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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

#81

Post by steelegbr »

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…

AWS may be overcharging but it's a balancing act. Going on-prem (well, shared DC) will be cheaper but comes with requirements for either jack of all trades sysadmins or a bunch of specialists. It can work well if your product is simple and scalable. A lot of places quietly achieve this.

That said, I've seen real world scenarios where complexity is up the wazoo and an opex cost focus means you're hiring under skilled staff to manage offerings built on components with low sticker prices. Throw in a bit of the old NIH mindset (DIY all the things!) and it's large blast radii with expensive service credits being dished out to customers regularly. On a human factors front your team will be seeing countless middle of the night conference calls.

While I'm not 100% happy with the AWS/Azure/GCP world, the reality is that on-prem skillsets are becoming rarer and more specialist. Hiring good people can be either really expensive or a bit of a unicorn hunt.

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

#82

Post by Ensorceled »

realitysballs wrote: post #56
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…

For my org. I don’t have budget for a dedicated in-house opsec team, so if I on-prem it triggers additional salary burden for security . How would I overcome this?

You can't. That's the use case FOR AWS/GCP. Once the differential between having a in-house team and the AWS premium becomes positive is when you make the switch.

A lot of the discussion here is that the cost of the in-house team is less than people think.

For instance: at a former gig, we used a service in the EU that handled weekends, holidays and night time issues and escalated to our team as needed. It was pretty cheap, approximately $10K monthly fee for availability and hourly rate when there were any issues to be resolved. There were a few mornings I had an email with a post-mortem report and an invoice for a hundred euros or so. We came pretty close to 5 9's uptime but we didn't have to worry about SLA's or anything.

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

#83

Post by jrochkind1 »

JCM9 wrote: post #25
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.

(Real question, not meant to be sarcastic or challenging!) -- What are the challenges in trying to use just the ~10 core services you want/need and ignoring the others? What problems do the others you don't use cause with this use case?

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

#84

Post by speleding »

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 complexity of AWS versus bare metal depends on what you are doing. Setting up an apache app server: just as easy on bare metal. Setting up high availability MySQL with hot failover: much easier on AWS. And a lot of businesses need a highly available database.

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

#85

Post by cornfieldlabs »

ndhandala wrote: post #78
cornfieldlabs wrote: post #64

Managed DB costs a lot. Is there a simple safe setup that we can run on an Ubuntu server? We self-host the Postgres db with frequent backups to s3 but just in case the site takes off, we need an affordable reliable solution. Does anyone here run their own db servers? Any advise? Backups, security, upgrades etc

If you're running k8s cluster. Check out cloudnative pg. That thing is a beast.

We have hosted on everything on a tiny Hetzner. The site barely has any users apart from our friends:) :(

Info noted

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

#86

Post by __alexs »

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…

AFAICT no AWS service has ever had a price increase. This is nonsense.

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

#87

Post by foldr »

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.

In fairness to Microsoft, this argument should have been correct. It ought to be possible for Microsoft to offer products with better polish and better support than open source alternatives, and that ought to more than compensate for any licensing costs. Whether Microsoft actually managed to do this is debatable, but the principle is sound enough.

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

#88

Post by onionisafruit »

embedding-shape wrote: post #22
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.

As someone who listens to loud rock and roll music …

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

#89

Post by vidarh »

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.

I help people run their systems.

Clients that use cloud consistently end up spending more on devops resources, because their setups tends to be wastly more complex and involve more people.

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

#90

Post by aeve890 »

>We're now moving to Talos. We PXE boot with Tinkerbell, image with Talos, manage configs through Flux and Terraform, and run conformance suites before each Kubernetes upgrade.

Gee, how hard is to find SE experts in that particular combination of available ops tools? While in AWS every AWS certified engineer would speak the same language, the DIY approach surely suffers from the lack of "one way" to do things. Change Flux with Argo for example (assuming the post is talking about that Flex and no another tool with the same name), and you have a almost completely different gitops workflow. How do they manage to settle with a specific set of tools?

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