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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

#91

Post by raincole »

__alexs wrote: post #86
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.

Cloud has been generally getting cheaper if you take inflation into account. But hating AWS is the fad so...

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

#92

Post by viaoktavia »

raincole wrote: post #91
__alexs wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cloud has been generally getting cheaper if you take inflation into account. But hating AWS is the fad so...

[flagged]

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

#93

Post by athrowaway3z »

marcinzm wrote: post #62

They were running for a long time (months? over a year?) on a single rack in a single datacenter. Eventually they scaled out but the word is eventually. I think that summarizes both sides of this debate in a nutshell. You can move off of AWS but unless you invest a lot you will take on increased risk. Maybe you'll get lucky and your one rack won't burn down. Maybe you won't. They did get lucky.

From the story, they seem to have kept the option to fallback on AWS.

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

#94

Post by vidarh »

theta_d wrote: post #43
bilekas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They don't though. You still need devops when you use AWS, and most organisations end up needing more time spent on devops when they use AWS.

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

#96

Post by Aldipower »

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.

Forgot? Driving something on AWS needs also a lot of people. In my experience even more. The term SRE did not exist before.

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

#97

Post by vidarh »

tyingq wrote: post #58
JCM9 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair, though using AWS solely for CloudFront would mean you should compare to Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, etc. I'm not sure if the value prop for it looks so great if you don't include the "integrated with your other AWS stuff" benefit.

I mean, AWS egress is so expensive that I'd put something else in front of it for anyone who has any decent amount of traffic.

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

#98

Post by vidarh »

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?

If you don't have budget for someone to handle this for you, you can't afford AWS either, as you still need to handle the same things and they're generally more complex when you use AWS.

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

#99

Post by ecshafer »

AWS is extremely expensive, and I think I have to agree with DHH's assessment that many developers are afraid of computers. AWS is taking advantage of that fear of actually just setting up linux and configuring a computer.

However to steelman AWS use. Many businesses are STILL running mainframes. Many run terrible setups like Access as a production database. In 2025 there are large companies with no CICD platforms or IAC, and some companies where even VC is still a new concept or a dark art. So not every company is in the position to actually hire competent system administrators and system engineers to set up some bare metal machines and configure Ceph, much less Hadoop or Kubernetes. So AWS lets these companies just buy this capabilities while forcing the software stack to modernize.

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

#100

Post by Joeboy »

seidleroni wrote: post #14

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

Wikipedia still thinks it means the thing I (and presumably you) do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_metal

Edit: For clarity, wikipedia does also have pages with other meanings of "bare metal", including "bare metal server". The above link is what you get if you just look up "bare metal".

I do aim to be some combination of clear, accurate and succinct, but I very often seem to end up in these HN pissing matches so I suppose I'm doing something wrong. Possibly the mistake is just commenting on HN in itself.

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