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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

#141

Post by dns_snek »

hibikir wrote: post #123
steelegbr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> Do I even know whether a specialist is good or not?

Of course but unless I misunderstood what you meant to say, you don't escape that by buying from AWS. It's just that instead of "sysadmin specialists" you need "AWS specialists".

If you want to outsource the job then you need to go up at least 1 more layer of abstraction (and likely an order of magnitude in price) and buy fully managed services.

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

#142

Post by ambicapter »

everfrustrated wrote: post #139
hibikir wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

This only gets worse as you go higher in management. How does a technical founder know what good sales or marketing looks like? They are often swayed by people who can talk a good talk and deliver nothing.

The good news with marketing and sales is that you want the people who talk a good talk, so you're halfway there, you just gotta direct them towards the market and away from bilking you.

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

#143

Post by anal_reactor »

fulafel wrote: post #26
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 direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments. ("Shall we make the app very resilie…

My manager wants me to make this silly AWS certification.

Let me go on a tangent about trains. In Spain before you board a high-speed train you need to go though full security check, like on an airport. In all other EU countries you just show up and board, but in Spain there's the security check. The problem is that even though the security check is an expensive, inefficient theatre, just in case something does blow up, nobody wants to be the politician that removed the security check. There will be no reward for a politician that makes life marginally easier for lots of people, but there will be severe punishment for a politician that is involved in a potential terrorist attack, even if the chance of that happening is ridiculously small.

This is exactly why so many companies love to be balls deep into AWS ecosystem, even if it's expensive.

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

#144

Post by speleding »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #113
speleding wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most businesses really don't need that complexity. They think they do. Premature optimization.

If your database has a hardware failure then you could loose all sales and customer data since your last backup, plus cost of the down time while you restore. I struggle to think of a business where that is acceptable.

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

#145

Post by lazyfanatic42 »

baq wrote: post #135
dangus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember having to put in orders for pallets of servers which then ended up storage somewhere because there were not enough people to carry and wire them up and/or there wasn't enough rack space to install them. Having an ability to spin up a server or a vm when you need it without having to ask a single question is very liberating. Sometimes such elasticity is exactly what's needed. OTOH other people's servers are…

the best is having rackspace & power but not enough cooling, hahaha murder me

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

#146

Post by embedding-shape »

Joeboy wrote: post #100
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…

Seems there is a difference between "Bare Metal" and "Bare Machine".

I'm not sure what you did, but when you go to that Wikipedia article, it redirects to "Bare Machine", and the article contents is about "Bare Machine". Clicking the link you have sends you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_machine

So it seems like you almost intentionally shared the article that redirects, instead of linking to the proper page?

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

#147

Post by dev_l1x_be »

> AWS is extremely expensive.

I really like how people throw around these baseless accusations.

S3 is one of the cheapest storage solutions ever created. The last 10 years I have migrated roughly 10-20PB worth of data to AWS S3 and it resulted in significant cost saving every single time.

If you do not know how to use cloud computing than yes, AWS can be really expensive.

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

#148

Post by vidarh »

hibikir wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to rage at you over the first sentence, because this is so often how people start trying to argue bare metal setups are expensive. But after reading the rest: 100% this. I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.

Well, they aren't wrong about the bare metal either: Every organization ends up tied to their staff, and said staff was hired to work on the stack you are using. People end up in quite the fights because their supposed experts are more fond of uniformity and learning nothing new. Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs, and people migrated to AWS to avoid dealing w…

It's simple enough to hire people with experience with both, or pay someone else to do it for you. These skills aren't that hard to find.

If you hire people that are not responsive to your needs, then, sure, that is a problem that will be a problem irrespective of what their pet stack is.

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

#149

Post by mrits »

anal_reactor wrote: post #143
fulafel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments. ("Shall we make the app very resilie…

My manager wants me to make this silly AWS certification. Let me go on a tangent about trains. In Spain before you board a high-speed train you need to go though full security check, like on an airport. In all other EU countries you just show up and board, but in Spain there's the security check. The problem is that even though the security check is an expensive, inefficient theatre, just in case something does blow…

AWS doesn’t have to be expensive.

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

#150

Post by embedding-shape »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #66
seidleroni wrote: post #14

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

In similar way I once worked on a financial system, where a COBOL-powered mainframe was referred to as "Backend", and all other systems around it written in C++, Java, .NET, etc. since early 80s - as "Frontend".

Had somewhat similar experience, the first "frontend" I worked on was a sort of proxy server that sat in front of a database basically, meant as a barrier for other applications to communicate via. At one point we called the client side web application "frontend-frontend" as it was the frontend for the frontend.
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