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AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

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Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#51
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

When your system goes down on AWS and your AWS admin is on holiday, you'll have the same problem.

What is your point?

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#52
I’ve come to believe that such comparisons usually come from people who don’t understand the trade-offs of AWS in production.

Each project has certainly its own requirements. If you have the manpower and a backup plan with blue/green for every infrastructure component, then absolutely harness that cost margin of yours. If it’s at a break even when you factor in specialist continuity - training folks so nothing’s down if your hardware breaks, then AWS wins.

If your project can tolerate downtime and your SREs may sleep at night, then you might profit less from the several niners HA SLOs that AWS guarantees.

It’s very hard and costly to replicate what AWS gives you if you have requirements close to enterprise levels. Also, the usual argument goes - when you’re a startup you’ll be happy to trade CAPEX for OPEX.

For an average hobby project maybe not the best option.

As for latency, you can get just as good. Major exchanges run their matching engines in AWS DCs, you can co-locate.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#53
post #18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this discussion is that a lot of people on these threads work as overpaid assistants to the one private chef, but also have never cooked at home. Translating: A lot of people work with AWS, are making bank, and are terrified of their skill set being made obsolete. They also have no idea what it means to use a dedicated server. That’s why we get the same tired arguments and assumptions (such as the be…

> such as the belief that bare-metal means “server room here in the office” I remember the day I discovered some companies, and not just tech ones (Walmart, UPS, Toyota,…) actually own, operate, and use their own datacenters. And there companies out there specialized in planning and building datacenters for them. I mean, it’s kind of obvious. But it made me realize at how small a scale I both thought and operated.

Check out how Wikipedia and the rest of the wikimedia universe is run.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#54

10x sounds way off. Try something with good nvme disks and decent amount of ram. It should be 30x

Sure, EBS or any network-attached storage is expected to be a lot slower than a local SSD for synchronous writes or random reads, as there is a network stack in between. But my understanding is that for those usecases, you can use metal instances with local nvme. (ephemeral though)

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

It is statistically far more likely that your cloud service will go down for hours or days, and you will have no recourse and will just have to wait till AWS manage to resolve it.

The difference is that if AWS goes down, I know for a fact that it'll be back up without me doing anything.

If my own dedicated server goes down, I'm going to need to call my admin at 3am 10 times just to wake him up.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#56
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

What AWS gives you is the ability to spin up dozens if not thousands of hosts in a single click. If you run your own hardware, getting stuff shipped to a datacenter and installed is 2 to 4 weeks (and potentially much longer based on how efficient your pipeline is)

If you own your own hardware, but you can provision a leased dedicated server from many different providers in an hour or three, and still pay far less than for comparable hardware from AWS.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#57
This is exactly true, and is something we have built our business around. In fact, I just kicked-off a multi-TiB Postgres migration for one of our clients this morning. We're moving them out of Supabase and onto a bare-metal multi-AZ Postgresql cluster in Hetzner.

I'm going to say what I always say here - for so many SME's the hyperscaler cloud provider has been the safe default choice. But as time goes on a few things can begin to happen. Firstly, the bills grow in both size and variability, so CFOs start to look increasingly askance at the situation. Secondly, so many technical issues start to arise that would simply vanish on fixed-size bare-metal (and the new issues that arise are well addressed by existing tooling). So the DevOps team can find themselves firefighting while the backlog keeps growing.

The problem really is one of skills and staffing. The people who have both the skills and desire actually implement and maintain the above tend to be the greying-beards who were installing RedHat 6 in their bedrooms as teenagers (myself included). And there are increasingly few of us who are not either in management and/or employed by the cloud providers.

So if companies can find the staff and the risk appetite, they can go right ahead and realise something like a 90% saving on their current spend. But that is unusual for an SME.

So we started Lithus[0] to do this for SMEs. We _only_ offer a 50% saving, not 90%. But take on all the risk and staffing issues. We don't charge for the migration, and the billing cycle only starts once migration is complete. And we provide a fixed number of engineering days per month included. So you get a complete Kubernetes cluster with open source tooling, and a bunch of RedHat-6-installing greying-beards to use however you need. /pitch

[0] https://lithus.eu

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#58
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

What AWS gives you is the ability to spin up dozens if not thousands of hosts in a single click. If you run your own hardware, getting stuff shipped to a datacenter and installed is 2 to 4 weeks (and potentially much longer based on how efficient your pipeline is)

Which is an awesome capability, if you need it.

I suspect that if you broke projects on AWS down by the numbers, the vast majority don't needed it.

There are other benefits to using AWS (and drawbacks) bit "easy scaling" isn't just premature optimisation because if you build something to do something it's never going to do that's not optimisation it's simply waste.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#59

This is always an unfair comparison because for any realistic comparison you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy and need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too. For example, you need to pay for security locks with access log and a commercial security company, or you have to pay for co-location in a datacenter. When you add up all these costs plus the electricity bill, I wage…

A high-density cabinet in a datacenter costs $4k at most, including power and bandwidth.

That's nothing compared to an average AWS bill.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#60

I'm struggling to find a way to express my opinion about this video without seeming like a complete ass. If the author's point was to make a low effort "ha ha AWS sucks" video, well sure: success, I guess. Nobody outside of AWS sales is going to say AWS is cheaper. But comparing the lowest end instances, and apparently, using ECS without seeming to understand how they're configuring or using it just makes their point…

What is the point you are trying to make? Are you saying that we would need to have someone on payroll to have a usable machine? Then why not just have... a SysAdmin?

Shared instances is something even European "cloud" providers can do so why is EC2 so much more expensive and slower?

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