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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

#261

Post by hinkley »

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.

I don’t think I’ve seen a menu as hilariously bad as the AWS dashboard menu. No popup menu should consume the entire screen edge to edge. Just a wall of cryptic service names with ambiguous icons.

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

#262

Post by vidarh »

infecto wrote: post #209
hibikir wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That so many people remember bare metal as of 20+ years ago is a large part of the problem.

A modern server can be power cycled remotely, can be reinstalled remotely over networked media, can have its console streamed remotely, can have fans etc. checked remotely without access to the OS it's running etc. It's not very different from managing a cloud - any reasonable server hardware has management boards. Even if you rent space in a colo, most of the time you don't need to set foot there other than for an initial setup (and you can rent people to do that too).

But for most people, bare metal will tend to mean renting bare metal servers already configured anyway.

When the first thing you then tend to do is to deploy a container runtime and an orchestrator, you're effectively usually left with something more or less (depending on your needs) like a private cloud.

As for "buying ahead of time", most managed server providers and some colo operators also offer cloud services, so that even if you don't want to deal with a multi-provider setup, you can still generally scale into cloud instances as needed if your provider can't bring new hardware up fast enough (but many managed server providers can do that in less than a day too).

I never think about buying ahead of time. It hasn't been a thing I've had to worry about for a decade or more.

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

#263

Post by hedora »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #244

I have seen multiple startups paying thousands of dollars a month in AWS bills to run a tiny service which could trivially run on an $800 desktop on a residential internet connection. It's absolutely tragic.

That’s like $24K a year. Assuming they have working failover and business continuity plans, it’s actually a really good deal (vs having a 10-20% time employee deal with it).

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

#264

Post by hinkley »

aaronax wrote: post #249
jrochkind1 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

They used to release new ec2 sizes at the same price as the previous gen which made upgrading a no brainer. That stopped with m7 and doesn’t seem to be coming back.

Not sure what Amazon plans to do when the m6 hardware starts wearing out.

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

#265

Post by JackSlateur »

chasd00 wrote: post #33
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.

Every company I’ve consulted for has hired a team dedicated to just setting up and monitoring AWS for the software devs. Hell, you’d probably reduce headcount running on bare metal.

In more than 15 years of experiences, in various compagnies, the number of people who can build and run an on-premise infrastructure sanely can be counted on my right hand fingers

These people exist, but we have far more stupid "admins" around here

When you are not in the infrastructure business (I work in retail at the moment), the public cloud is the sane way to go (which is sad, but anyway)

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

#266

Post by alphager »

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…

Why do you think public cloud is worse for the environment than a private dc? I'd expect the larger dcs to be more energy efficient.

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

#267

Post by speleding »

evanelias wrote: post #208
speleding wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've done quite a few MySQL setups with replication. I would not call setup "extremely easy", but then, I'm not a full time DB admin. MySQL upgrades and general trouble shooting is so much more painful than AWS aurora where everything just takes a few clicks. And things like blue/green deployment, where you replicate your entire setup to try out a DB upgrade, are really hard to do onprem.

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

#268

Post by JackSlateur »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #34
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.

This is the fallacy that Amazon sold everyone on: that the cloud has no headache or managment needed. This is manifestly untrue. It's also untrue that bare metal takes lots of management time. I have multiple Dell rack servers colocated in several different datacenters, and I don't spend any time at all managing them. They just run.

You miss the good time spent debugging a firmware issue, which leads to packet drop on the NIC (or data corruption on the nvme)

I do not miss that crap

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

#269

Post by tayo42 »

canucktrash669 wrote: post #151
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…

Managed servers reduce the on-prem skillset requirement and can also deliver a lot of value. The most frustrating part of hyperscalers is that it's so easy to make mistakes. Active tracking of you bill is a must, but the data is 24-48h late in some cases. So a single engineer can cause 5-figure regrettable spend very quickly.

What size companies are we talking about

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

#270

Post by cs702 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #21
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…

> 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…

> the point was never "We're cheap" but "We let you scale faster for a premium"

Actually, it was more like "Scale faster, easier, more reliably, with proven hardware and software infrastructure, operated by a proven organization, at a price point that is competitive with the investment you'd have to make to get comparable hardware, software, and organizational infrastructure." But that was then. Today, things are different. Cloud services have become giant hairballs of complexity, with plenty of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-by-default traps, at prices that can quickly spiral out of control if you're not on top of them.

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