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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

#101

Post by izacus »

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…

A lot of people here have built their whole professional careers around knowing AWS and deploying to it.

Moving away is an existential issue for them - this is why there's such pushback. A huge % of new developer and devops generation doesn't know anything about deploying software on bare metal or even other clouds and they're terrified about being unemployed.

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

#102

Post by vidarh »

ownagefool wrote: post #28
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 A…

I'm generally strongly in favour of bare metal (not so much actually on prem) but your case is one of the rare cases wher AWS makes sense. Even for cheap setups like that, bare metal could likely be cheaper even factoring in someone on call to handle issues for you, but the amounts are so small it's a perfectly reasonable choice to just pick whatever you're comfortable with.

That's the sweet spot for AWS customers. Not so much for AWS.

The key thing for AWS is trying to get you locked in by "helping you" depend on services that are hard to replicate elsewhere, so that if your costs grow to a point where moving elsewhere is worth it, it's hard for you to do so.

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

#103

Post by iLoveOncall »

This is a completely meaningless article if they don't provide information about their technical stack, which AWS services they used to use, what TPS they are hitting, what storage size they're using, etc.

The story will be different for every business because every business has different needs.

Given the answer to "How much did migration and ongoing ops really cost?" it seems like they had an incredibly simple infrastructure on AWS, and it was really easy to move out. If you use a wider-range of services the cost savings are much more likely to cancel themselves.

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

#104

Post by izacus »

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?

Use the same people who are now maintaining your complex AWS setup. It's not like that doesn't need maintenance or oncall.

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

#105

Post by vidarh »

neves wrote: post #44
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.

As Jeff Bezos has been quoted as saying "your margin is my opportunity"...

The biggest difficulty in eating into AWS market share is that believing it is cheap has become religion.

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

#106

Post by vb-8448 »

calgoo wrote: post #61
vb-8448 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? 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".

Also, when something breaks, you are responsible. If you put it in AWS like everyone else and it breaks, then its their problem not yours. We will still implement workarounds and fixes when it happens, but we are not responsible. Basic enterprise rules these days is to always pay someone else to be responsible.

Actually nothing new here, this was the same in the pre-cloud era where everyone in enterprises prefer big names(ibm, microsoft, oracle, ecc) to pass the responsibility to them in case of failures ... aka "nobody get fired because of buying IBM"

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

#107

Post by zppln »

aeve890 wrote: post #90

>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…

If you're that much of a slave to your tool chain you don't get to call yourself an engineer.

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

#108

Post by dangus »

Spooky23 wrote: post #80
esskay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this 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.

I don’t think it’s paid shilling, it’s dogma that reflects where people are working here. The individual engineers are hammers and AWS is the nail. AWS/Azure/GCP is great, but like any tool or platform you need to do some financial/process engineering to make an optimal choice. For small companies, time to market is often key, hence AWS. Once you’re a little bigger, you may develop frameworks to operate efficiently.…

I think a lot of engineers who remember the bare metal days have legitimate qualms about going back to the way that world used to work especially before containerization/Kubernetes.

I imagine a lot of people who use Linux/AWS now started out with bare metal Microsoft/VMWare/Oracle type of environments where AWS services seemed like a massive breath of fresh air.

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

#110

Post by spwa4 »

speleding wrote: post #84
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.

A high availability MySQL server on AWS is about the same difficulty as on your own kubernetes instance (I've got a play one on one of those $100 N100 machines, got one with 16G mem). Then:

    helm repo add mariadb-operator https://mariadb-operator.github.io/mariadb-operator
    helm install mariadb-operator mariadb-operator/mariadb-operator
And then you can just provision MariaDB "kind", ie. you kubectl apply with something specifying database name, maximum memory, type of high availability (single primary or multimaster) and secret reference and there you go: new database, ready to be plugged into other pods.
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