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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

#41

Post by rob74 »

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…

...while on the other side, the "traditional" hosting/colocation providers feel the squeeze and have to offer more competitive prices to stay in business?

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

#42

Post by shishcat »

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.

Don't you have cloud architects and similiar figures already?

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

#43

Post by theta_d »

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.

> It could even be outsourced and then a small contract for maintenance.

Yeah, those people we outsourced to happen to work at AWS.

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

#44

Post by neves »

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…

It's always nice to remember that AWS is responsible for 70% of Amazon profits.

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

#45

Post by mberning »

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…

It’s expensive and the “design” of the services, if you could call it that, is such that you are forced to pay a lot, or play a lot of games to get around it. If you are going to spend your engineering time working around their ridiculous pricing schemes, you might as well spend the money on building things out yourself.

Perfect example - MSK. The brokers are config locked at certain partition counts, even if your CPU is 5%. But their MSK replicator is capped on topic count. So now I have to work around topic counts at the cluster level, and partition counts at the broker level. Neither of which are inherent limits in the underlying technologies (kafka and mirrormaker)

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

#46

Post by antonkochubey »

rco8786 wrote: post #37
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…

Anytime I have to go into the AWS control panel (which is often) I am immediately overwhelmed with a sense of dread. It's just the most bloated overcomplicated thing I could possibly imagine.

You're lucky not to have dealt with Azure and GCP control panels, in that case :-)

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

#47

Post by jammo »

nik736 wrote: post #9

It's an interesting article, thanks for that. What people forget about the OVH or Hetzner comparison is that for those entry servers they are known for, think the Advance line with OVH or AX with Hetzner. Those boxes come with some drawbacks. The OVH Advance line for example comes without ECC memory, in a server, that might host databases. It's a disaster waiting to happen. There is no option to add ECC memory with t…

Yes, but there are options for dedicated server providers who offer dual PSU and ECC ram etc. It's more expensive though for e.g a 24 Core Epyc with 384GB RAM dual 10G netowork is like $500/month (though there's smaller servers on serversearcher.com for other examples)

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

#48

Post by darkwater »

The core of this success is this, IMO:

  > Our workload is 24/7 steady. We were already at >90% reservation coverage; there was no idle burst capacity to “right size” away. If we had the kind of bursty compute profile many commenters referenced, the choice would be different.
Which TBH applies to many, many places, even if they are not aware of it.

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

#49

Post by noir_lord »

jsiepkes wrote: post #39
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.

This is exactly the rhetoric Microsoft used in the 00's with it's "Get the facts" marketing campaign against Linux and open-source: "Never mind the costs, think about the people hours you are saving!". It wasn't as simple as that then, at it's still not as simple as that now.

Nope and never has been but to (some of) both sides “it depends” means you are on the other side.

It’s become polarised (as everything seems to).

I’ve specced bare metal, I’ve specced AWS, which is used entirely a matter of the problem/costs and relative trade-offs.

That is all it is.

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

#50

Post by Hilift »

fulafel wrote: post #26
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 resilie…

> The direct cost is the easy part

I don't think it is easy. I see most organizations struggle with the fact that everything is throttled in the cloud. CPU, storage, network. Tenants often discover large amounts of activity they were previously unaware of, that contributes to the usage and cost. And there may be individuals or teams creating new usages that are grossly impacting their allocation. Did you know there is a setting in MS SQL Server that impacts performance by an order of magnitude when sending/receiving data from the Cloud to your on-premises servers? It's the default in the ORM generated settings.

Then you can start adding in the Cloud value, such as incomprehensible networking diagrams that are probably non-compliant in some way (guess which ones!), and security? What is it?

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