AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by embedding-shape » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

Joeboy wrote: post #164

embedding-shape wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I indeed deliberately pasted a link that shows what happens when you try to go to the Wikipedia page for "bare metal".

Right, slightly misleading though, as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-metal_server is a separate page.

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

#172

Post by DrewADesign » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #153

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.. AWS is extremely expensive. I see more comments in favor than pushing back. The problem I have with these stories is the confirmation bias that comes with them. Going self-hosted or on-premises does make sense in some carefully selected use cases, but I have dozens of stories of startup teams spinning their wheels with self-hosting strategies that turn into…

> The shared theme of all of the failure stories is missing the true cost of self-hosting: The hours spent getting the servers just right, managing the hosting, debating the best way to run things, and dealing with little issues add up but are easily lost in the noise if you’re not looking closely.

What the modern software business seems to have lost is the understanding that ops and dev are two different universes. DevOps was a reaction to the fact that even outsourcing ops to AWS doesn’t entirely solve all of your ops problems and the role is absolutely no substitute for a systems administrator. Having someone that helps derive the requirements for your infrastructure, then designs it, builds it , backs it up, maintains it, troubleshoots it, monitors performance, determines appropriate redundancy, etc. etc. etc. and then tells the developers how to work with it is the missing link. Hit-by-a-bus documentation, support and update procedures, security incident response… these are all problems we solved a long time ago, but sort of forgot about moving everything to cloud architecture.

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

#173

Post by embedding-shape » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

everfrustrated wrote: post #152

embedding-shape wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they offered a handful of high-value services, all at great prices, making them cost-competitive with bare metal but much easier That was never the case for AWS, the point was never "We're cheap" but "We let you scale faster for a premium". I first came across cloud services around 2010-2011 I think, when the company I worked at at the time started growing and we needed something better than shared hosting. AWS was…

I'd agree that AWS never sold on being cheaper, but there is one particular way AWS could be cheaper and that is their approach to billing-by-the-unit with no fixed costs or minimum charges. Being able to start small from a $1/mth bill without any fixed cost overheads is incredibly powerful for small startups. If I wanted to store bytes in a DC it would cost $10k/mth by the time I was paying colo/ servers/ disks befo…

> Being able to start small from a $1/mth bill without any fixed cost overheads is incredibly powerful for small startups.

Yes, no doubt about it. Initially AWS was mostly sold as "You never know when you might want to scale fast, imagine being featured in a newspaper and your servers can't handle the load, you need cloud for that!" to growing startups, and in that context it kind of makes sense, pay extra but at least be online.

But initially when you're small, or later when you're big and establish, other things make more sense. But yes, I agree that if you need to aggressively be able to scale up or down, cloud resources make sense to use for that, in addition to your base infrastructure.

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

#174

Post by kleiba » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

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…

How does Spain deal with trains that come in from a neighboring country?

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

#175

Post by thelastgallon » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 2:04 PM UTC

These are the features that AWS provides

(1) Massive expansion of budget (100 - 1000x) to support empire building. Instead of one minimum-wage sysadmin with 2 high-availability, maxed-out servers for 20K - 40K (and 4-hour response time from Dell/HPE), you can have 100M multi-cloud Kubernetes + Lambda + a mix-and-match of various locked-in cloud services (DB, etc.). And you can have a large army of SRE/DevOps. You get power and influence as a VP of Cloud this and that and 300 - 1000 people reporting to you.

(2) OpEx instead of CapEx

(3) All leaders are completely clueless about hiring the right people in tech. They hire their incompetent buddies who hire their cronies. Data centers can run at scale with 5-10 good people. However, they hire 3000 horrible, incompetent, and toxic people, and they build lots of paperwork, bureaucracy, and approvals around it. Before AWS, it was VMware's internal cloud that ran most companies. Getting bare metal or a VM will take months to years, and many, many meetings and escalations. With AWS, here is my credit card, pls gimme 2 Vms is the biggest feature.

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

#176

Post by whstl » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #89

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.

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.

I've worked on both kinds of companies in almost 25 years and I can confirm this is true.

The biggest ops teams I worked alongside were always dedicated to running AWS setups. The slowest too were dedicated to AWS. Proportionally, I mean, of course.

People here are comparing the worst possible of Bare Metal with "hosting my startup on AWS".

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

#177

Post by palata » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

BirAdam wrote: post #128

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'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…

> Thing is, public cloud really killed my passion for the industry in general.

Similar here, I think. I got into Computer Science because I liked software... the way it was. Now I truly think that most software completely sucks.

The thing is that it has grown so much since then, that most developers come from a different angle.

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

#178

Post by mhitza » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

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…

It's a chicken and egg problem. If the cloud didn't become such a proeminent thing, the last decade and a half would have seen the rise of much better tools to manage on-premise servers (= requiring less in-depth sysadmin expertise). I think we're starting to see such tools appear in the last few years after enough people got burned by cloud bills and lockin.

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

#179

Post by Joeboy » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #171

Joeboy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I indeed deliberately pasted a link that shows what happens when you try to go to the Wikipedia page for "bare metal".

Right, slightly misleading though, as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-metal_server is a separate page.

Yes, but if you look up "bare metal" it goes to the page about actual bare metal (aka "bare machines" or whatever).

Can we stop this now? Please?

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

#180

Post by wredcoll » Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

DrewADesign wrote: post #172

Aurornis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. I see more comments in favor than pushing back. The problem I have with these stories is the confirmation bias that comes with them. Going self-hosted or on-premises does make sense in some carefully selected use cases, but I have dozens of stories of startup teams spinning their wheels with self-hosting strategies that turn into…

> The shared theme of all of the failure stories is missing the true cost of self-hosting: The hours spent getting the servers just right, managing the hosting, debating the best way to run things, and dealing with little issues add up but are easily lost in the noise if you’re not looking closely. What the modern software business seems to have lost is the understanding that ops and dev are two different universes.…

> What the modern software business seems to have lost is the understanding that ops and dev are two different universes.

This is a fascinating take, if you ask me, treating them as separate is the whole problem!

The point of being an engineer is to solve real world problems, not to live inside your own little specialist world.

Obviously there's a lot to be said for being really good at a specialized set of skills, but thats only relevant to the part where you're actually solving problems.