #14

The title has a typo - it's Exercism, not Exercise.

Thanks! Fixed now.

Submitted title was "Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank". Solution is not to fix the typo but to follow the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". It's not necessary to add the company name since the domain is displayed next to the title.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#108

Post by AndroTux »

ihid wrote: post #81
Laaas wrote: post #10

How are they managing to spend 7.5k a month in server expenses? Are they using AWS?

We're paying ~$1k/month for all our webservers (which is a dozen ECS instances). They're handling about 3,000 requests per second (but that does sometimes massively spike to tens of thousands if not more). We're paying ~$1k/month for all our tooling servers (so the 150 different test runners, representers, analyzers that are used to check peoples code. There's >=1 of those running every second). Bare in mind, we're r…

Not to be that guy, but I'm pretty sure that these volumes (talking about ECS and database here) could be handled quite well by a few dedicated $100/mo servers, provided the code isn't hugely unoptimized. So I'm sure you could save (very conservatively) half your budget when going on-prem. That said, it probably won't help you much overall, I would imagine.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#109

Post by tptacek »

andrewstuart wrote: post #34
re-thc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are they using AWS? Yes!

$50/month gets you a 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link on Ionos. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps $7500/month would get them 150 such servers. Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer back. Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.

$7500/mo is less than half of one headcount --- if you could get all hosting for free. This is a sideshow. With these numbers, their viability is not determined by hosting costs.

The problem here is that we all have opinions about hosting, but not so many useful opinions about business models, so hosting feedback is what this person is going to get.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#110

Post by efitz »

From the article: > “I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model”.

There’s your problem right there. Investors want profit. If you want investors then you have to convince them you’ll deliver ROI.

Altruism is not a business model. There is nothing wrong with altruism but it is not compatible (except in short term or insignificant ways) with most of the business world, which is profit driven.

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