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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

#341

Post by infecto »

vidarh wrote: post #262
infecto wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are right but I just think people miss the history when we talk about moving to the cloud. It was not that long ago at a reasonable size Bay Area company, I would need to justify new metal to be provisioned to standup a service I was tasked with.

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

#342

Post by nemothekid »

>We now save over $1.2M / yr and we expect this to grow, as we grow as a business.

Am I just naive? How is a uptime SaaS product saving over a million year on managed colo vs AWS? Was every API route in it's own EC2 instance?

AWS is expensive sure, but over a million dollars a year? For this product specifically?.

I got some clarification from their earlier posts and it looks like they were intentionally avoiding any AWS platform features:

>Our goal was to avoid reliance on AWS or any proprietary cloud technology.

>When we were utilizing AWS, our setup consisted of a 28-node managed Kubernetes cluster. Each of these nodes was an m7a EC2 instance. With block storage and network fees included, our monthly bills amounted to $38,000+. This brought our annual expenditure to over $456,000+.

I just think if you are going to deploy on AWS, then treat it AWS like managed-colo, then your bill is going to be high. I understand how that seems unfair, but AWS isn't really in the business of selling virtual machines. If you sit down and ask yourself how you got here, it just seems like you committed yourself to wasting money. If I knew I just needed some linux boxes from the start, there are better choices than AWS.

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

#343

Post by parliament32 »

esskay wrote: post #54
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 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 don't think it's paid shilling, I think it's people who got bamboozled into learning cloud-provider-clickops over actual systems work and feel threatened when you suggest hyperscalers aren't the future.

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

#344

Post by array_key_first »

dangus wrote: post #108
Spooky23 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s paid shilling, it’s dogma that reflects where people are working here. The individual engineers are hammers and AWS is the nail. AWS/Azure/GCP is great, but like any tool or platform you need to do some financial/process engineering to make an optimal choice. For small companies, time to market is often key, hence AWS. Once you’re a little bigger, you may develop frameworks to operate efficiently.…

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.

My company runs all their own bare metal data centers but it's containerized, and it's basically magic.

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

#345

Post by YouAreWRONGtoo »

jmaker wrote: post #276
torginus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clo…

We run regular FinOps meetings within departments, so everyone’s aware. I think everyone should. But it’s a lot of overhead of course. So a dev is concerned not only with DevOps anymore but with DevSecFinOps. Not everyone can cope with so many aspects at once. There’s a lot of complexity creep in that.

[dead]

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

#346

Post by thelastgallon »

torginus wrote: post #316
rikafurude21 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your 6th needs months to understand how the basic blocks in your system are arranged then he might not be one of the "good" guys

Not really a hardcore infra guy, but on the coding side, I know companies with products that have codebases in the multi million LoC range written over decades, one of my friends interned there and told me they didn't even let him work on the core product for months, they put him on some custom testing framework they had for it, just so he could get familiar enough with the core code to be able to contribute meaningf…

And how does AWS help with this?

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

#347

Post by array_key_first »

raincole wrote: post #91
__alexs wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT no AWS service has ever had a price increase. This is nonsense.

Cloud has been generally getting cheaper if you take inflation into account. But hating AWS is the fad so...

Cloud is literally never cheaper, especially if you perform benchmarks.

Yes, EC2 might seem to be only 2.5 times the cost of storage... Except that, even if you buy the high speed storage, it's going to be 10x - 100x slower than bare metal. Which then means you can buy much slower drives, if you wanted to, and save a shit ton of money.

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

#348

Post by iso1631 »

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.

The only metric that's important is the CTO's bonus

When everyone is suffering because AWS is having its bi-yearly 8 hour outage, the CTO isn't blamed, bonus all round, and maybe the AWS sales team takes him for an apology lunch

When the CTO is up for 1500 days straight then has a 2 hour downtime when nobody else does, the CTO is blamed, no bonus, and more likely to get fired

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

#349

Post by mrktf »

ghaff wrote: post #195
wredcoll wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the root success of aws, it lets internal teams bypass sysadmin departments.

Working around official IT was certainly a significant factor early on. I'm less convinced it is nearly as big a driver (or a downside depending on your perspective) today.

It depends on organization size, just my anecdotal example, I would say the moment IT department becomes own island (for example: can totally ignore requests, with excuses staff overbooked/we need extra planning/6 months extra meetings. Or even worse - process request,but up to point where it can show for upper management and blame you for wasting resources) - you can go full cloud, at least there it is possible get something working in reasonable time.

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

#350

Post by briffle »

Spooky23 wrote: post #80
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 don’t think it’s paid shilling, it’s dogma that reflects where people are working here. The individual engineers are hammers and AWS is the nail. AWS/Azure/GCP is great, but like any tool or platform you need to do some financial/process engineering to make an optimal choice. For small companies, time to market is often key, hence AWS. Once you’re a little bigger, you may develop frameworks to operate efficiently.…

The tooling should be getting close to manage this on-prem now, with VM's, K8s clusters, networking, storage, etc. I know that oxide computers exists, and they look fantastic, but there has got to be more 'open' ways to run things on your own Dell/HP/Supermicro servers with NVMe drives. Especially since VMware has jacked up their prices since being acquired.

Talos OS looks really interesting. But I also need the storage parts, networking parts, etc.

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