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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

#201

Post by embedding-shape »

mrits wrote: post #149
anal_reactor wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but you outgrow the free ("trial") resources in a blink, and then it starts being expensive compared to the alternatives.

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

#202

Post by rglover »

I really dislike how this industry oscillates between various states of epiphany that things that are overcomplicated and expensive are overcomplicated and expensive. As an industry, we must look like utter clowns to the world. It's really sad that saying "own or control your own servers" seems to be a sword in the stone moment for far more people than it should. Things that used to be a "duh" are now a "wow" and it's deeply unsettling to watch.

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

#203

Post by haik90 »

whstl wrote: post #168
PenguinCoder wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm proudly 100% on prem Linux sys admin. There are not openings for my skills and they do not pay as well as whatever cloud hotness is "needed".

That's the crazy thing. Most AWS-only Ops engineers I know are making bank and in high demand, and Ops teams are always HUGE in terms of headcount outside of startups. The "AWS is cheaper" thing is the biggest grift in our industry.

I think this is driven by the market itself and the way cloud promotes their product.

After fully in cloud for sometimes, we’re moving to hybrid solutions. The upper management happy with costs and the cloud engineer had new toy's

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

#204

Post by torginus »

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…

Unfortunately it's not, and it gets more difficult the more cloud-y your app gets.

You can pay for EC2+EBS+network costs, or you can have a fancy cloud native solution where you pay for Lambda, ALBs, CloudWatch, Metrics, Secret Manager, (things you assume they would just give you, like if you eat at a restaurant, you probably won't expect to pay for the parking, toilet, or paying rent for the table and seats).

So cloud billing is its own science and art - and in most orgs devs don't even know how much the stuff they're building costs, until finance people start complaining about the monthly bills.

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

#205

Post by torginus »

vidarh wrote: post #71
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…

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.

The weird thing is I'm old enough to have grown up in the pre-cloud world, and most of the stuff, like file servers, proxies, dbs, etc. isn't any more difficult to set up than AWS stuff, it's just that the skills are different

Also there's a mindset difference - if I gave you a server with 32 cores you wouldn't design a microservice system on it, would you? After all there's nowhere to scale to.

But with AWS, you're sold the story of infinite compute you can just expect to be there, but you'll quickly find out just how stingy they can get with giving you more hardware automatically to scale to.

I don't dislike AWS, but I feel this promise of false abundance has driven the growth in complexity and resource use of the backend.

Reality tends to be you hit a bottleneck you have a hard time optimizing away - the more complex your architecture, the harder it is, then you can stew.

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

#206

Post by kleiba »

hedora wrote: post #189
kleiba wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The security check has nothing to do with protecting trains or passengers, so your question is irrelevant.

Thanks for letting me know that my question is irrelevant. Sorry for taking up your time.

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

#207

Post by infecto »

m-gasser wrote: post #158
Hilift wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The direct cost is the easy part I don't think it is easy. I see most organizations struggle with the fact that everything is throttled in the cloud. CPU, storage, network. Tenants often discover large amounts of activity they were previously unaware of, that contributes to the usage and cost. And there may be individuals or teams creating new usages that are grossly impacting their allocation. Did you know there i…

> Did you know there is a setting in MS SQL Server that impacts performance by an order of magnitude when sending/receiving data from the Cloud to your on-premises servers? It's the default in the ORM generated settings. Sounds interesting, which setting is that?

Would love to know as well.

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

#208

Post by evanelias »

speleding wrote: post #144
PenguinCoder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why are you ignoring the huge middle ground between "HA with fully automated failover" and "no replication at all"?

Basic async logical replication in MySQL/MariaDB is extremely easy to set up, literally just a few commands to type.

Ditto for doing failover manually the rare times it is needed. Sure, you'll have a few minutes of downtime until a human can respond to the "db is down" alert and initiates failover, but that's tolerable for many small to medium sized businesses with relatively small databases.

That approach was extremely common ~10-15 years ago, and online businesses didn't have much worse availability than they do today.

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

#209

Post by infecto »

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…

Your comment also jogged my memory of how terrible bare metal days used to be. I think now with containers it can be better but the other reason so many switched to cloud is we don’t need to think about buying the bare metal ahead of time. We don’t need to justify it to a DevOps gatekeeper.

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

#210

Post by rossdavidh »

JCM9 wrote: post #25
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…

This. When AWS was 10 solid core services it made sense and was exciting. It’s now a bloated mess of 200+ services (many of which almost nobody uses) with all that complexity starting to create headaches and cracks. AWS needs to stop trying to have a half-arsed solution to every possible use case and instead focus on doing a few basic things really well.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish". It was a Microsoft saying, but it explains Amazon's approach to Linux. Once your customers are skilled in how to do things on your platform, using your specialized products, they won't price-comparison (or compare in any other way) to competing options. Whether those countless other "half-arsed solutions" actually make money is beside the point; as long as the customer has baked at least one into their tech stack, they can't easily leave.
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