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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

#21

Post by embedding-shape »

cs702 wrote: post #15

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 ar…

> they offered a handful of high-value services, all at great prices, making them cost-competitive with bare metal but much easier

That was never the case for AWS, the point was never "We're cheap" but "We let you scale faster for a premium".

I first came across cloud services around 2010-2011 I think, when the company I worked at at the time started growing and we needed something better than shared hosting. AWS was brought up as a "fresh but expensive" alternative, and the CTO managed to convince the management that we needed AWS even if it was expensive, because it'll be a lot easier to tear up/down servers as we need it. Bandwidth costs I think was the most expensive part of the package, at least back then.

When I look at what performance per $ you get with AWS et al today, it looks the same, incredibly expensive for the performance you (don't) get. Better off with dedicated instances unless you team is lacking the basic skills of server management, or until the company really grown so it keeps being difficult dealing with the infrastructure, then hire a dedicated person and let them make the calls for what's next.

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

#22

Post by embedding-shape »

seidleroni wrote: post #14

As someone who works with firmware, it is funny how different our definitions of "bare metal" is.

As someone who does material science, it's funny how our definition of "bare metal" is so different.

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

#23

Post by [deleted] »

cs702 wrote: post #15

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 ar…

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by Foobar8568 »

bilekas wrote: post #20
jagged-chisel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Outsourcing and cloud cost are always underestimated.

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

#25

Post by JCM9 »

cs702 wrote: post #15

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 ar…

This. When AWS was 10 solid core services it made sense and was exciting. It’s now a bloated mess of 200+ services (many of which almost nobody uses) with all that complexity starting to create headaches and cracks.

AWS needs to stop trying to have a half-arsed solution to every possible use case and instead focus on doing a few basic things really well.

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

#26

Post by fulafel »

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…

The direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments.

("Shall we make the app very resilient to failure? Yes running on multiple regions makes the AWS bill bigger but you'll get much fewer outages, look at all this technobabble that proves it")

And of course AWS lock-in services are priced to look cheaper compared to their overpricing of standard stuff[1] - if you just spend the engineering effort and IaC coding effort to move onto them, this "savings" can be put to more AWS cloud engineering effort which again makes your cloud eng org bigger and more important.

[1] (For example implementing your app off containers to Lambda, or the db off PostgreSQL to DynamoDB etc)

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

#27

Post by sieabahlpark »

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.

[dead]

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

#28

Post by ownagefool »

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…

The consequence of running ingress and DNS poorly is downtime.

The consequence of running a database poorly is lost data.

At the end of the day they're all just processes on a machine somewhere, none of it is particularly difficult, but storing, protecting, and traversing state is pretty much _the_ job and I can't really see how you'd think ingress and DNS would be more work than the datastores done right.

Now with AWS, I have a SaaS that makes 6 figures and the AWS bill is With all that said, there's definitely a price point and staffing point where I will consider doing that, and I'm pretty down for the whole on-prem movement generally.

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

#29

Post by doctorpangloss »

Microk8s has common, catastrophic performance bugs. There are also catastrophic problems with microk8s Ceph addons. So is this post true? Microk8s, for people who know stuff, is a canary for clusters / applications that don’t really work.

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

#30

Post by aitchnyu »

pbiggar wrote: post #7
pbiggar wrote: post #6

[flagged]

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.

Related, do they check your usage of their proprietary tools (ease of leaving) to negotiate your bills?
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