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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

#241

Post by Ensorceled »

spwa4 wrote: post #122
Ensorceled wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, you need less admin, depending but not none. And AWS pushes you towards devops heavy solutions.

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

#242

Post by hedora »

pingoo101010 wrote: post #129

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…

I’ve seen cloud slowness create weird Stockholm syndrome effects, especially around disk latency.

It always makes sense to compare to back of the envelope bare metal numbers before rearchitecting your stack to work around some dumb cloud performance issue.

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

#243

Post by MontyCarloHall »

torginus wrote: post #239
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming those 20PB are hot/warm storage, S3 costs roughly $0.015/GB/month (50:50 average of S3 standard/infrequent access). That comes out to roughly $3.6M/year, before taking into account egress/retrieval costs. Does it really cost that much to maintain your own 20PB storage cluster? If those 20PB are deep archive, the S3 Glacier bill comes out to around $235k/year, which also seems ludicrous: it does not cost six…

How the heck does anyone have that much data? I once built myself a compressed plaintext library from one of those data-hoarder sources that had almost every fiction book in existence, and that was like 4TB compressed (but would've been much less if I bothered hunting for duplicates and dropped non-English). I suspect the only way you could have 20PB is if you have metrics you don't aggregate or keep ancient logs (wh…

Lots of things can get to that much data, especially in aggregate. Off the top of my head: video/image hosting, scientific applications (genomics, high energy physics, the latter of which can generate PBs of data in a single experiment), finance (granular historic market/order data), etc.

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

#245

Post by NDizzle »

marcosdumay wrote: post #215
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".

Nobody is hiring generalists nowadays. At the same time, the incredible complexity of the software infrastructure is making specialists more and more useless. To the point that almost every successful specialist out there is just some disguised generalist that decided to focus their presentation in a single area.

Maybe everyone is retaining generalists. I keep being given retention bonuses every year, without asking for a single one so far.

As mentioned below, never labeled "full stack", never plan on it. "Generalist" is what my actual title became back in the mid 2000s. My career has been all over the place... the key is being stubborn when confronted with challenges and being able to scale up (mentally and sometimes physically) to meet the needs, when needed. And chill out when it's not.

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

#246

Post by nickstinemates »

marcosdumay wrote: post #224
vb-8448 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

And the big name companies always refuse to take responsibility, and have worse reliability metrics than the lean alternatives... but somehow that is never a problem.

Reality matters less than perception.

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

#247

Post by snark42 »

lazyfanatic42 wrote: post #145
baq wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That only happens when you have your own data center. That's a whole different issue and most people with their own hardware don't have their own data centers as it's not particularly cost efficient except at incredibly large scale.

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

#248

Post by throwforfeds »

hedora wrote: post #200
whstl wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wonder how vibe coding will impact this. You can easily get your service up by asking claude code or whatever to just do it It produces aws yaml that’s better than many devops people I’ve worked with. In other words, it absolutely should not be trusted with trivial tasks, but you could easily blow $100K’s per year for worse.

I've been contemplating this a lot lately, as I just did code review on a system that was moving all the AWS infrastructure into CDK, and it was very clear the person doing it was using an LLM which created a really complicated, over engineered solution to everything. I basically rewrote the entire thing (still pairing with Claude), and it's now much simpler and easier to follow.

So I think for developers that have deep experience with systems LLMs are great -- I did a huge migration in a few weeks that probably would have taken many months or even half a year before. But I worry that people that don't really know what's going on will end up with a horrible mess of infra code.

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

#249

Post by aaronax »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #83
JCM9 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Real question, not meant to be sarcastic or challenging!) -- What are the challenges in trying to use just the ~10 core services you want/need and ignoring the others? What problems do the others you don't use cause with this use case?

Costs have not dropped. Computing becomes cheaper over time, but AWS largely does not.

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

#250

Post by freetanga »

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Thalys_train_attack
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