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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]

#101

Post by aurareturn »

oersted wrote: post #90
aurareturn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a geek and I like to tinker with hardware. I want to maximum my $/hardware and have built a ton of DIY computers myself since I was young. I'm all about getting the most hardware for the money. But I'd like to sleep at night and the cost of AWS is not a significant issue to the business.

That’s fair enough but that’s a luxury position, if costs are not concern to you then there’s not much point in discussing the merits of different methods to manage infrastructure efficiently. And yes of course such costs are nothing if you are thinking of $300K just on a couple sysadmins. But this is just a bizarre bubble in a handful of small areas in the US and I am not sure how it can stay like that for much long…

Don't get me wrong. If I'm starting a brand new business with my own money and no funding, I'd absolutely buying a cheap dedicated instance. In the past, AWS gave out generous credits to startups/new businesses. This is no longer the case.

Once my business requires reliability and I need to hire a dedicated person to manage, I'd absolutely move to the cloud. I personally like Digital Ocean/Render.

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

#102

Post by christkv »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #36

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…

At this point managing AWS, Azure or other cloud providers is as complicated or more complicated than managing your own but at an enormous cost multiplier and if you have steady traffic workloads I'm not sure it makes sense for most companies other than burning money. You still need to pay a sysadmin to manage the cloud and the complexity of the ecosystem is pretty brutal. Combine that with random changes in shit that causes problems like when we got locked out of our Azure account because they changed how part of their roles system works. I've also seen people not understanding the complexity of permissions etc and giving way to much access to people who should not have access.

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

#103

Post by grebc »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #71
paranoidrobot wrote: post #36

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…

This comment comes across as someone who is either trying to flog AWS to customers or someone who has to justify a job that depends on AWS.

Bingo.

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

#104

Post by jrk »

aurareturn wrote: post #55
grey-area wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know that AWS will come back up. You definitely don’t know whether your own instances will come back or if you’ll need to redeploy it all.

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

#105

Post by nake89 »

h33t-l4x0r wrote: post #64
continuational wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But on Hetzner, you can usually get a dedicated server installed and ready tomorrow.

Hetzner is oversold. It's not appropriate for production in the same sense that EC2 obviously is. It's fine for staging though.

Out of curiosity, how is a dedicated server oversold?

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

#106

Post by aurareturn »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #88
aurareturn wrote: post #34

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 $…

> 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 when you need to post on Hackernews to get support from your cloud provider as locked out of your account, being ignored and the only way to get access is try to create as much noise as possible it gets spotted. Or your cloud provider wipes your account and you are a $135B…

  Or when you need to post on Hackernews to get support from your cloud provider as locked out of your account, being ignored and the only way to get access is try to create as much noise as possible it gets spotted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42365295

https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1ha5qgk/hetzner_ca...

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

#107

Post by jrk »

oersted wrote: post #68
aurareturn wrote: post #34

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 $…

After 8 years operating like this, I have had approximately the same number of critical outages in standard Cloud as with these providers. One included a whole OVH building burning down with our server in it, and recovery was faster than the recent AWS and Cloudflare outages. We felt less impotent and we could do more to mitigate the situation. If you want to, these providers also offer VMs, object storage and other…

It is not only not that much more complex, it is often less complex.

Higher-level services like PaaS (Heroku and above) genuinely do abstract a number of details. But EC2 is just renting pseudo-bare computers—they save no complexity, and they add more by being diskless and requiring networked storage (EBS). The main thing they give you is the ability to spin up arbitrarily many more identical instances at a moment’s notice (usually, at least theoretically, though the amount of the time that you actually hit unavailability or shadow quotas is surprisingly high).

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

#109

Post by oersted »

peanut-walrus wrote: post #49
oersted wrote: 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…

It makes sense to think about price in the context of your business. If your entire infra cost is a rounding error on your balance sheet, of course you would pick the provider with the best features and availability guarantees (choose IBM/AWS). If your infra cost makes up a significant percentage of your operating expenses, you will start spending engineering effort to lower the cost. That's why AWS can get away with…

It’s often less about engineering effort and more about taking some small risks to try less mainstream (but still relatively mature) alternatives by reasoning from first principles and doing a bit of homework.

From our experience, you can actually end up in a situation that requires less engineering effort and be more stable, while saving on costs, if you dare to go to a bit lower abstraction layers. Sometimes being closer to the metal is simpler, not more complex. And in practice complexity is much more often the cause of outages rather than hardware reliability.

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

#110

Post by tempestn »

nake89 wrote: post #105
h33t-l4x0r wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner is oversold. It's not appropriate for production in the same sense that EC2 obviously is. It's fine for staging though.

Out of curiosity, how is a dedicated server oversold?

I'm not familiar with Hetzner personally, but maybe they mean the uplink? I've found that with some smaller providers, advertising 10Gbit, but you rarely get close to that speed in reality.
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