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AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

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Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#11

Post by bilekas »

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ?

> We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime that happened a week ago.

This is a very nice brag. Given they are using their ddos protection ingress via CloudFlare there is that dependancy, but in that case I can 100% agree than DNS and ingress can absolutely be a full time job. Running some microservices and a database absolutely is not. If your teams are constantly monitoring and adjusting them such as scaling, then the problem is the design. Not the hosting.

Unless you're a small company serving up billions of heavy requests an hour, I would put money on the bet AWS is overcharging you.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#12

Post by JCM9 »

ramon156 wrote: post #5
JCM9 wrote: post #3

For smaller operations I’d still go with a rent-a-server model with AWS. Theirs is a critical mass though where roll your own makes sense. The long term app model on the market model is shifting much more towards buying services vs renting infrastructure. It’s here where the AWS case falls apart with folks now buying Planet Scale vs RDS, buying DataBricks over the mess that AWS puts for for data lakes, working with m…

This doesn't really explain why you wouldn't just get a hetzner. I don't have much experience with either, but if you know how to setup your infra then hetzner seems like a no-brainer? I do not want to be tied to AWS where I have no idea what my bill will be

Depending on the use case you very much could just use Herzner. A simpler and more transparent customer experience than trying to navigate the mass complexity of AWS for basic stuff.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#13

Post by bilekas »

aetherspawn wrote: post #10

Ok but what about a dedicated OVH for example? Those are about 70% cheaper than AWS, so is it still worth it to colo?

Did you read the article ? The main point of this and the prior article is that YES colocation/baremetal IS a better option for this company (and I would argue the majority of AWS users)

reference : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294569

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#15

Post by cs702 »

In the early days of cloud service providers, they offered a handful of high-value services, all at great prices, making them cost-competitive with bare metal but much easier. That was then.

Things today are different. As cloud service providers have grown to become dominant, they now offer a vast, complicated tangle of services, microservices, control panels, etc., at prices that can spiral out of control if you are not constantly on top of them, making bare metal cheaper for many use cases.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#16

Post by pbiggar »

mstipetic wrote: post #8
pbiggar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add that Amazon execs told us to our face that they use your AWS usage to decide if they were going to copy your services (which they did in our case), so any dev or ops tool on AWS shouldn't be there anyway for competitive reason.

What was the service they cloned from you?

CircleCI - their version is CodeBuild.

Note: edited the comment above to use "copy" instead of "clone" to be more accurate.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#17

Post by JCM9 »

bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

As the author points out AWS can provide a few things that you wouldn’t want to try and replicate (like CloudFront) but for most other things you’re very much correct. AWS is ultimately very expensive for what it is. The complicated billing that’s full of surprises also makes cost management a head-banging experience.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#18

Post by jagged-chisel »

bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software. If we rent in the cloud, there is less HR hassle - hiring, raises, bonuses, benefits, firing … none of that headache involved with the cloud.

Technically? Totally doable. But the owners prefer renting in the cloud over the people-related issues of hiring.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#19

Post by fabian2k »

bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

A large part of the different views on this topic are due to the way people estimate the amount of saved effort and money because you're pushing some admin duties to the cloud provider instead of doing this yourself. And people come to vastly different conclusions on this aspect.

It's also that the requirements vary a lot, discussions here on HN often seem to assume that you need HA and lots of scaling options. That isn't universally true.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#20

Post by bilekas »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #18
bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software. If we rent in the cloud, there is less HR hassle - hiring, raises, bonuses, benefits, firing … none of that headache involved with the cloud. Technically? Totally doable. But the owners prefer renting in the cloud over the people-related issues of hiring.

> Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software.

You don't need to hire dedicated people full time. It could even be outsourced and then a small contract for maintenance.

It's the same argument you could say for "accounting persons", or "HR persons" - "We are a software organisation!" - Personally I don't buy the argument.

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