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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

#121

Post by goalieca »

izacus wrote: post #101
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.

meanwhile skills in operating systems, networking, and optimization are declining. Every system i've seen in the last 10 years or so has left huge cash on the table by not being aware of the basics.

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

#122

Post by spwa4 »

Ensorceled wrote: post #82
realitysballs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is also the factor that the idea that you don't need administrators for AWS is bullshit. Cool idea, bro. Go to your favorite jobs portal. Search for "devops" ... 1000s of jobs. I click on the first link.

Well, well, they have a whole team doing "devops administration" on AWS and require extra people. So not having the money for an in-house team ... no AWS for you.

I've worked for 2 large-ish firms in the past 3 years. One huge telco, one "medium" telco (still 100s of people). BOTH had a team just for AWS IAM administration. Only for that one thing, because that was company-wide (and was regularly demonstrated to be a single point of failure). And they had AWS administrator teams, yes teams, for every department (even HR had one, though in the medium telco all management had a shared team, but the networking and development departments still had their own AWS teams, who, btw, also did IAM. The company-wide IAM team maintained an AWS IAM and some solution they'd bought that also worked for their windows domain and ticketing system (I hate you IBM remedy), and eqiupment ordering portal and ...)

AND there were "devops" positions on every development team, and on the network engineering team, and even a small one for the building "technics" team.

Oh and they both had an internal cluster on top of AWS, part on-premise, part rented DC space, which did at least half the compute work (but presumably a lot less of the weird edge-cases), that one ran the company services that are just insane on AWS like any kind of video.

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

#123

Post by hibikir »

steelegbr wrote: post #81
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…

And don't forget the real crux of the problem: Do I even know whether a specialist is good or not? Hiring experts is really difficult if you don't have the skill in the topic, and if you do, you either not need an expert, or you will be biased towards those that agree with you.

It's not even limited to sysadmins, or in tech. How do you know whether a mechanic is very good, or iffy? Is a financial advisor giving you good advice, or basically robbing you? It's not as if many companies are going to hire 4 business units worth of on prem admins, and then decide which one does better after running for 3 years, or something empirical like that. You might be the poor sob that hires the very expensive, yet incompetent and out of date specialist, whose only remaining good skill is selling confidence to employers.

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

#126

Post by ksec »

Many other points. When the Cloud Started, they offered great value in adjacent product and services. Scaling was painful, getting bare metal hardware have long lead time, provisioning takes time. DC was not of as high quality, Network wasn't as redundant. A lot of these today are much less of an issue.

In 2010 you could only get 64 Core Xeon CPU coming in 8 Sockets, or maximum or 8 Core per socket. And that is ignoring NUMA issues. Today you could get 256 Core per socket that is at least twice as fast per core. What used to be 64 Server could now be fitted into 1. And by 2030, it would be closer to 100 to 1 ratio. Not to mention Software on Server has gotten a lot faster compared to 2010. PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, ASP or even Perl. If we added up everything I wouldn't be surprised we are 200 or 300 to 1 ratio compared to 2010.

I am pretty sure there is some version of Oxide in the pipeline that will catch up to latest Zen CPU Core. If a server isn't enough, a few Oxide Rack should fit 99% of Internet companies usage.

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

#127

Post by submeta »

There is so much hidden cost in maintaining your own bare metal infrastructure. I am always astounded by how people overlook the massive opportunity cost involved in not only setting up, securing, and maintaining your bare metal infrastructure, but also make it state of the art, including best practices, making sure you have required uptime, monitoring and intervening if necessary. - I work in a highly regulated market with 700 coworkers, our IT maintains an endless amount of VMs. And you cannot imagine how much more work they have to do compared to a setup where you spin up services in AWS or Azure. And destroy it when you don’t need it. No updates, no patches. No misconfiguration. Not every company uses automation either (chef, ansible and whatnot)

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

#128

Post by BirAdam »

esskay wrote: post #54
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…

> 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'm not either. I used to do fully managed hosting solutions at a datacenter. I had to do everything from hardware through debugging customer applications. Now, people pay me to do the same but on cloud platforms and the occasional on-prem stuff. In general, the younger people I've come across have no idea how to set anything up. They've always just used awscli, the AWS Console, or terraform. I've even been ridiculed for suggesting people not use AWS. Thing is, public cloud really killed my passion for the industry in general.

Beyond public cloud being bad for the planet, I also hate that it drains companies of money, centralizes everyone's risk, and helps to entrench Amazon as yet another tech oligarchic fiefdom. For most people, these things just don't matter apparently.

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

#129

Post by pingoo101010 »

Many startups and companies couldn't exist if there was only AWS (or GCP / Azure) due to how much they overcharge.

For example, we couldn't offer free GeoIP downloads[0] if we were charged the outrageous $0.09 / GB, and the same is true for companies serving AI models or game assets.

But what makes me almost sick is how slow is the cloud. From network-attached disks to overcrowded CPUs, everything is so slooooow.

My experience is that the cloud is a good thing between 0-10,000 $ / month. But you should seriously consider renting bare-metal servers or owning your own after that. You can "over-provision" as much as you want when you get 10-20x (real numbers) the performance for 25% of the price.

[0] https://downloads.pingoo.io

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

#130

Post by lossolo »

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…

These concerns are exaggerated. I've been running on Hetzner, OVH and friends for 20 years. During that time I've had only two issues, one about 15 years ago when a PSU failed on one of the servers, and another a few years ago when an OVH data center caught fire and one of the servers went down. There have been no other hardware issues. YMMV.
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