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> The Equinix Metal service will be sunset on June 30, 2026.
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.
AWS was mostly spared from yesterday’s big cuts but have been told to “watch this space” in the new year after re:Invent.
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 a way to "commoditize" engineers. You can run on premise or mixed infra better and cheaper, but only if you know what you are doing. This requires experienced guys and doesn't work with new grad hired by big cons and sold ad "cloud experts".
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…
I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.
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 the fallacy that Amazon sold everyone on: that the cloud has no headache or managment needed. This is manifestly untrue. It's also untrue that bare metal takes lots of management time. I have multiple Dell rack servers colocated in several different datacenters, and I don't spend any time at all managing them. They just run.
I’ve been working at a place for a long time and we have our own data centers. Recently there has been a push to move to the public cloud and we were told to go through AWS training. It seems like the first thing AWS does in its training is spend a considerable amount of time on selling their model. As an employee who works in infrastructure, hearing Amazon sell so hard they the company doesn’t need me anymore is not exactly inspiring.
After that section they seem to spend a considerable amount of time on how to control costs. These are things no one really thinks about currently, as we manage our own infra. If I want to spin up a VM and write a bunch of data to it, no one really cares. The capacity already exists and is paid for, adding a VM here or there is inconsequential. In AWS I assume we’ll eventually need to have a business justification for every instance we stand up. Some servers I run today have value, but it would be impossible to financially justify in any real terms when running in AWS where everything has a very real cost assigned to it. What I do is too detached from profit generation, and the money we could save is mostly theoretical, until something happens. I don’t know how this will play out, but I’m not excited for it.
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…
Our .NET Apps are still deployed as Docker Compose Apps which we use GitHub Actions and Kamal [1] to deploy. Most Apps use SQLite + Litestream with real-time replication to R2, but have switched to a local PostgreSQL for our Latest App with regular backups to R2.
Thanks to AI that can walk you through any hurdle and create whatever deployment, backup and automation scripts you need, it's never been easier to self-host.
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.
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…
We should coin the term "Cloud Learned Helplessness"
This really is the crux of the matter in my opinion, at least for applications (databases and so on is in my opinion more nuanced). I've only worked at one place where using cloud functions made sense (keeping it somewhat vague here): data ingestion from stations that could be EXTREMELY bursty. Usually we got data from the stations at roughly midnight every day, nothing a regular server couldn't handle, but occasionally a station would come back online after weeks or new stations got connected etc which produced incredible load for a very short amount of time when we fetched, parsed and handled each packet. Instead of queuing things for ages we could instead just horizontally scale it out to handle the pressure.